I stumbled upon this job posting from the Deutsche Bundesbank [1] (the central bank of Germany) and felt a strong moral obligation to share it. Although the job posting is in German, it does not state that speaking German is a requirement (just English).

They are looking for a senior software developer for developing the Digital Euro. You need a Master's degree in IT or a related field, knowledge of Crypto (tokens) and CDBCs and speaking English. Bonus points for experience in backend development (in fast compiled languages, e.g. Go, Scala, Rust) and knowledge of the European payment network. Pay is according to TVöD E13 [2], although with some extra perks.

Why am I sharing this?

I am just a regular European folk working as a dev in Germany. I am more on the junior end of the spectrum, but being an insider has made me already realize that the logic that we put into the systems that we develop has consequences in terms of social dynamics, politics, etc. In addition, a good design can greatly boost the benefit that we bring to society.

An example of a choice having political consequences is using the regular client-server architecture. Although simple and advantageous for many applications, it also has the immediate consequence of being easy to control by a single party. I will not go much into whether this is good or bad, but just point out that such an architecture facilitates the implementation of things like ChatControl [3]. If the developer has some power to decide whether to, for example, add E2E encryption, this becomes harder. Going further and developing a decentralized messaging app like Briar [4] makes something like ChatControl close to impossible.

Another example is the concept of digital signature. There are many ways to implement this but I have seen many institutions that implement this idea in what from my point of view is a fundamentally flawed way. The "signed" documents only include a link to retrieve the document from the institution's database. This has two problems. First, at some point in the future nobody will be able to prove the authenticity of the document when the system stops working. Second, the institution can alter the document in their database (and this implies the danger of abuse of power). An alternative that addresses these problems are signatures using public-key cryptography.

Countless more examples are in our everyday lives: artist's retribution on Spotify, the impossibility to sideload apps on iPhones, and many more.

Having said that, I am essentially worried that the person that fills this position is not really concerned about the societal implications of the next digital implementation of something as crucial to modern society as money. There are many political matters that would become ingrained in such implementation, particularly related to the extent to which the government should be able to control this money (centralized vs decentralized), how anonymous should it be and so on.

As a reader of HN, I often see in the comments very thoughtful discussion that is not limited to the technical aspects of technology, but takes into account its societal implications. Regardless of your political stance, as a citizen of the EU, I would rather have someone like you filling this position. Therefore, I thought this was an adequate place to share it :)

Regardless of whether you would be applying, I also wanted to spark a discussion, because this posting signals that the Digital Euro is on its way, and just in the way that we need time to digest the implications AI, we also need to consider what digital money should be.

[1] https://www.bundesbank.de/de/karriere/jobboerse/software-ent...

[2] https://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tvoed/bund?id=...

[3] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

[4] https://briarproject.org/