Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
https://www.taler.net/en/news/2026-13.htmlEurope desperately needs its own digital payment solutions to reduce its dependence on US companies and its exposure to sanctions that could target EU citizens if the president has a bad day.
GLS is also on board with Wero, which, unfortunately, hasn't seen big adoption yet.
I really hope Taler takes off.
https://www.taler.net/en/faq.html
> Taler e-money is issued with a validity period. One month before the expiration date, your wallet should automatically exchange any digital cash that is about to expire for new digital cash with an extended validity period. However, if your wallet is offline for an extended period of time, it may be unable to do so. Ensure your wallet is regularly online to avoid losing money due to expiration!
It will be choked out at key junctions with KYC in the same way crypto has.
The claims that is is privacy preserving are deceptive, and in my option constitute an act of intentional fraud on the part of its creators -- the fact that people are deceived by the privacy claims is clear in your comment: You ask why would the banks adopt something private. The answer is: it isn't.
Its existence is justified under a fairytale model of how the world works-- a false belief that actually anonymous payments are unlawful and that their compromised alternative is the best possible. In the path of doing so, they not only falsely sell a system with compromised privacy as private, but they also help bring about a dystopia where privacy is unlawful in much the same manner that doing business with companies that refuse to accept cash does.
It would be fair to say that its an upgrade to privacyless systems-- because it doesn't attach the sender's identity to the transactions themselves--, but to characterize it as a private or privacy preserving system is a lie.
I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.
When people start saying hyper-opinionated stuff like this, I usually tune out. The rest of your comment, whether or not it has nuggets of merit or insight, is going to be tainted by the fact that you've bought into the whole "evil EU is tyrannical" thing. It's very in vogue right now among the MAGA and alt-right types. They all started hating the EU with a passion of a thousand suns all of a sudden, pretty much in synchrony, and curiously coinciding with anti-EU propaganda campaigns driven by EU's fascist neighbour next door, angry at the EU stopping it from genociding its way through eastern Europe.
Like, your point about one of the Euro's main raison d'etres for the general public - frictionless cross-border transactions without needing to convert currencies - going away with online payments, that's a good point. Too bad about all the talking points you couched it in.
Neither buyer nor seller are anonymous. Your bank knows your ID-verified identity and that you have deposited X talers. However, nobody knows when, where, or even if you spend those talers. You are free to spend talers on eg. a e-book about Tiananmen Square and the bank/state will never know that you did. The seller, on the other hand, has no protections, and will be destroyed for selling an e-book about Tiananmen Square. Also, you can't realistically buy a physical book about Tiananmen Square because you will give up your address to the shipper and by extension to the state.
If my understanding is correct... it's not good enough. In a free society we should be able to both purchase and publish e-books about Tiananmen Square, and this does not permit that.
That's pretty hard unless Taler is very widespread. I could see a world in which that would work - if people generally made all small purchases in Taler and it replaced cash. But there's no reason for governments to buy into that (except as maybe an intermediate pretense after ending legal cash payments entirely), and no reason for large corporate chains to buy into it unless (and maybe even if) government has bought into it (too much legal exposure for too little benefit.)
So any merchant who dealt in Taler would be maximally scrutinized, and whatever exception they were riding in order to be allowed to deal in Taler would be too valuable to give up through selling forbidden books. Like maybe your doctor could deal in Taler fairly freely, and he's not risking his medical license to screw around in politics.
It's basicially david chaum's blind-signature money idea. It's centralized but the central issuer can't connect the outputs to the inputs. (but unique inputs signed by the issuer correspond to unique outputs)
>Also are transactions final and irreversible?
I think so unless you are able to reveal the secrets of the transaction. Hmm, however revealing the secret to someone is basicially same as spending it to them (analgous to releasing a signed and finalized transaction into the mempool in cryptocurrency). It's finalized by the issuer signing it.
Like you basicially send the vendor the secret, and then they hand it in to the coin issuer and wait for the issuer to sign a new input, before giving you the merchandise. So idk how it would work reversing the transactions
[edit] Yes, he has been involved. https://www.heise.de/en/news/39C3-How-the-open-source-cash-G...
original https://chaum.com/ecash/
new and improved https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/eCash_2.0_9-7-2...
Interesting stumble upon. https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Better-than-mon...
large companies, that should work
the state if it does an criminal investigation, that won't work, also at least for now there is no need to do so if you don't to anything criminal. Sure if fascists take over that would change but they then also would ban any system which would allow avoiding their gaze so not sure it's relevant tbh.
and as things are currently you have to far more worry about US companies and state knowing about what transactions which are legal but you want to keep private then about your local EU government
So if you get Taler from your bank and spend it somewhere, the government can see it at your bank, and they can see it where it was spent, but they don't see you at all. You've done your trusting out of band.
If that's right, it could still be used for illegal and untaxed transactions if the entire chain was trusting out of band. I could use it to buy drugs without paying taxes if by dealer would be happy to shoot me later if they couldn't spend it at a retailer, rather than to check if it was good.
I still don't understand it. I've tried periodically for years, but I'm missing something.
it's more transaction tokenization system then a crypto currency, so you don't really "buy Taler (currency)", you give Taler digital Euros and they give you a token representing this digital Euros in a more anonymous way. (They also can work for other currencies, but doesn't do currency exchanges/cross currency transactions itself).
Effectively this means:
- The merchant (e.g. your local grocery store, restaurant etc.) doesn't get information about you they can aggregate, sell etc. This is the main improvement.
- It's not controlled by a US company, this is also a pretty big improvement.
- Taler doesn't strictly require customer wallets to be bound to an bank account nor do they identify who you are as a customer. This makes it hard for Taler to abuse the audit log, which is also an improvement.
- It does strictly require merchants (anyone receiving money) to be bound to a bank account for given currency (here Euro). It's best to think about it as the money going directly to the merchants normal bank account.
- Taler has audit logs containing what token was used from which customer(id) with which merchant (which is strictly bound to having to have a bank account), as well as logs about how money got into the customers wallet and all this methods you can put money into it will (likely) be traceable, so criminal investigator and similar can still pretty much trace back who did which transaction when. Just with a bit more effort/extra steps. So with enough automation states can as much surveil you then they can now. Practically it seems to make things a bit more high effort then today, which is a good thing to have.
IFF Taler allow putting digital Euros into a wallet using gift cards buyable with cash this indeed could still be used for money laundering (similar to how most gift card systems can be used for it), but I think it's unlikely they allow such things and most people practically will likely link up their bank account.
Another thing to consider is that for any ordering of physical good you normally have to put in a shipping address with your name, even if you send it to a post box.
And for a bunch of other things the vendor also has to get your identity out of band (independent of used payment processing). E.g. many kinds of contracts, high value payments, currency exchanges etc. etc.
This doesn't make it useless. It still is an improvement. Especially if payment terminals in physical shops get support for it and/or digital goods can be bought with it. In Germany a lot of the large chains with physical shops more or less all use the same payment terminals for card payment with support relative flexible software so it's actually possible I think. Just hard to happen without regulatory pressure, similar to Wero support on a payment terminal.
If you want to maintain FOSS principles and provide people with monetary technology, you need to be noncompliant — whether in letter or just in spirit — with the law in most of the world, where the law limits people's access to financial activity, in order to fulfil a public policy of empowering gatekeepers.
Blockchains that support stablecoins are already here and millions of people already use them (and soon agents will use them as well).
All for worldwide, instant and extremely low fee payments and transfers.
Canadians understand this problem much better than many european politicians. In particular Merz is like a lame obedient duck here. And Macron too now, after failing the french population again and again. He had many years time to fix France and did not do so. That is deliberate failure.
I’m all for fast-forwarding and you can pull this off I will donate towards a statue in your honour.