GNU Taler begins operating in Switzerland, distributed by the Taler Operations AG. Gnu Taler aims to be a “digital wallet” and has been used by the swiss national bank as well as the european national bank as a example for how a digital currency handed out by the state could work. It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.
Currently the Taler is brought out by a special organisation, the “Taler Operations AG”, and not the national bank, although both the national bank as well as the Taler Team have shown interest in a official digial currency by the national bank based on the Taler. But we need to relativate as the national council has stated that the introduction of a digital currency would probably take relatively major legislative changes and therefore take a bit of time.
The ECB also wants to introduce a digital Euro. I wonder how exchanging my digital Euros to digital Swiss Francs and vise versa would work. Currently with physical cash you need to exchange your money at an intermediary. But with digital coins it’s surely possible for the national bank to handle this.
If you ever paid with your card in a non-Euro country, you already did something like that.
Revolut will on the fly convert between your currencies on the fly.
Cyberpunk is now, old man.
I wonder how rms feel about this
I hope this takes off. MasterVisa censors pornographic stuff, denying payment services for people who don’t normalize their creations. On top of that, MasterVisa will likely become collaborators of the Trump Regime, tracking payments of anti-trump folks, denying service to clinics that provide healthcare to women and minorities, ect.
Privacy is extremely important for the safety and liberty of people.
It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.
So I could buy a VPN with it and then order some Swedish porn (edit: life streams), and no authority would be able to track me down?
Basically yes, but the seller needs to register a business account with a Swedish Taler bank exchange, and if that bank figures out that the seller is breaking Swedish law they can terminate that account.
Why would anyone want to track you down for watching porn?
In Sweden you can buy porn but you are not allowed to buy life streams and tell actors what to do to prevent abuse of power imbalances.
I see.
Haaaave you met Baptists?
It must be about ten years that Taler has stood unopposed as a proposed system for digital payments that’s pretty good and might actually happen. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything else that exists. It’s been a lot of years of tests, audits, experiments, and demos that occasionally turn up in my news feed — it was beginning to look like vapourware. I guess it’ll be another several years before it gets to my part of the world, but it’s good to see it finally getting started.
There’s something I’m really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the “Digital euro” idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that’s new?
Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it’s just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what’s actually new when we’re talking about digital currency like this post?
There must be something I’m missing here.
A lot of good replies here, but one thing that Taler doesn’t do and credit cards do is…credit. This can be solved by having a line of credit at your bank and using Taler over that, which may actually be cheaper, as well.
As a non-European, I hope this spreads.
Current Platforms are private businesses. Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, they’re all private businesses that can do whatever they want. This means that 1 They all charge a lot of money (I think 1-5% of the purchase) 2.1 since they’re all american the new Führer can turn off digital payments for a Business or even an entire Country he doesn’t like. And the way he uses every single leverage he can get to get others agree to his terms, this seems realistic. 2.2 since they’re private businesses with a quasi-monopoly on digital payments, they can threaten our economies if we try to do something they don’t like, say raising taxes on them or limiting how much they can charge. A Taler by the national bank would be completely sovereign and make us independent from the US and its companies.
The Taler also has the advantage that the buyer is anonymous. So if you want to buy a Dildo without the seller, the bank, the government or even your family knowing, you can. If you delete the payment from your history then there is no proof at all that that payment came from you (well, your shipping address is on the package, but that’s not something the Taler can solve lol). However, different from other crypto currencies, the seller is NOT anonymous, which prevents tax evasion.
Hope that cleared it up?
Yes, this helps, thanks.
I already understood the need to avoid private money agents like Paypal, visa, etc. In the UK we have the BACS and FPS systems that allow for direct free money transfer. Though they should be more usable for day to day transactions, they work well enough if you need to send a significant amount of money between bank accounts.
Your explanation of the anonymity seems like the real value add of these digital currencies. The fact this only applies to the buyer and not the seller is a good choice, and definitely wins over blockchain crypto. Looking at it more closely, the fact they use signed tokens rather than proof-of-x is also a very good choice.
I will need to read up on Taler’s docs more closely. But looking at the summary of features on their site something hits me as an immediate problem - you need to “load up” a wallet. If Jane Doe wants to buy a coffee, it’s far easier to just use a bank card (which may interface through a private money agent like visa, or a middleman like google/apple). Loading up private wallets isn’t a difficult concept (it’s how gift cards work), but it does add extra steps of friction that I think will need to be removed before this can really be taken up by the general public.
It may harm the anonymity aspect, but I think that to get people using it a system that could operate like a tap-once-and-done bank card payment, loading up a wallet for immediate spend seems like the best solution. It would also help alleviate any fears that typically are associated with blockchain based digital currency - primarily of losing the signed digital money as it sits in a wallet out with the bank account’s protections. And once the system is normalised and people are used to it, then all the architecture is there for anyone that really needs the anonymity.
an additional note: part of why is it not perfect is that you can’t send money privately to another person, like you would do with cash. in transactions like that there is a 3rd party involved that overses the transaction
Solving tax evasion while keeping both parties anonymous would be incredibly hard if not outright impossible though. Cash is king for privacy but also for tax evasion.
I don’t think any digital solution could or should replace cash. They can and should exist and function together.
Is this a flaw of Taler or the businesses like Visa?
I dont see how would it be a flaw of visa, but according to the Taler FAQ this is a feature.
Can I send money to my friends with Taler?
Taler supports push and pull payments between wallets (also known as peer-to-peer payments). While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete.
It would be a flaw of visa as you need a card reader or similar to recieve payments, your friend can’t just send you a fiver easily.
That’s solved now that PayPal (and others?) start including this functionality into their mobile apps. No card reader required anymore
That’s definitely something that gets listed as an advantage of The Digital Euro, and something that you can’t do with Visa (although you can with PayPal), so if expect that Taler supports it.
I was just playing around with their demo, and person to person transcations are supported. If you send me your username I can send you 50 kudos (fake money for the demo).
https://demo.taler.net/en/I actually haven’t been able to try sending money yet lol
taler://pay-pull/exchange.demo.taler.net/22PZCE789NDRY45H313P5HJYN79ACRX45FYA69ZVYK35WTSX3770
Ok, pretty sure I managed to send you 2.5 kudos.
Two of the things that I think are new vs the current system are:
Wallet: anonymous holding of currency without a custodian. You can’t hold fiat currency digitally today without a bank or other entity providing that service.
Transfer: moving fiat currency anonymously and under your own direction without intermediaries. You can’t make a digital payment or transfer in pure fiat currency today without that custodian providing the service (often through fee-based payment network). As a result, your identity is known when that transaction happens.
This.
A legit offline digital currency transfer akin to how one uses cash.
And ofc a giant body regulating it with proper audits, directives, delegated acts, etc.
Additionally this opens up the possibility of a modern personal existence without banks (ie private companies). We are now basically forced to use banks + (USA) monies transfer systems.
Disclaimer: Not an expert on this.
It was previously not really possible to send money digitally directly, except in the form of cyptocurrency. It always goes through banks or intermediaries. If you transfer money between bank accounts, the banks have to talk to each other to do so, and the “real” transfer happens between their central bank accounts at a later point in time. There is indeed only spreadsheets with numbers going up and down. Effectively the banks are in control of all of it. In most cases we don’t want a slow bank transfer but some sort of user-friendly payment portal like PayPal or wero, which the banks also need to have contracts with (or, operate themselves).
My vague understanding here is that this process is completely detached from banks, and that you are thus transferring actual money. It’s not just numbers in a spreadsheet going up and down.
If anybody understands it better please correct anything I got wrong.
You get this right I would say.
You need to install an electronic wallet on your device and add the fiat money amount to the wallet’s balance (so Taler itself s not a currency).
There’s a demo on the website for those interested (you need to download a wallet): https://www.taler.net/en
That’s kinda cool news. Hope it grows to be an alternative to these american systems.
*USAian
You a Saiyan
“I’m insane, from space”
US-American we say in Switzerland
Not sure what this means but European alternatives to us American megacorps are usually good.
Did you mean the European central bank in Frankfurt? Because I don’t think Europe has a national bank, not yet being a nation and all that.
Did you mean the European central bank in Frankfurt
ups, my mistake ;P
Cool to see a project like this not just being a github page or theory, but actually used in practice!
Not sure about the anonymity is good or not: why is that necessary? Current bank systems are already anonymous
Uhh no the fuck they’re not?
Could you explain how the current banking system is anonymous?
Banking secrecy, alternatively known as financial privacy, banking discretion, or bank safety, is a conditional agreement between a bank and its clients that all foregoing activities remain secure, confidential, and private.
That means private, not anonymous. The bank still knows who you are, that you have a bank account (or multiple) there, how much money the bank accounts have, who transferred money to the bank account and who took it out. Bank transfers require knowledge of a name, bank number, bank account number, and sometimes even more information e.g if a transfer above 10k is made it has to be reported to the IRS (same applies in Europe) - if you were anonymous, that wouldn’t be possible.
Also, that wiki page links to more pages about banking privacy in multiple countries. Nowhere does it mention anonymity.
Privacy != anonymity
100% anonymity is usually associated with criminality. Nobody cares about your dildo
While is disagree with the harsh tone of u/[email protected] and u/[email protected] here, The current banking systems are not anonymous. Anonymity is important to protect our privacy, to prevent us being manipulated and, in the worst case, to protect our security.
Imagine something like the US. A ultra-conservative government gets to power and decides that anyone that has ever bought a Dildo is a threat to children and needs to be put on a watchlist. The GNU Taler prevents that by hiding that you ever bought a Dildo.
The GNU Taler also has the advantage of not being 100% private. While the buyer is, in fact, completely private, the seller is not. This protects the buyer, as noone can see who bought something or prove a specific person bought anything, but still prevents the seller (the one receiving money) from evading taxes, as the government can clearly see that he received money, even if it doesn’t know from whom.
The GNU Taler aims to be a perfect balance of the advantages of cash and digital payments and it manages to do so pretty well in my opinion.
The GNU Taler prevents that by hiding that you ever bought a Dildo.
I mean, not really right? The government can still ask the webshop, that probably took your name and address. Or the PSP that facilitated the transaction, they likely know too. It’s not like Visa/MasterCard/banks are the only parties that know it now, and the others are usually also beholden to laws that let government agencies query things.
obviously, but that’s not something you can fix via the payment method ;P
Absolutely true, but it does place some question marks after the supposed benefit of Taler. Not due to any fault of Taler ofc.
you have to solve problems 1 at a time
the eshop could just have incredibly shitty logs and just not have that information.
Most webshops don’t directly implement payment methods, they implement PSPs. And those do keep good logs. Depending on the shop keeping those logs may be required by law too.
keep on forgetting the atrocities that are kyc laws.
That’s a problem that can’t really be solved with technology.
