> Pix is already 100% surveilled

And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled? Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games).

At least with Pix, the costs get lower for the end users.

Visa/Mastercard are also 100% surveilled. The nightmare of your transactions being monitored and arbitrarily blocked that's peddled as an argument against CBDCs or public financial infrastructure like Pix is already a reality for all of traditional finance (with the exception of physical cash, which happens to also be a central bank product). Sometimes even balances get confiscated, read the horror stories by Stripe customers. Americans seem to believe that the same thing is necessarily worse if it's done in the public sector. Other countries tend to see it differently. Just let them be.

> Pix is already 100% surveilled

Visa and Mastercard are 300% surveilled: once by the Brazilian government, once by the payment providers themselves, and then finally by the American government.

There are privacy implications of cashless societies, but these foreign companies are worse in every aspect.

Not really.

All financial institutions are surveilled and regulated. There's a reason Patio 11 describe the industry as an "arm of the government".

But furthermore, his argument is not about surveillance (which he accepts when he describes the central bank as the regulator) but about the competition.

It's the very idea of something being provided as a public good that is considered "anormal" and "anti-competitive" here.