Print Your Own Money: A Cash-Like Experience for Digital Payment Systems

YE WANG, ETH Zurich

CHENHANG ZHOU, Nanyang Technological University
YU CHEN, ETH Zurich
SHENYI WANG, ETH Zurich
XIAOCHEN ZHENG, ETH Zurich
ROGER WATTENHOFER, ETH Zurich
arXiv:2104.10480v2 [cs.HC] 29 Jan 2022

Digital money is getting a lot of traction recently, a process which may accelerate even more with the advent of Central Bank Digital
Currency (CBDC). However, digital money has several disadvantages: Payments are difficult or outright impossible in emergency
situations, such as the failure of the electricity grid or internet. CBDC may also be difficult to handle for children, the elderly, or
non-resident travelers. To overcome these problems, we design a cash-like CBDC experience in the form of physical money that may
ultimately replace physical banknotes and coins. In contrast to classic banknotes and coins, our design is integrated with digital CBDC
payment systems. Users can easily access physical money without the involvement of any third parties. We also address user concerns
for adopting payment systems from both technical and security perspectives. We introduce a model for trust level, and discuss how
our system meets the security concerns of our users.

ACM Reference Format:

Ye Wang, Chenhang Zhou, Yu Chen, Shenyi Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, and Roger Wattenhofer. 2021. Print Your Own Money: A Cash-Like
Experience for Digital Payment Systems. 1, 1 (February 2021), 18 pages.

1 INTRODUCTION
Money and payments have changed their form many times in history. Currently we are witnessing yet another transition,
from cash (banknotes and coins) to digital currency (payment apps and other forms of digital payments).
While this transition is happening everywhere, we can learn most from countries that are at the forefront of this
development. In Sweden or China for instance, digital payments are already so predominant that many shops have
stopped accepting cash [3, 4, 43]. In a study by the Swedish Retail and Wholesale Council, more than half of the retail
businesses expect to not accept cash after 2025 [3, 4]. In the last years, bank branches and ATMs have been vanishing in
Sweden [40]. It seems now a matter of time until Sweden will essentially be cash free.
Digital currency can have several forms. Digital currency could either be issued by companies, e.g., Facebook’s Diem
project. Even more likely, our future money will be Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Many central banks are

Authors’ addresses: Ye Wang, wangye@ethz.ch, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Chenhang Zhou, czhou005@e.ntu.edu.sg, Nanyang Technological
University, Singapore, Singapore; Yu Chen, yuchen14@student.ethz.ch, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Shenyi Wang, shewang@student.ethz.ch, ETH
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Xiaochen Zheng, xzheng@student.ethz.ch, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Roger Wattenhofer, wattenhofer@ethz.ch, ETH
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.

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2 Ye Wang, Chenhang Zhou, Yu Chen, Shenyi Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, and Roger Wattenhofer

already pushing ahead with the development of CBDC [10]. In Sweden, it is known as the e-krona [41], in Uruguay, the
digital peso [29], and in China DC/EP, short for Digital Currency Electronic Payment [32, 34].
CBDC is a digital currency issued by a country’s central bank [8, 9]. The user experience of CBDC will probably be
akin to payment apps or credit/debit cards. Payments will be contactless, and transfers between private individuals will
be possible. The majority of central banks believe that CBDC will eventually be available to the public, and more than
75% of central banks have already been engaging in CBDC work [10].
However, the world of CBDC is not without trouble. One technical challenge is how money can be transferred
in an emergency situation, for instance if the electricity grid or internet is not available. In such a unique scenario,
transactions should still be possible. Bona fide handling of transactions in emergency situations would potentially
enable a fraudster to spend the same money twice with a manipulated smartphone. Such a combination of circumstances
would be rare, but important to consider before rolling out CBDC [43]. Another issue with CBDC is that everybody
participating in the system needs to have a CBDC account. This may be an issue for children, the elderly, or possibly
non-resident travelers.
These examples show that a backup plan is necessary. For a while, cash will be this backup solution. But running
an orthogonal second payment system is not a valid long term strategy. Some people will simply not carry cash just
for emergencies. If cash is not used on a regular basis, even its security will be in jeopardy: People will not recognize
the security features of rarely seen banknotes, and hence the trust in banknotes will vanish. Once cash is at this stage,
it will not be helpful in emergencies. So central banks will stop producing cash altogether, since the production and
logistics costs of cash are high. We believe that cash may be disappearing surprisingly quickly. First in countries like
Sweden, then in other parts of the world [3].
In principle, cash and CBDC represent two payment systems that are essentially incompatible. In this paper we
propose a cash-like alternative that is fully compatible with CBDC, and as such better suited for the future of digital
payments. More precisely, in this paper we propose a system where you can print your own money. We mean this
quite literally: You print some QR code on a piece of paper (or any other physical media), which is then the physical
equivalence of digital money.
We can increase trust and handling by (additionally) using NFC technology. Our self-printed cash is compatible with
any digital payment system. This enables people without bank accounts to access financial services supported by digital
payment systems. Moreover, our self-printed cash can be used for offline (emergency) transactions, like traditional cash.
To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to suggest such a form of printable digital money to accommodate the
different social needs. In some sense, our proposal gets close to what economists call token-based digital money (instead
of account-based digital money) since a payee is able to verify the validity (genuine and unspent) of the payment
token [13]. Our design provides a new solution to CBDC systems, which enhances the money usability for different
people in different scenarios.

2 BACKGROUND
2.1 Central Bank Digital Currency
Digital money issued by central banks is not a new concept. It has been proposed since 1985 [5, 45]. However, there was
no clear framework and technical support for promoting CBDC in the 1990s. With emerging blockchain technologies in
the last decade [11, 14, 33, 35], central banks got a blueprint to develop and promote CBDC [3, 7].

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Print Your Own Money: A Cash-Like Experience for Digital Payment Systems 3

Fig. 1. Potential reasons why people choose cash or digital payment from literature.

By the end of 2020, 60% of central banks have conducted CBDC experiments or proofs-of-concept, while 14% are
moving forward to development and pilot arrangements [10]. China is one of the leading countries in CBDC and has
released details of the prototype system to the public [52]. The front-end of DC/EP is similar to the front-end of a
payment app such as AliPay. Payments are contactless, and transfers between private individuals are made directly
between their smartphones.
On top of providing an official digital payment system supported by the central bank, the People’s Bank of China
considers DC/EP equivalent to cash [50]. To enable transactions without network services, two solutions of offline
payments have been proposed [54, 55]. The first one [54] uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology and
Bluetooth to construct a communication channel between payer and payee. Digital currency chips are required for
transaction terminals, which have the strong anti-cracking ability. The chip can verify the authenticity of digital
currency and the legality of transactions without permission from the system. The second proposal [55] does not require
additional hardware. The payment’s authorization is ensured by the user identification, the public key, and the digital
certificate of the user. The transfer information is recorded in the transaction ledger after one of two parties rejoins the
system. The recipient can use the money as an input of a transaction after the confirmation of the transaction from the
system.
Existing solutions of CBDC still consider digital money and physical money in two different systems. Although they
try to solve the challenge of offline payment, they do not provide a universal CBDC system that can also be accessed
by people without bank accounts or digital devices. In this paper, we design a payment system that enables all social
groups, even without bank accounts and specific digital devices, to access financial services and meet their needs in
different scenarios.

2.2 Preferences of Digital Money and Cash

To design a CBDC system that meets people’s needs, we first study how people perceive current payment systems. In
particular, user preference with cash or digital payments can inspire us to determine the features of our designed system.
There are a series of works that have investigated people’s payment preference with empirical methods [12, 18, 21, 23–
25, 31, 38, 43, 47, 49], especially their choices between cash and digital payments [18–20, 38]. We review previous
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4 Ye Wang, Chenhang Zhou, Yu Chen, Shenyi Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, and Roger Wattenhofer

literature and categorize user payment preferences as four scenarios accordingly: cash-only, cash-preferred, digital-
preferred, digital-only.

2.2.1 Cash-only Reasons. Intuitively, some people “persist” on cash as they are unbanked, either because of age,
illiteracy, or perceived unsuitability [26], while digital payment systems linked with banking account are always
mandatory besides a few exceptions [42]. Kumar et al. [26] detailed scenarios where some Indian vendors are unbanked
due to reasons such as long travel distance to bank and perceived inconvenience of being a bank user. On top of
this, payees’ technical constraint is still a determinant that forces people to choose cash without alternatives. For
example, under catastrophes that lead to power or communication signal temporary outage, paralyzing digital payment
infrastructure [43], vendors and merchants have no options but only accept cash transactions, which results in cash-only
scenarios for payers as well.

2.2.2 Cash-preferred Reasons. Other than cash’s dominance in the scenarios above, reasons supporting cash-preferred
scenarios where people are prone to use cash, even when digital payment is available, are presented in many works.
Financially speaking, payment and transaction via cash rarely incur additional service fees, which digital payment
likely does. Traveling abroad and cross-border transaction fees are always excessively high and will hardly make
economic sense to the budget [27]. Therefore, people may prefer to use cash in such scenarios. Also, in terms of financial
control, as elaborated by Joseph at al. [39] that cash, checks, and coupons will assist people in tracking and controlling
their personal finance efficiently [24].
Another remarkable attribute of cash, comparing with digital payment, is that cash is tangible [36] and socially
symbolic [51], which entices people to preferably choose cash under memorial circumstances [18, 26, 46]. Firstly, the
tangibility of cash can serve as a visual aid in some routine workflow [36], such as bus ticket buying, which has been
chosen and inherited by relevant working people until now. Moreover, such tangibility is seen to improve both payer’s
and payee’s perceived security during transactions, unlike digital payment only involves a virtual process [37]. Secondly,
cash can be credited with additional social value, which are widely appreciated by society. Ferria et al. [18–20] have
elaborated the role of cash in unifying and harmonizing social clusters by rendering necessary interactions among
communities. Wu [51] and Arnado [2] have exemplified Filipino’s case in festivals and occasions and further amplified
Ferria’s point that sociability of cash is preferred as it could serve as a social symbol, restoring and binding cultural
community which is superior to its original payment functionality.
Beyond previous reasons for cash preference, the privacy concern is another reason determining user preference
in cash. Karin [44] has concluded that cash payment is still favored by people looking for anonymity against digital
payment [30], though such anonymity may bring issues to the government, that the misuse of cash may breed money
laundering, tax evasion, and other illegal activities [44].

2.2.3 Digital-preferred Reasons. Digital payments are preferred over cash in some scenarios (e.g. pandemic outbreak)
or serving as special purposes (e.g. managing investment).
Similarly to the cash’s role in personal financial tracking and controlling, digital payments are preferred by households
in sophisticated scenarios [28], e.g., debt between friends and loan payment. Microsoft has brought up an initiative to
solve the loan management in an undeveloped country using digital payments [31]. This initiative turned out to be a
success as digital systems have provided people with accurate and timely payment information, which manual methods
could hardly achieve.
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Print Your Own Money: A Cash-Like Experience for Digital Payment Systems 5

Lewis et al. [28] have suggested that digital payment is more capable and prevalent in financial investment for people
who intends to remotely structure wealth and manage their portfolios. The yield of their investment is fluctuating on a
daily basis while digital transaction method could support remote and agile transactions. Investment is currently linked
to people’s bank accounts as an extra service, which people could access to financial markets, buy in or sell out directly
from their savings.

2.2.4 Digital-only Reasons. Nevertheless, digital payments also dominate in scenarios where cash could hardly be
accepted. For example, online shopping may require users to finish payment before shipment. Therefore, only digital
payment could perform timely transaction [1]. Another interesting reason has been discussed in Shen et al. [43] that
when merchants experience the advantages of digital payments, they may refuse to accept cash with their customers.
As their headline highlights, people are unable to use cash in the most common life scenarios.
Moreover, with the development of the ecosystem of digital payments, digital payment service providers, such as
Alibaba and PayPal, provide benefits and conveniences for people who purchase through digital payments [22], which
are completely inaccessible to people who use cash. Therefore, these incompatible digital payment ecosystems drive
people to use digital money when interacting with their services.
To sum up, plenty of related works have provided us with diversified motivations behind user’s choice between cash
and digital payment. We have, therefore, conclusively listed out key points as discussed in these studies (cf. Figure 1).
These insightful studies inspire us to notice the role of physical and digital money. Both of them may not be eliminated
when we design a CBDC system. Therefore, our system aims to provide users optimized experiences with diversified
forms of money and addresses challenges during their payment experiences.

2.3 Design of Paper-based Digital Payment Systems

By observing the difficulties for people who are over eighty years old to use digital payments in the UK where the
paper-based check was proposed to be abolished [47], Vines et al. [46] explore the design of preserving and augmenting
the paper check for digital payments. They invited 16 eighty-somethings to participate in design workshops and
experiment with two designs called community and digital check.
The community check is designed as pre-paid certification. People pay the community check (a special designed
checkbook) to merchants, and merchants send the check along with their bank account information to the issuer of
the community check. When the issuer receives a check from a merchant, the issuer will transfer the money to the
merchant. This is very different from our design, where the money of a payment is immediately transferred to the
merchant, without involving a third party.
Their digital check is a set of special papers and pens with a camera and Bluetooth. The pen will capture the
information written by users and send it to the bank through a computer. Users can make digital payments by signing
the specially designed check physically. This is also very different from our design, as it needs much more technology.
So while some of the goals of Vines et al. [46] are similar to ours, both their implementations are divergent.
Our design also supports both physical and digital forms of payments, and the two approaches can be combined.
When a payment method fails, users can easily convert to the other form of money with a personal device. Our system
does not rely on special devices and objects. Users can print cash with any digital devices on paper or other media,
which ensures generality (anyone who has digital devices can easily print money) and reduces the cost (no need to buy
additional equipment). Moreover, users can conduct offline payments without access to a device, while payees are not
necessarily connected to internet.
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6 Ye Wang, Chenhang Zhou, Yu Chen, Shenyi Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, and Roger Wattenhofer

Fig. 2. Design sketches - challenges that people encounter in experiencing current payment systems. Switching from one system to
another system requests people physically visit special locations, such as bank branches, ATMs, etc.

3 PAYMENT SYSTEM DESIGN

As previous studies suggest, people choose cash or digital payments in different scenarios, while some reasons are just
personal preferences, which the other payment methods may not easily substitute. For example, for those who are not
familiar with digital devices and are used to managing their financial activities in cash, it might be hard to convince
them that digital payments are more suitable for financial management. Therefore, we may infer that both cash and
digital money is inevitable in the money system, while both physical money and digital money will be included in
our design. Moreover, our system also addresses the challenge that people cannot pay with digital money in offline
scenarios. Given that our system enables the unification of physical and digital money, both our physical money and
digital money supports offline payments.

3.1 Conversion Between Digital Money and Cash

Figure 2 demonstrates the challenge of experiencing with current money system. The conversion between cash and
digital money heavily relies on banks. More precisely, people can only switch from one payment system to another one
by spending time, money, and energy to go to a bank branch or an ATM. Otherwise, they have to prepare both cash
and digital money any time with them. Moreover, in emergencies or inconvenient scenarios without enough time or
mobility to visit a specific location, people struggle with such a conversion process between cash and digital money.
Therefore, we aim to optimize the conversion process between the digital money and the physical money in our
payment systems. In such cases, cash can be accepted by digital systems, while people can get cash easily from their
digital accounts as well.
With the design principle in mind, we sketch basic ideas of how users can interact with the system (cf. Figure 3).
For example, when users want to use cash in a digital system, the payees can take a picture with the mobile phone to
deposit it; or when users want to get some cash, they do not have to go to a bank or ATM but just print it by themselves.
To realize this design idea, our system needs to accomplish two requirements. First, the mobile phones (digital devices)
should collect the information of cash and verify the authentication of the cash. Second, after the payee confirms the
transaction, the original cash should be invalid and cannot be used again. We outline the process of generating cash and
deposit cash in Figure 4. Each piece of cash has its own unique identity and value. The information has been recorded in
the system when the cash generated. The authentication of the cash can be verified in the system and the information
of the cash will be deleted after the verification.
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Print Your Own Money: A Cash-Like Experience for Digital Payment Systems 7

Fig. 3. Design sketches - ideal experiences with our payment systems. When people want to deposit the received cash into their
accounts, they can upload them to the system by simply taking a picture. Meanwhile, when people need cash, they can print valid
cash directly with their personal printers.

Traditional cash is standardized in terms of its size, weight, and design, made of rigid and light-density material
such as polymer or paper. People distinguish the authenticity of cash by their own experience of its physical properties.
However, to ensure the generality of the CBDC system, we do not require the form, material, and presentation of the
cash. Any cash that contains valid information can be verified in the system. Therefore, there is a risk of double-spending,
while users can directly copy the information on the cash and generate a new one with the same information. Since we
have no requirement for the physical material of the cash, we use asymmetric cryptography to ensure financial security.
Figure 5 shows the process of printing a physical cash from a digital account. When users want to print money, the
local device will first generate a pair of asymmetric keys, i.e., a public key (pk) and a private key (sk) for the cash and
send the user id, pk, and the value of the cash to the server. The server will verify the user identity like other digital
payment systems and check whether the user has enough balance to generate such cash. If the user has enough money
to generate the cash, the system will subtract the value from his account, create a unique identity for the cash, and
store the information of the cash in the system, including its value, its pk, its creator, and its identity. The system will
send back the cash identity to the user, indicating the success of generating such cash.
After receiving the cash identity, users can print the information (cash identity and private key) on paper (such
as QR code) or in other physical medium (such as NFC tag). Figure 7 shows an example of cash, which contains the
identity and a private key. Payees who receive the cash can verify and deposit it in their own accounts.
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8 Ye Wang, Chenhang Zhou, Yu Chen, Shenyi Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, and Roger Wattenhofer

Fig. 4. Design sketches - process of cash generation and cash deposit. Like traditional cash system, each self-printed cash has a
unique identity and value, which are recorded in the digital system.

Fig. 5. The interactions between the user and the system when Fig. 6. The interactions between the user and the system when
printing cash. accepting cash.

Figure 6 shows how users redeem money into their digital accounts when they receive cash. Valid cash contains
two information, i.e., the identity and the corresponding private key. The payee will first encrypt the payee’s id by the
private key as ciphertext and send it to the server with the cash identity. Then, the server can use the cash’s public key
to verify the redeem request’s validity. If the plaintext matches the payee’s identity, then the system will increase the
payee’s account balance and invalidate the redeemed cash in the system.
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Print Your Own Money: A Cash-Like Experience for Digital Payment Systems 9

Fig. 7. An example of printed QR code cash. Left: the amount of cash and information indicating the validity of the cash. Right: the
detail of the necessary information.

Fig. 8. Print a merchant-specific cash. Fig. 9. Receive a merchant-specific cash.

3.2 Offline Payments

The solution we proposed in the previous subsection aims to solve the incompatibility of cash and digital money.
However, the system still relies on online verification - although payers can use the printed cash to conduct the payment
offline, payees still need to communicate with the online server to verify the cash.
Therefore, we consider addressing this challenge with merchant pre-authorization systems. In merchant pre-
authorization systems, users will determine the receiver of the cash before making a payment. The server will generate
merchant-specific cash in advance, and the cash can only be used at the specified merchant. Meanwhile, the merchant
can verify the validity of the printed offline, demonstrating an offline payment scenario for both consumers and
merchants.
The system generates a pair of asymmetric keys for each merchant. The system keeps the private key for generating
the merchant-specific cash and sends the corresponding public key to the merchant. Merchant can verify the validity of
the merchant-specific cash for offline payments using the public key.
Figure 8 shows how the system generates merchant-specific money. On top of generating the cash identity, the
system will also encrypt the cash information with the private key of the merchant. Then the merchant is able to use
the public key to verify whether the cash is generated through the system.
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10 Ye Wang, Chenhang Zhou, Yu Chen, Shenyi Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, and Roger Wattenhofer

Figure 9 shows the process of receiving a merchant-specific cash. The merchants will first verify the cash’s validity
with the private key of the cash provided by the consumer and the public key of themselves to make sure that the cash
is generated with enough balance to pay the bill. After reconnecting to the network, merchants can submit all the cash
they receive from users during the offline period, and the system will process all payment requests at that time.
The key pair of each merchant can update regularly. If users want to revoke the printed money for a specific merchant,
they just need to wait until the merchant changes the key pair or the merchants to be online and verify the money has
not been spent. Then the old cash is not valid anymore, and users can withdraw the money back to their own accounts.
In current businesses, offline verification for merchants only occurs in extreme scenarios, especially in countries and
cities where infrastructure is well developed. Moreover, we suggest that merchants may regularly update the pair of
keys to ensure that attackers cannot hack the private keys to generate cash.
Moreover, if merchants do not trust the central system, i.e., the central bank, they may also establish a white-list
of users. Only users with sufficient creditworthiness can generate merchant-specific cash. If a user is found to have
falsified after online verification, the merchant can more easily trace the person responsible.

4 EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
Our prototype system can not be tested in real scenarios easily. It is hard to embed our system with the current money
system without the permission of governments. Therefore, at this stage, we test our system in the laboratory. We focus
on the system’s usability: Can this system bring convenience to users? Can this system solve the problems that users
encounter in real life? What do users think of this new cash system? How do they feel when testing it?
Our experiments are held in two phases. In the first phase, we test the performance of our system under different
payment scenarios. In the second phase, we invite users to complete the same payment tasks as in the first phase with
different devices.

4.1 System Performance

In our prototype system, we consider two presentations of cash, i.e., printed QR code and NFC tag. Even though we
have purchase the materials at retail stores, the cost (0.035 CNY and 0.42 CNY per note, respectively) is much less than
the production cost of cash [15], which demonstrates that our system can be an appropriate substitute to current money
system from the perspective of cost for central banks. A blue-tooth printer is used to print QR codes. The capacity of
each NFC chip is 888 bytes.
We test our system performance with four different Android phones released between 2015 and 2020. We design six
tests for measuring how the system performs under different payment scenarios.

• Test 1: Print five $10.0 in QR mode.

• Test 2: Receive one $10.0 with a QR code.
• Test 3: Print one $10.0 in NFC mode.
• Test 4: Receive one $10.0 with NFC.
• Test 5: Print one $10.0 in QR+NFC mode.
• Test 6: Offline verify one $10.0 in QR+NFC mode.

One of our researchers tests the system with four different Android devices (Figure 10), launched between 2015
to 2020. Each test has been conducted six times on every device. We take the average performance of each test and
list it in Table 1. Each printing money operation with a single printer or a single NFC tag takes around 10 seconds,
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Print Your Own Money: A Cash-Like Experience for Digital Payment Systems 11

(a) Print cash with HUAWEI P20 through the blue-tooth (b) Write information into a NFC tag touch to the printed
printer. money.

(c) Scan the QR code to read the information on the printed (d) Read the information stored in the NFC tag on the printed
money. money.

Fig. 10. Examples of testing our prototype system with HUAWEI P20.

while if we use both paper and NFC tag to store the information of the money, it takes 15 seconds to print each money.
When converting printed physical money to digital money, it takes users 10 seconds for the cash stored with a single
material and 15 seconds for the cash in both QR code and NFC tag. Meanwhile, the process of making changes and
offline payment validation does not consume additional time. Despite the different performance of the Android devices,
the processing speed of our prototype system does not variance a lot. We can infer that our system can be adapted to
different Android devices and has a relatively stable speed, which is much faster than the current conversion between
cash and digital money (go to a bank/ATM for deposit or withdrawal operations).

4.2 User Experiments

After measuring the system performance, we invite six users to participate in our system design (4 female and 2 male,
age from 20 to 32). Because of the COVID-19 situation, instead of inviting testing users to come to our lab, we deliver
the system equipment (HUAWEI P20, blue-tooth printer, and NFC tags) to participants and provide them a user guide
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12 Ye Wang, Chenhang Zhou, Yu Chen, Shenyi Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, and Roger Wattenhofer

Test (sec) MI 10 HUAWEI P20 RedMI K30 Pro HUAWEI Mate 8

Test 1 41.21 35.45 38.63 40.79
Test 2 12.28 8.67 10.12 11.19
Test 3 12.45 13.22 11.83 16.22
Test 4 6.84 8.16 11.05 9.70
Test 5 14.82 18.02 14.72 17.55
Test 6 12.16 18.88 16.95 17.14
Table 1. Performance of four Android devices on six tests on average. Each test has been conduct six times on every device.

User (sec) 1 2 3 4 5 6 average

Test 1 42.12 54.91 65.05 39.2 43.22 46.4 48.48
Test 2 10.43 6.59 6.07 20.29 11.4 6.52 10.22
Test 5 19.06 25.52 25.45 11.91 46.62 19.05 24.60
Test 6 17.6 37.9 27.89 36.46 48.66 24.83 32.22
Table 2. User experiments with HUAWEI P20.

for learning the payment system. Participants test the system in their familiar environment (e.g., home, office). We keep
in contact with them through real-time video calls and record the conditions they encounter during the test.
During the testing session, users first read the instructions of the system. Then, they can try out the systems and ask
questions to the researchers. Next, we asked the users to complete the four tests (test 1, 2, 5, 6) in Section 4.1, which
cover all functionality of our system. We record the testing process and collect the testing issues. Finally, we discuss
with them their feelings about the payment system.
After a total of 15 minutes of reading and familiarizing themselves with the system, users independently complete
the tests with the system. Their using time of each test is listed in Table 2.

4.3 Technical Challenges

Compared to our system performance tests with experienced users, the first-time users show a good understanding of
the new system. We find two main challenges through our observation of the testing process: network connection and
NFC practice.
Except for test 6, which is conducted offline, the remaining four tests require network connections during the testing
period to send and receive messages with the server. Some users experience a long testing time (User 5, Test 5) because
of internet connecting issues. In fact, users consider this problem can be easily solved by moving positions. However, if
the network interrupt happens when the merchant receives the money, it will greatly influence the business’s efficiency.
Therefore, all users consider the offline payment design is useful in daily life, and they have not felt any inconvenience.
Another challenge for users is the NFC practice. In the user study, all devices are provided by researchers, so users
may feel that they are not familiar with the NFC practice. Different devices sense the signal from the NFC chip with a
different part of the devices. Users 2, 4, and 5 encounter the failures of NFC write and read due to improper operations
in Tests 5 and 6. Since we only require one NFC read and write during the entire process for each cash, users are able to
complete the test successfully after re-familiarizing themselves with the device. Meanwhile, our system ensures that
even though failures of NFC operation happen, users can still process the payment with a second attempt.
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Print Your Own Money: A Cash-Like Experience for Digital Payment Systems 13

4.4 Loss or Theft

The most significant concern about our system from testing users is security. Several users (1, 2, 3, 4, 6) are curious
about recovering the money after a loss or theft and how to track thieves.
Our payment system has a remedies plan in case of cash is stolen. The system allows users to invalidate the cash
they print if it has not been used. The money will then go back to the users’ accounts, ensuring that thieves cannot use
the cash anymore.
It is undeniable that the risk still exists if the thieves use the money before the users destroy the cash. However, we
argue that our system is not more vulnerable than the traditional cash system. First, people also face the risk of losing
cash or have cash stolen in the current money system. Because the cash in our system can be easily converted to digital
accounts, users do not need to keep cash for a long time. In addition to the cash’s basic information, users can also make
additional authentications of the people who pay with the cash, such as appearance, bio information, and other identity
information. In such a case, attackers cannot use the money directly. Moreover, since the cash system is anonymous if
cash is lost or stolen, it is almost impossible for users to trace the money flow of their lost money. In our system, each
cash’s usage history is through the central system, making it possibly better to track the flow of lost or stolen money.

4.5 Usability Challenges

Another concern mentioned by users is managing change money. In our qualitative study, participants also mentioned
that in retail scenarios, almost surely, the cash value does not perfectly match the money that payers have to pay to the
merchants. Based on different user preferences, we consider two possible mechanisms.
First, User 3 wants to keep the cash as the change. The most intuitive solution is to generate new cash by the
merchants. The newly printed cash is considered as the credential of the change. However, such a mechanism has
pitfalls of security. Both the merchant and the consumer have the identity and the private key of the cash. Therefore,
there is a possibility that the merchant embezzles the money. We discuss this security issue with User 3, and he does
not consider it a big problem for him. Because the system has a record of the cash generation and deposit, he does not
worry too much about the merchant stealing the money. He also said that he would prefer to use such a mechanism at
a large and trusted merchant.
Another mechanism is designed to solve the problem proposed by our interviewees that they do not want to manage
small change. Rather than generating new cash, the change money will directly return to the user’s digital account. If
the total value of paid cash is equal to or larger than the total amount of the bill, then the system will deposit the bill’s
amount in the merchant accounts and return the change to the account which creates the cash.
This solution addresses not only the inconvenience when carrying large amounts of small change but also the
security issue of the first mechanism. However, this mechanism is not suitable for offline payers who want to use the
change money to conduct a second-round payment. Such a system may change how people prepare cash: instead of
considering the total amount they might use, people should consider the number of times they use money.

5 DISCUSSION
In this paper, we provide a system design of CBDC and test the system’s usability with users. We further elucidate the
understanding of designing payment systems through this study in this section and discuss potential challenges of
promoting a payment system and how our system addresses these challenges.
Manuscript submitted to ACM
14 Ye Wang, Chenhang Zhou, Yu Chen, Shenyi Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, and Roger Wattenhofer

5.1 Rethink Current Payment Systems

As suggested in previous empirical studies or surveys, cash is still widely appreciated and used by people, yet with an
observed decreasing frequency due to the emergence of digital payment. Obviously, cash is always a mutually relied
on transaction tools by users and vendors as it could operate normally in unexpected situations, e.g., power outages.
Further, from a sociability perspective, people prefer cash in scenarios where cash is perceived to carry extra intangible
values that exceed its domination. On the other side, digital payment systems, indeed in recent years, have significantly
reshaped the concept of payment in terms of speed and security. Though several payment services have attempted to
increase the sociability of digital payment, it is still incompetent in both implications mentioned above compared to
cash. Generally speaking, dual-track system-digital payment and cash have been long operating parallel, and they are
mutually converted by banks only after verification. However, vigorous verification is always practiced by the bank
before entering into the vault. Thus, users are required to visit an ATM or bank branch for deposit physically. Unbanked
people may therefore be refused other financial services, which nowadays are mostly provided digitally.
Therefore, based on the implications above, we uphold the idea that 1) the physical form of the currency is necessary
and should be preserved for different scenarios; 2) the verification process should, to some extent, be independent
of the banking system to enable the conversion between digital and cash payment. Therefore, design is centering on
preserving the physical payment attributes of cash and inheriting the advantage of digital payment. Moreover, we
hope to remove users’ burden of visiting banks or ATMs for deposits by embedding verification information inside our
printable cash, which allows users to convert cash to digital credit on their own and vice versa. Self-printed cash, in this
case, could be viewed as a physical representation of a portion of users’ deposit and ready for trade offline with peers or
revert back to the deposit. Although we keep the physical form of money in the system, people are not completely
anonymous, which may reduce illegal activities, such as money laundering and tax evasion.
By allowing banking users to convert between their credits and cash freely, our system also contributes to aggregate
financial inclusions by enrolling unbanking people, while unbanking people can still get self-printed cash from others
to access digital services. This is meaningful for modern society as financial services should be equally accessible as
electricity and water [48]. Our system provides different people with the appropriate form of payment, and encourage
different. People with different preferences towards cash or digital payment could transact and convert to either form
they desire in our system.
As Ferria [17–20] and her colleagues have pointed, cash has always been a solid binding power within the community
as cash will encourage interactions during transactions. Similarly, as our system inherits the physical form of cash, the
offline transaction will meanwhile bring positive interaction between payers and payees. Furthermore, as cash and
digital payment could more frequently and seamlessly convert to each other, users who prefer either digital payment
or cash would adopt different payment scenarios with respective payment methods more smoothly. Therefore, the
introduction of our design could significantly create a more overall hybrid payment patterns where people still pay on
their preference as well as be encouraged to attempt different payment methods.
Notwithstanding, We have also noticed that two challenges existed for users to adapt to a new digital payment
system: 1) implementation challenges that may resist the system promotion; 2) security challenges that how people
could adopt and trust our system. We will address these two aspects accordingly in the rest of this section.

Manuscript submitted to ACM

Print Your Own Money: A Cash-Like Experience for Digital Payment Systems 15

5.2 Implementation Challenges For Promoting Payment Systems

There are three implementation challenges confronted by current system design: 1) costs from the process of printing
own money; 2) costs of other devices and infrastructure; 3) increasing pressure imposed on the bank.
First of all, we have exemplified in the experiment that our system uses printed cash as the carrier of payment
information. It will be challenging issues dealing with tons of paper printed, used, and disposed of by millions of people
every day. Paper waste will have a negative effect on the environment. Moreover, it is noticeable that the perceived
benefits of cash may be undermined if the costs of printing cash are overly high. However, compared to the current
cash system, the cost of self-printing money is much less [16]. Since traditional cash could only be verified by physical
methods (e.g., its appearance and marks), and it will frequently circulate in the market for decades, which requires
traditional cash with special materials and printing techniques to ensure the liveness of cash when it circulates in
society [15]. In contrast, we do not require special materials for presenting cash in our system. The authentication
of our self-printed money is guaranteed by the information carried in it. As shown in the system design, NFC chips
or other mediums that people perceive to be safe enough to write money’s information on would be acceptable. On
the other hand, because of the development of digital payment systems, people may prefer to deposit the self-printed
money they receive into their account, which shortens the period of self-printed money circulates in society and further
reduces the cost of printing money.
Another challenge comes from the accessibility of self-printed money. Our prototype system uses a printer for
printing cash. The use of such external ancillary devices may reduce the flexibility and versatility of the system.
However, similar to what we discuss in the previous paragraph, the portable printer in our prototype system is only a
demonstration example, and it will not be the only final solution for self-printed cash. Although our system requires
users to prepare paper and printers, the accessibility of such devices may still be better than ATM machines and bank
branches in the traditional cash system as they are continuously disappearing [40]. As self-printed cash costs less
than traditional cash, we may also expect the central banks and governments to provide some help in setting up the
infrastructure for the system to achieve better universal access.
Nevertheless, central systems may face a surging demand of authentication from users: request for printing, request
for authentication for money received, balance retrieve, etc. Interactions between users and the central bank could be
overwhelming, which could impose great pressure on the bank’s network. Therefore, integrating the cash payment into
the digital payment system and keep the system available will be challenging. For example, if the service is down, could
printed cash be normally verified? In a nutshell, system architecture design will be demanding and revolutionary for
banks. Indeed, we have not studied the back-end system architecture and tested its performance, while our current
work focuses on the interaction design between users and the payment systems. Some prior works [6, 52, 53] have
explored CBDC systems with different implementations, such as distributed ledgers. Other financial sectors may also
be involved in the CBDC system and share the potential workload of the central system.

5.3 Security Challenge in Endorsing Payment Systems

Another challenge we need to address is how self-printed money could be trusted and accepted by the end-users. This
is a critical challenge for our system as the essential feature of the cash is it can be legally accepted and liquidated for
payment as long as it is real. In online scenarios (with access to the internet), a payee can directly verify the validity of
payment. However, in offline scenarios, the ability to ensure the security of accepting money determines whether the

Manuscript submitted to ACM

16 Ye Wang, Chenhang Zhou, Yu Chen, Shenyi Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, and Roger Wattenhofer

payment system can be adopted by people. Therefore, we analyze the trust spectrum of payment systems on different
levels and accordingly discuss which path we should take to tackle the payee’s concern.
• On the most basic level, the QR code represents money sitting in the account of the payer. Whoever scans that
QR code first, will be the receiver of the money. Today’s physical equivalent is a personal check. It may be okay
for a relative to give a child a (decorated) personal check as a present, since the relation between payer and
payee is strong, and as such trustful. If the check fails to be cashable, the parents may have a word with the
relative that gave the check. Even a retail store may accept such a form of payment, if the payer is a well-known
return customer. One may carry such a personal check along for emergency situations, possibly simply in an
NFC enabled application like Google pay, or in printed form.
• On the next higher security level, the paying account is not a personal account, but it belongs to a trusted third
party such as a commercial bank. Today’s physical equivalent is a banker’s check. A retail store may accept such
a banker’s check even if the customer is unknown, as it is guaranteed to be valid by the bank that issued the
check. A fraudulent customer may copy such a banker’s check in an attempt to double spend. However, the
issuing bank will go after such a fraudulent customer the same way it does already today. Moreover, such a
check could be difficult to copy by having some printed security elements, similarly to banknotes today. Banks
may be willing to issue digital money in the form of such banker’s checks as a business. In contrast to banknotes,
such a banker’s check will be more secure: If we are in an emergency situation, the validity of such a check can
be verified simply by caching the check.
• There is an even more secure level: this is known as colored money in the cryptocurrency world. Today’s physical
equivalent is a gift card of a particular store. The idea is that the money is printed such that there is only one
possible receiver, for instance a retail store. In this case, the retail store can be sure that there is no double spend,
as the store is the only possible receiver for the money. In some sense, the money was already promised to the
store when being printed, the customer only waits for an opportunity to spend it. In contrast to today’s gift
cards, colored money can be reverted back into the payer’s account.
Our system design caters to the highest security level as it involves authentication from the trusted central bank. We
provide solutions for people with different trust awareness, thus addressing the security concerns for people when
receiving payments offline.

6 CONCLUSION
This paper considers upcoming challenges with the development of digital payments. When central banks are promoting
and developing digital payments, how should we design the central bank digital currency systems to enable all social
members to access financial services as much as public utility access?
We answer this question by designing a CBDC system with self-printed cash. Our solution is compatible with digital
payment systems, while being resilient to emergency scenarios. We test our prototype system with different devices
and validate its accessibility. Our work provides a new solution for the development of CBDC systems and may serve
as a blueprint of the design of hybrid digital currencies.

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