GNU Taler is a Free Software payment system that preserves the privacy of payers while ensuring that income is visible to authorities.
I’ll stick with monero.
From the FAQ:
How to avoid digital cash expiration?
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!
You can lose money if the coins in your wallet “expire”.
The fact that this system is shipping v1.0 with such an anti-user design deficiency tells me all I need to know. I wonder how many Taler “beta” users will lose their cash before they fix the design. I wonder how much of the customer support load of the exchanges will be dealing with this issue.
And this comes after a decade of the cryptocurrency industry educating users to store their funds in a cold-wallet to avoid getting hacked, so it’s counter-intuitive to anyone with passing experience of digital currencies. If there’s one thing that we learnt from the cryptocurrecy industry, it’s that users don’t care to understand how the technology works, and will do stupid things. Anything that seeks wide adoption needs to be designed for non-technical people.
What a terrible design decision.
If there’s one thing that we learnt from the cryptocurrecy industry, it’s that users don’t care to understand how the technology works, and will do stupid things.
Yes, like turning a digital payment system into a speculative asset and making it basically impossible to actually buy anything with it.
But it seems you are totally missing the point of Taler, as it doesn’t even aim to be anything like so called crypto-“currencies”. It’s a digital payment system like Paypal, but decentralized.
But it seems you are totally missing the point of Taler, as it doesn’t even aim to be anything like so called crypto-“currencies”. It’s a digital payment system like Paypal, but decentralized.
No, I’m not missing that point, I understand the design goals of Taler. You seem to have misinterpreted my comment. I am pointing out that the inability to store Taler currency in a cold wallet is counter to existing user education from similar systems (digital currencies) and therefore will lead to loss of funds of users who don’t understand how Taler works.
Except for some very niche crypto-currency users no one stores “money” like that. You have a bank account where you store money.
I think the whole point is that you’re not supposed to keep your money in your taler wallet for an extended period. Its mostly a way to facilitate payment between different crypto/currencies
To maintain the anonymity goal you still want to obtain Talers in advance (otherwise you’d open yourself up to timing correlation) - so they will have to be in the wallet for some non-negligible duration.
Regardless of expiration that also means the device holding the secrets to use the Talers can be lost in that time, so you need some e.g. encrypted cloud backup to restore from. Since people are terrible at printing out recovery codes, you can either have key escrow (leading to a compromise of the anonymity properties), or you accept that some people will lose their money for reasons they will not understand.
Regardless, I would much prefer Taler as a CBDC to whatever permissioned Blockchain garbage the Big4 consulting companies will come up with.
So its basically like taking money out if the ATM before you go spend it. You dont have to do it when you’re buying things
Taler is not a store of value. Exchanging some Taler is like going to the ATM and withdrawing some cash to put in your wallet.
See my first sentence.
Yes, like cash.
I have seen 0 articles relating GNU Taler with the digital Euro, and I am very worried this incredible project will end nowhere. Because the digital Euro is definitely coming and that would be the moment to put Taler to work.
As a french citizen, i reeeeeaaaaaally hope the digital euro will be good, and truly as flexible as cash
It won’t be great if non-libre payment systems are still the rule.
Taler has a completely different application. Digital euro won’t use it
Could you expand?
AFAIK Taler is for payments, the Digital Euro is for storing value.
Yes, but also, your Taler wallet stores value too, I guess.
In any case, I wonder why Taler has not made it a point that they are (or could) be a payment system for the digital euro.
If it’s not going to be used for that, it could still be used as a good paypal alternative.
Due to the fact that Taler is designed for government to see all income means it’s not an option. Is there any privately owned company anywhere in the world that uses Taler?
Given government’s attitude that all money everywhere belong’s to the government, they only decide on how much to let the worthless servants get to use, I’m good with tax evasion. When I carry cash at stores, it’s fine if they don’t report the income. Government is very good at taking money by force, but not as interested to pay for anything. It is in store’s best interest to accept privacy coins like Monero or Zcash before using something like Taler
It’s an objective improvement over EMV which doesn’t protect privacy at all.
Taler protect payer privacy while exposing income information. Meaning it can help collect taxes to pay for infrastructure, education, public service, …
That’s a fine compromise. I hope Taler become a practical alternative to EMV and other shitty payment systems being pushed by banks.
Stores should accept monero to eliminate paying taxes
Lol yeah right
Also you would still have to pay sales tax
You should go to a few countries and see how the world operates. Stores can include all taxes in the quoted price upfront before the sale, as many countries embed the taxes in the price shown publicly, and then the store takes privacy coin payment like monero, and if the store does not record a few sales to skip on taxes since there’s no payment account tied to company name, even better
Who is the Payment Service Provider?
I can’t tell if this is decentralised.
It can be many different ones. Usually your home bank would allow you to exchange some Euro into Taler tokens and then use those to pay in compatible stores. But instead of a centralized system there can be many different exchanges that follow the same standard (protocol) and can be used with the same software and wallet apps.
Wow that sounds like a terrible product no one would want, who is the target audience for such a thing?
Target audience: People who want to pay for stuff anonymously through the Internet. It’s a large and underserved market.
It’s a big part of why people got so excited about bitcoin, and why it was so disappointing when it spectacularly failed to be any good at that application.
It doesnt sound very anonymous. If the info is “visable to authorities” then its not very private.
Paypal and most other services already allow for payments to be “private” but visable to authorities.
People who actually want private and anoymous payments already use crypto.
Taler ensures asymmetric privacy. The buyer does not expose their identity to the seller (or the government), nor what they bought to their bank/payment-provider. But the seller needs to expose their income for tax purposes. This is a good compromise as it follows existing law and prevents tax-evasion and (to some extend) money laundering.
Taler does use crypto, aka cryptography, to make sending payments securely anonymous. That is the main point of it.
The same audience as Paypal, which seems to be reasonably popular. Except this is privacy preserving and an open standard that many providers can use.
