> Update: my guess would be that private money (think Venmo) and crypto have a chance to win over commercial bank money (think bank accounts and transfers) for the general public, and the government thinks it’s a potential threat (probably wisely IMO).

Venmo is really still commercial bank money - any deposit in a Venmo account is backed 100% by a deposit in a commercial bank account.

> God knows why the bank industry doesn’t have its shit together, but even in the EU I’ve come to feel suspicious towards bank transfers. Maybe a transfer will take five seconds, maybe one day, maybe a week with no explanation why. Bank apps, even modern ones (N26 etc) are still somewhat meh.

EU banks use a combination of SEPA and SEPA Instant, and for a payment to go via SEPA Instant both the sender and recipient have to be connected to the SEPA Instant scheme and settle via a common system (e.g. TIPS). Where this isn't the case, payments fall back to SEPA, causing a lack of predictability at time of payment.

The status quo in the UK is much better, every bank is on Faster Payments (the UK equivalent of SEPA Instant), and have been for almost a decade. This makes bank-to-bank transfers in the UK fast and predictable.

> A CBDC is at least going to be stored in a single database, so maybe it’ll be working a bit better.

All UK bank transfers settle via the Bank of England's RTGS system, which means at heart, everything is already in a single database anyway.