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!
Staying disconnected is not what makes them expire, but you need connection to ‘renew’ them before they do expire, if you plan on keeping your tokens for a very long time (say, years). At least that’s my reading of it.
> This is infinitely worse than Bitcoin.
If we only consider this single aspect and ignore all the other ways in which it’s arguably better than Bitcoin, then yes.
It will be choked out at key junctions with KYC in the same way crypto has.
> The NGI TALER project is funded under Horizon Europe (Pilots for the Next Generation Internet) with the aim of bringing GNU Taler to market across Europe. https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
Unlike crypto, it is designed from the beginning with KYC/AML in mind. https://www.taler.net/en/principles.html
The issue seems to have been that GLS Bank was not able to support this beyond Germany. KYC/AML is a pretty complex topic. And since GLS is a tiny local bank (1,100 employees) it would have been a very large project for them. https://ich.taler.net/t/taler-en-belgique-en-france-ou-au-lu... https://www.gls.de/taler
More on the implemtation here: https://www.taler.net/en/kyc.html https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/023-taler-kyc.html https://docs.taler.net/taler-kyc-manual.html
Must have been quite a curveball for Taler. Good luck on new venture!
Taler is _not_ a fully anonymous payment system nor does it claims so.
It solves two specific problems:
- merchants get way more personal information about you then they actually need (merchants as e.g. your grocery store)
- alternative payments system implementations not owned by visa
non of this points include, or pretend to include, that your transactions are anonymous to auditors. Taler is in it's documentation pretty clear about that. It's a improvement to existing payment systems in the framework and limitations of existing payment transactions.
For being a honeypot you normally discrepancy between disclosed information and actual situation or other way to try to trick people to disclose things they don't want to disclose.
Just because some improvement to existing payment systems isn't hitting some legally impossible ideal doesn't make it a honeypot or any other way malicious.
> privacy-friendly online transactions
so I believe any reasonable user, without digging more deeply, would not come to the conclusion that they are complying with KYC laws.
Any government-approved payment system is obviously going to be auditable under existing legal frameworks.
and much much less so wrt. (customer,merchent)-> auditor aspect.
It's also more German laws you have to worry about then EU regulators, as the German laws based on the regulation are noticeable more strict then what the EU requires.
And while this laws do apply to all transactions, they don't require the customer to be identified in every transaction. Instead it's a risk based model. E.g. you local grocery store doesn't check you identity when you buy some groceries with cash. Even if you buy with card no one checks if that is your card and the information the card transaction shared does not fulfill the data collection requirements for the highest risk transaction.
This is why Taler can work, _it_ has enough information to do risk and fraud detection for many "daily" low risk transaction. And for very high risk transactions the merchant anyway has to identify you out of band and can't rely on the card transaction information. Through I guess somewhere in between is still a gray area not sure how Taler handles that.
The wording on the Taler website is a bit wishy-washy, but I THINK the TL;DR is:
1. They tried to do be a payments processor with assistance from a German bank.
2. That didn't work out for what Taler claims are "unrelated reasons" but I suspect we all can agree it was due to KYC/AML hurdles.
3. The Taler plan now appears to not be a payments processor but rather merely an issuer.
And in that respect, there is plenty of precedent for that passing in the EU, i.e. there are are already many online places you can go swap your Euro for Bitcoin legally.
So, yes, there will still be KYC/AML. You will still need to provide your ID to swap your Euro for your Taler. But after that, Taler has nothing to do with transaction processing, you go spend your Taler balance elsewhere and somebody else's server processes the transaction. Taler will know and be obligated to retain records of who bought how much, when and how but not when and where (of if) they spent it.
At least that's my interpretation of the word-soup on their website.
If I am understanding Taler, it is not like cash coins/paper where the government does not and has no way to know that you, e.g., bought a bottle of wine from a vintner with cash, and that vintner can use that bill/coins in many different ways and the gov't has essentially no way to trace or track that.
The way I am seeing it... please correct me where I'm not understanding something... the Taler architecture would require you to pay cash into an exchange, then you extract (likely IDs/tagged/marked) Taler, you then pay that Taler to a merchant, e.g., who by policy cannot remain anonymous, and that merchant deposits that market Taler into the exchange. So in that scenario, what has happened is that the Taler the merchant received "privately" is clearly associated with the Taler you extracted from the exchange to pay the Taler deposited by the Vintner.
It's maybe private in that the Vintner does not need to know who you are, but you can bet the control freak tyrants in the government will know that you bought that wine.
So what you may say, wine is fine, but what if it's something the government doesn't want you doing, buying, supporting? Maybe wine is now illegal because {fill in the reason}, maybe you are not sufficiently obedient and compliant during an "emergency" and need to be cut off? Maybe you are sanctioned by the EU and all your money is taken and you have no means of even feeding yourself other than the "humanitarian" limit of living on €200/month and you can't even return to your native Switzerland from Brussels because you are not allowed on trains, planes, or allowed to drive across borders like happened to Jaques Baud for speech some tyrannical EU politician or bureaucrat did not like?
What worries me is the SNB whitepaper on "how to issue a digital currency" they worked on with Taler: https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r...
> > In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.
And also I don't think they have a privacy-preserving solution for money transfers between consumers. So if I wanted to give you 20€ I think that has to be represented as a burning of tokens and a reissue, so the central issuer learns all those transactions even though purchases at merchants are private.
My assumption is that this is possible but not supported by default, since there’s no way to guarantee (without using an exchange) that the giver has really deleted the tokens they sent to the receiver, and will not spend them before the receiver can (which would render the receiver’s copy of the tokens unusable).
But assuming someone implements this in software, would it be possible to make direct transfers like this while relying entirely on trust? Or are the tokens somehow tied to the wallet that has first received them?
I have no idea how that's supposed to work.
Putin is committing his genocide to Ukrainians; Trump is siding with him. It is time to call those who weaken Europeans as enemies.
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.
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.
Moreover, I don’t know in which part of the world you live where private on-line payments are commonplace, but the only cashless payment options I tend to see are with bank transfers, credit or debit cards and payment processors like PayPal. My understanding is that compared to those, Taler gives payers privacy and doesn’t make things any worse for payees than they already are, which makes it an enormous step forward for privacy. Perhaps I’ve missed something, because saying it helps bring about dystopia when it only strives to make things much better than they are right now seems terribly out of touch.
I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.
People hear that it's private and -- unsurprisingly-- think it's private! :P In my view it's like to Apple's proposed content scanning in end to end encryption that applies a lot of additional cryptographic complexity with language that suggests that it's protecting the user's privacy, but in reality the complexity is entirely there to undermine their privacy (in a somewhat selective way) and a far simpler scheme would give much stronger privacy.
I think it's analogous to promoting a key-escrow cryptosystem as "communicate privately!"-- both in terms of people not getting the privacy from it they would expect and helping to bring about a world where actual privacy is unlawful. The privacy problems of Taler are essentially identical to those of key-escrow: even if you don't have any fear of 'lawful' access, any access that exists may be abused. The only reliable solution to the security/privacy problems is for the access to not exist unless that is literally impossible. But it's clearly not impossible, as many people use more private systems than taler every day including in Germany.
Taler is strictly less private and considerably more complicated than a basic chaum-cash token system-- which actually provides the privacy people expect it to have. So it's not like I'm suggesting blockchain mumbo-jumbo is the only alternative. :)
https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks
That is objectively, justifiably classifiable as manipulative and destructive.
To clarify: I assert that taxation and a functioning state, and the safety and security of the users of an online currency are absolutely not incompatible with one another—and I'm not even implicitly asserting that the definition of a "functioning state" is some kind of weird ancap impossible libertarian ideal.
If you're failing to pay taxes on any scale you're going to get caught by whistleblowers or by conspicuous visible purchases. Enforcement isn't 100%, of course, but it never is for any crime and it doesn't need to be.
Even if your effective tax rate is 50% evasion can only double your money at best, and you've only got taxes to pay if you've got a successful income stream-- it doesn't take much threat of imprisonment or large fines to keep someone with something to lose staying within the lines. You're already making good money (if you're not-- no taxes) so why risk your good situation for a small constant factor more?
Some amount of successful evasion simply means somewhat higher taxes for everyone else, and that is a reasonable compromise for not living in a panopticon-- particularly since no amount of surveillance can entirely prevent tax evasion.
To the extent that someone wants to engage in evasion they'd route around this surveillance system or not even worry about it: Data isn't intelligence, visible income can be offset by fake expenses (which are private in this system too!)-- and so it can't be said that this scheme's surveillance would even be particularly effective at blocking tax evasion. You'd be left with detecting it via traditional means, just as you already can even with completely private transactions, but without the privacy loss.
So it's a non-solution to a non-problem, that create significant privacy related collateral harm. It can do both because non-evaders won't bother to take the additional steps to protect themselves, and are exposed to every hack, leak, data-breach, change of policy, or abuse of lawful process.
(Analog: run strong encryption or strong encryption+steganography inside key-escrowed encryption. This possibility bounds the potential benefits of key escrow but fails to bound the harms.)
For any system one should imagine the abuse potential should the currently benign regime be replaced with a future genocidal one. Certainly Germans should be well acquainted with the value of that kind of reasoning-- it isn't like targeting sub-populations for asset seizure is a hypothetical threat. A key property of privacy loss is that it's forever: you might not mind a piece of exposure today but years from now it could turn fatal.
But even then I wouldn't complain about it except for the misleading presentation of it as a privacy system and the smearing of opponents as tax evaders.
It's simply a falsehood to claim people opposed to this are opposed to taxation. Personally, I find taxation to often be a superior choice to fund public infrastructure compared to the most obvious alternatives such as printing money or accumulating debt-- particularly because taxation is more visible and thus more accountable. But we must take great care to mitigate the potential collateral damage of taxation including accounting overhead, market distortion, and loss of privacy.
The false and defamatory characterization of opponents as tax protesters is part of why I feel comfortable saying that I believe the mischaracterization of the system as 'private' is an act of intentional fraud. An honest system doesn't need to discourage or suppress its critics by falsely accusing them of being in favor of crime or other anti-social conduct.
Europe 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.
Wero has the right momentum, it'll get there. But federating mobile wallets in the Eurozone and eventually Europe at large is no small feat.
Don’t all state currencies ultimately come from banks? This feels much closer to cash in practice, which also comes from banks, yet I’d say it’s compatible with privacy.
I’m all for fast-forwarding and you can pull this off I will donate towards a statue in your honour.
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.
What? You can definitely publish about it in a free society, and cash anonymity has nothing to do with it.
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.
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.
That's just not true, and I'm not talking about "you can pay with Bitcoin in the store" use case but the stable coin use case for settlement, which you can see Stripe expand a lot in the past years.
Step out into the wider world and that isn't remotely true.
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...
it's a practical doable improvement to the existing system in the existing legal framework
the outcome might be similar but there is a big difference in intend and framing there
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.
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.