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If you are like me and wonder, "What's the point of a centralized digital currency in economies where almost all financial transactions are effectively digital anyway?" I found this HBR article[0] provides a good overview of how an economy with a CBDC looks different than our current economy, why countries may want that, and why countries may not want that.

[0] https://hbr.org/2021/10/what-if-central-banks-issued-digital...

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I read the article, but I don't see why this has to be built on top of a blockchain. What's wrong with plain old relational databases? The currency is issued by the central bank, if the central bank says that this transaction is voided, who's gonna stop them?

Blockchains are a solution to byzantine consensus, but with a central authority you can always trust the central bank (in the consensus problem sense of trust), so I don't see what problem gets solved by moving to a slower and worse database.

A blockchain is a DB that's really hard to forge, unlike your typical RDBMS.

I'd say that any Merkle tree with a strong hash function, and an ability to upgrade it, would do. Say, something like git.

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