I suspect that it will lose out against the Digital Euro.
I do think that GNU Taler is the better technical solution as the blind signatures and online model require less trust in the platform, while the Digital Euro requires untamperable hardware enclaves. So in an ideal world we would all standardize on GNU Taler and be happy.
Unfortunately, anything related to money is probably the place where trust paranoia is the least useful. In fact, widespread use of the Digital Euro will probably be the best proof for the security of the available hardware enclaves, similar to how Bitcoin is proof that SHA-2 is currently secure. Otherwise, somebody would make bank from counterfeiting in the few moments before the system crashes down.
The digital Euro has the real benefit to allow offline transactions.
Both Digital Euro and GNU Taler have the psychological burden that you have to exchange "real money" for some kind of digital "monopoly money" which can get lost with no way to re-imburse you. (Which is the same as would happen with literal cash, but nobody will care about that.)
(Which is why I actually think both "digital cash" solutions will die out, with GNU Taler fading into obscurity, and Digital Euro being kept on life support as it is literally legal tender. And we will eventually all just be using Wero, which is just SEPA wire transfers in a trench coat)
I'm a happy GLS Bank customer, and I've just learned about its involvement in Taler. Pretty awesome.
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.
In Poland everyone uses Blik, recently even Revolut (a popular pan-EU neobank) started supporting it for transactions in Poland. It’s trusted, available for 10+y and generally a successful project.
I don’t think it ever tried expanding outside of Poland though.
When it comes to Wero—I’m not sure. My bank recently replaced “payconiq” with it, and I don’t see any benefits or new features and the app seems amateurish.
I guess the single market is not really “single” in the US sense.
banks have two ways to offer non-iDeal Wero: Either in their own app, or via the Wero app.
I think it's super interesting to see how Wero connects all the separate instant payment schemes. It launched in Germany and France, replacing giropay in Germany. Now it first rebrands iDeal as iDeal|Wero, and plans to replace it with regular Wero. And in Poland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Italy, they don't push the Wero brand or technology, but instead they build interoperability with the local systems.
Most banks integrate Wero into their online banking app, but some (e.g. mine) use the dedicated app for Wero (It's just called wero on google play and iOS). You still sign up with your bank account though.
The critical feature that Wero needs is adding money to your account balance via SEPA instant or credit card. That way users without participating bank accounts can join.
The real benefit is "one to rule them all". It's so much more useful to have one single network that everybody uses even if the service doesn't have all the bells and whistles, than it is to have to use a patchwork of 1000 different networks even if they're stuffed with fancy features.
Which is 99.9% of the users and probably not a blocker for main stream adoption especially if it’s not the only way to pay (Bank transfer, cash etc all still works).
Wishing Taler lots of success and hoping for the best. Adopting something like this should be a given, but unfortunately freedom and privacy aren’t seen as essentials, not even in the EU.
Never having heard of it before, the moment I read "cash like tokens in your account" I was immediately out. Also claiming buyer privacy when the money ultimately has to come from a bank transaction or another digital transaction leaving some sort of trail is a false illusion.
Yeah, so it isn't intended to you.
It is intended to be electronic cash, where the seller still has accountability for regulators and the buyer has some minimal amount of protection.
I would expect that, just like other cryptocurrency, "cloud wallets" will manage the tokens themselves for most people, who will gladly give up decentralization for the tiniest bit of convenience
Which is still better than the status quo where only licensed banks can hold digital money for you. I'm fine with everyone having the choice of custodian as long as I can implement a wallet from the open specifications myself.
> Also claiming buyer privacy when the money ultimately has to come from a bank transaction or another digital transaction leaving some sort of trail is a false illusion.
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.
> 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
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.
That claim is meaningless without digging deeper. It's not the fault of any project that different people interpret terms like "privacy-friendly" differently. They don't say "anonymous".
I definitely read that the same way Apple means it with ApplePay - they are improving your privacy with respect to the merchant you are purchasing from, by them not learning anything unnecessary about you.
Any government-approved payment system is obviously going to be auditable under existing legal frameworks.
The buyers are anonymous, the recipients (i.e. shops/merchants, generally) are not. The idea is that this will effectively prevent money-laundering and tax evasion as merchants wouldn't be able to hide any earnings.
the anonymity of payment is between customer and merchant,
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.
> I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.
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.
On your point #2, just a small hint: At https://taler-ops.ch/ we legally operate GNU Taler in Switzerland already. Now, Switzerland is a bit easier (lower capital requirements, no DORA), but actually quite similar in terms of KYC/AML as FATF provides a common reference frame.
private and anonymous, especially from the government are two totally separate things.
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?
One point of Taler's architecture is that blind signatures are used to create tokens, so the issuer doesn't know which coin was issued to which person. Then the merchant doesn't know who the coin was issued to but can redeem it with the issuer if it's valid. So if there's enough transaction volume it'll be hard for issue of coins and redemption at merchants to be correlated.
> > 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.
The privacy properties for P2P transfers between consumers are identical to those with merchants: the exchange can require the receiver to provide information about themselves, but the payer remains anonymous just like for purchases at a merchant. And yes, it involves spending (burning, if you prefer) the old tokens (we prefer digital coins) and issuing (blindly signing) fresh coins. Afterwards, the fresh digital coins are indistinguishable from those issued during a regular withdrawal from a bank account.
Would it be technically possible to transfer tokens to another user directly, without an exchange acting as an intermediate?
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?
You can backup tokens and restore them to another wallet (and we are in the process of making that easier). We call that sharing, and it is not a transaction as it is simply granting access to the same money to both wallets.
Right, because you can issue coins as a "purchase" of the coins being transferred. That makes sense, but still doesn't address the concerns around the system being designed to support negative interest rates and withdrawal rate limits.
"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." -- actually no. Because the digital cash you "extracted" from the exchange was blindly signed, the exchange/central bank would NOT learn that you bought wine. Only that someone (anyone who previously withdrew a sufficient amount of digital cash) bought wine. Please do read up on cryptography, how to do this is known since 1989.
>the tyrannical government of the EU, which requires total control for the next phases of its very existence
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.
I can assure you the dislike towards the EU is not a MAGA and alt-right exclusive. In fact you can turn it around and try to find the groups which are in favor of the EU at the moment.
Nevertheless my first thought about their endeavor to jump the German bureaucracy hurdles and furthermore the EU ones was indeed how they, the bureaucracy, will pile you up more with each hurdle you pass until you give up. Tyrannical EU is not a stretch.
This is a surveillance oriented alternative to cryptocurrencies which uses the distraction of complicated cryptography to obfscuate the fact that by design it intentionally undermines the privacy of its users: it attaches the receivers identity to every payment they receive, along with the amount and makes it non-private-- potentially opening the door to abuse by kidnappers, extortionists, marketers responding to income signals, plaintiffs attorneys, and other such scoundrel.
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.
Taler is meant to be private and anonymous for the payer (customer) and not for the payee (merchant). I feel they’ve always been very clear about this, so unless you disagree about the premise, calling them deceptive seems unreasonable.
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.
Thank you very much for your input! Would you please publish a proper paper with references to code of the project that proves your statements, that would be incredibly helpful. Also it would be of great importance to backup your words with some facts!
The "fraud" claim is kind of bizarre to me, but it's clear (and not hidden) that Taler intentionally provided less privacy for payees than other designs and systems because of a conscious decision that payees should have less privacy.
I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.
It's absolutely deceptive as you're seeing demonstrated in this thread-- I comment on this intentional and-- you believe "not hidden" lack of privacy-- and I get a reply demanding a publish a paper to prove it ("Papers please"... fitting!). This has consistently been the case for Taler. Sure, you and I are aware of the limitations-- but we're domain experts.
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. :)
The system was designed by people who value taxation as something important to a functioning state. You can call that a conspiracy, I would rather call it social market economy.
Almost a decade ago I had a conversation with a GNU Taler proponent in Germany. I pointed out the risks that come with additional government surveillance of payments in the face of potential future governments that may not value liberty as much as the current one does. His pushback was that the german voters would never elect someone as crazy and corrupt as Trump (this was during his first term) and he can fully trust the future german government. It was a somewhat surreal conversation, and feels more surreal with the current shift towards AfD...
That seems to be the widespread attitude in Germany, that the current systems were set up to prevent a repeat of the bad stuff that happened, and as long as those systems are functioning, the bad stuff cannot happen again.
The tradeoffs of the design itself sacrifice payee safety and philosophically imply that the lives of its users are secondary to socially engineering goals which they dishonestly deny are incompatible with same.
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.
Indeed, taxation today and historically is not based on mass surveillance and doesn't depend on mass surveillance.
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.
It's "money" but it has to be permanently connected to the Internet and it *expires* if disconnected for too long?? This is infinitely worse than Bitcoin.
> 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's "money" but it has to be permanently connected to the Internet and it *expires* if disconnected for too long??
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.
To be fair, in today's clown world inflation has eaten 50% of your cash holding real value in 5 years. The only way to stay "ahead" is to dispose of your cash in exchange for securities (and not whatever this is).
Taler is a payment system used with existing currencies. It’s neither a currency nor an investment asset. It’s a way to pay for stuff without giving up your privacy, not for staying ‘ahead’.
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.
The total value in the financial system will always be forced to match the total value existing in the real world, one way or another. This is inevitable with any financial system, and it usually takes place by a rapid devaluation of whatever people are holding lots of.
So this is trying to compete against Wero, which is being backed by most major western European banks? I wish them luck, but I somewhat doubt they can compete against that.
It might be an advantage actually. Wero is a clusterfuck in Germany because it is backed by banks. In Germany there is not a single Wero App, but every bank wanted to implement it in their own app. Now you have the situation that a) some people cannot use it, because their bank decided to not implement at all b) each bank decides what features they implement as well as the timeframe. Some can pay online others cannot, yet, some won't at all. Some can pay in stores, others cannot, yet, some won't at all.
It's essentially dead before it has started. This is something Taler could do better. The real danger for Taker is the digital Euro, which I hope they really implement.
It literally just launched in 2-3 markets only, and it has the baking of banks, EU, regulatory bodies. Which is a big hurdle to clear and Taler is not even at the first hurdle yet, they got rejected in fact.
Having it integrated in every banks app is actually better, so people don’t have to set up another app and register for something. Why should they, if it’s build for being interoperable…just like using your banks Visa or Mastercard like right now.
Just give it some years, it also took a while to get instant transactions or Apple Pay and other mobile payment systems. It’s not like a web app you just deploy and you are online worldwide.
The other half of the usual story is that: the user gets confused by all the possibilities and non-cohesive implementations of the FLOSS version and just pays some US startup which offers a single straightforward package.
Wero also looks like the wrong solution tbh, because it doesn’t seem to have card infra. Fintech is one of the few bastions of European excellence, I’m annoyed the EU haven’t mandated an alternative card network into existence.
> GNU Taler is a privacy-preserving payment system. Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering.
> The primary use case of GNU Taler is payments; it is not meant as a store of value. Payments are always backed by an existing currency.
tldr of my understanding (do correct me if I'm wrong):
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.
Of course in Germany you can purchase and publish e-books about Tiananmen Square, but I think that Tiananmen Square was just a placeholder to be replaced by something your government really doesn't like.
I think I have your understanding of it, and if that's correct then what's happening is that Taler isn't helping somebody sell books about US support of Nazi militias in overthrowing the elected government and ethnically cleansing ethnic Russians from Ukraine, it's just enabling them not to necessarily reveal the buyers. If they want to make money from this publishing without the government seeing, they'd have to come up with another reason to have been receiving Taler that wouldn't make the government suspicious.
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.
I haven't looked at Taler in a while. What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled? Also are transactions final and irreversible?
>What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled?
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
I thought it looked an awful lot like David Chaum's DigiCash. If they haven't brought Chaum into the discussion, I would be very nervous about using Taler.
This is a proposal to operate a regulated payments processor, supervised by BaFin. All the usual, necessary regulations and consumer protections will apply under German law.
I think Taler is designed to be privacy-preserving while being able to comply with national laws. So not the currency you're looking for if you wanna buy something illegal.
I think the proper comparison point is not something like Monero, but multinational credit card companies. Taler is obviously much more private than those.
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
The problem with this line of reasoning is that is works for all values of "they", "criminal", "investigation", and "fascists". Right now we probably don't think it's a problem that you can't buy drugs with this system. In the future, if they ban books about Tiananmen Square, and this system gets introduced and it also doesn't let you buy books about Tiananmen Square, we won't think that's a problem either.
Sounds like that's the only thing it's good for. As far as I can understand it's designed so the merchant has to report it in order to verify it exists. I find it really hard to understand, but I think the thing I'm missing is that the person who buys Taler in the first place simply has to trust the issuer - because they can't verify that they've actually received any without leaving a record i.e. becoming a merchant who is receiving Taler in exchange for cash.
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.
GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying. You cannot create an open system in line with FOSS principles and be compliant with laws that mandate centralized control. That's why this project began with an architecture that prefaces dependence on the backdoor key holders, and is now going even more pronouncedly in the direction of asymmetrical power relationships, by becoming an entirely centralized bank. This is the only way it can remain compliant with the laws in question.
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.
There is no backdoor. There may be bugs (point those out, we'll fix!), and there is the very clear and documented statement that the receiver of funds is subject to legitimization based on the legal requirements under which the exchange operates. That is not a backdoor. Backdoor implies secrecy, we have no secrets other than our private keys. ;-)
My understanding is that you (the buyer) connect to the exchange to get tokens, and the seller later connects to the exchange to get money for your tokens. The exchange doesn’t know where, how and when you spend your tokens. Where’s the backdoor?
(And I think the exchanges aren’t expected to be run directly by the state, but that’s probably irrelevant to the topic at hand.)
> And no, pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies
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.
I wouldn't say "pretty much nobody" uses cryptocurrency.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. But in terms of mass adoption? I wouldn't say that has happened, because there is still too much friction in terms of dealing with your own opsec, keeping your keys secure, etc. Like I don't see average Joes going into it en masse. But anyone with enough determination will use it.
I say this as someone who is personally opposed to the technology on principle, but I'm not deluded to think that nobody else is using it either. It has a market.
The sooner Europeans decouple themselves - including security,
including a nuclear arsenal - from crazy Trump the better. In
all aspects. Without exceptions.
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.
Sadly Trump is not the only person who has to be decoupled from. Germany has its own locally grown problems too - I'm not sure it's better to trust Germany than to trust America.
I suspect that it will lose out against the Digital Euro.
I do think that GNU Taler is the better technical solution as the blind signatures and online model require less trust in the platform, while the Digital Euro requires untamperable hardware enclaves. So in an ideal world we would all standardize on GNU Taler and be happy.
Unfortunately, anything related to money is probably the place where trust paranoia is the least useful. In fact, widespread use of the Digital Euro will probably be the best proof for the security of the available hardware enclaves, similar to how Bitcoin is proof that SHA-2 is currently secure. Otherwise, somebody would make bank from counterfeiting in the few moments before the system crashes down.
The digital Euro has the real benefit to allow offline transactions. Both Digital Euro and GNU Taler have the psychological burden that you have to exchange "real money" for some kind of digital "monopoly money" which can get lost with no way to re-imburse you. (Which is the same as would happen with literal cash, but nobody will care about that.)
(Which is why I actually think both "digital cash" solutions will die out, with GNU Taler fading into obscurity, and Digital Euro being kept on life support as it is literally legal tender. And we will eventually all just be using Wero, which is just SEPA wire transfers in a trench coat)
I'm a happy GLS Bank customer, and I've just learned about its involvement in Taler. Pretty awesome.
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.
In Poland everyone uses Blik, recently even Revolut (a popular pan-EU neobank) started supporting it for transactions in Poland. It’s trusted, available for 10+y and generally a successful project.
I don’t think it ever tried expanding outside of Poland though.
When it comes to Wero—I’m not sure. My bank recently replaced “payconiq” with it, and I don’t see any benefits or new features and the app seems amateurish.
I guess the single market is not really “single” in the US sense.
https://www.blik.com/en (source: I’m Polish, but moved abroad ~4y ago)
> and the app seems amateurish
What app? In the Netherlands, where wero originated as iDeal, I've always used it via my bank's app. Isn't it how it's supposed to work?
banks have two ways to offer non-iDeal Wero: Either in their own app, or via the Wero app.
I think it's super interesting to see how Wero connects all the separate instant payment schemes. It launched in Germany and France, replacing giropay in Germany. Now it first rebrands iDeal as iDeal|Wero, and plans to replace it with regular Wero. And in Poland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Italy, they don't push the Wero brand or technology, but instead they build interoperability with the local systems.
Most banks integrate Wero into their online banking app, but some (e.g. mine) use the dedicated app for Wero (It's just called wero on google play and iOS). You still sign up with your bank account though.
The critical feature that Wero needs is adding money to your account balance via SEPA instant or credit card. That way users without participating bank accounts can join.
> I don’t see any benefits
The real benefit is "one to rule them all". It's so much more useful to have one single network that everybody uses even if the service doesn't have all the bells and whistles, than it is to have to use a patchwork of 1000 different networks even if they're stuffed with fancy features.
You mean sanctions that have targeted EU citizens.
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.
Isn't there already a standard QR code format you can scan with your bank app to make an instant SEPA transaction?
Transfers and payments are different things.
But first we need all the banks to support that.
Wero has the problem that it depends on Android or iOS.
Which is 99.9% of the users and probably not a blocker for main stream adoption especially if it’s not the only way to pay (Bank transfer, cash etc all still works).
I should stress that GLS has been very helpful, and continues to be helpful.
Wishing Taler lots of success and hoping for the best. Adopting something like this should be a given, but unfortunately freedom and privacy aren’t seen as essentials, not even in the EU.
Never having heard of it before, the moment I read "cash like tokens in your account" I was immediately out. Also claiming buyer privacy when the money ultimately has to come from a bank transaction or another digital transaction leaving some sort of trail is a false illusion.
Yeah, so it isn't intended to you. It is intended to be electronic cash, where the seller still has accountability for regulators and the buyer has some minimal amount of protection.
You need to read more carefully. "Cash-like tokens in your wallet under self-custody." would be correct. Taler has no accounts.
I would expect that, just like other cryptocurrency, "cloud wallets" will manage the tokens themselves for most people, who will gladly give up decentralization for the tiniest bit of convenience
Which is still better than the status quo where only licensed banks can hold digital money for you. I'm fine with everyone having the choice of custodian as long as I can implement a wallet from the open specifications myself.
> Also claiming buyer privacy when the money ultimately has to come from a bank transaction or another digital transaction leaving some sort of trail is a false illusion.
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 don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.
It will be choked out at key junctions with KYC in the same way crypto has.
It is a project supported by the EU.
> 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
GLS is also part of a larger banking group that decided to back https://wero-wallet.eu/ ...
Ah yes. Network effects of course.
Must have been quite a curveball for Taler. Good luck on new venture!
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wrong assumption
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.
that may become clear from deeper reading, but from a cursory glance at the home page they claim
> 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.
That claim is meaningless without digging deeper. It's not the fault of any project that different people interpret terms like "privacy-friendly" differently. They don't say "anonymous".
I definitely read that the same way Apple means it with ApplePay - they are improving your privacy with respect to the merchant you are purchasing from, by them not learning anything unnecessary about you.
Any government-approved payment system is obviously going to be auditable under existing legal frameworks.
The buyers are anonymous, the recipients (i.e. shops/merchants, generally) are not. The idea is that this will effectively prevent money-laundering and tax evasion as merchants wouldn't be able to hide any earnings.
Can you buy crypto with this?
It even technically works for Bitcoin (https://git-www.taler.net/depolymerization.git/) - just nobody there who wants to try to do this legally so far.
the anonymity of payment is between customer and merchant,
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.
> I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.
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.
On your point #2, just a small hint: At https://taler-ops.ch/ we legally operate GNU Taler in Switzerland already. Now, Switzerland is a bit easier (lower capital requirements, no DORA), but actually quite similar in terms of KYC/AML as FATF provides a common reference frame.
Regulation should not be a problem, there are several past precedents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipknip
I don't get your point. The current proposal for a digital euro supports private peer-to-peer transactions
private and anonymous, especially from the government are two totally separate things.
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?
One point of Taler's architecture is that blind signatures are used to create tokens, so the issuer doesn't know which coin was issued to which person. Then the merchant doesn't know who the coin was issued to but can redeem it with the issuer if it's valid. So if there's enough transaction volume it'll be hard for issue of coins and redemption at merchants to be correlated.
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.
The privacy properties for P2P transfers between consumers are identical to those with merchants: the exchange can require the receiver to provide information about themselves, but the payer remains anonymous just like for purchases at a merchant. And yes, it involves spending (burning, if you prefer) the old tokens (we prefer digital coins) and issuing (blindly signing) fresh coins. Afterwards, the fresh digital coins are indistinguishable from those issued during a regular withdrawal from a bank account.
Would it be technically possible to transfer tokens to another user directly, without an exchange acting as an intermediate?
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?
You can backup tokens and restore them to another wallet (and we are in the process of making that easier). We call that sharing, and it is not a transaction as it is simply granting access to the same money to both wallets.
Right, because you can issue coins as a "purchase" of the coins being transferred. That makes sense, but still doesn't address the concerns around the system being designed to support negative interest rates and withdrawal rate limits.
"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." -- actually no. Because the digital cash you "extracted" from the exchange was blindly signed, the exchange/central bank would NOT learn that you bought wine. Only that someone (anyone who previously withdrew a sufficient amount of digital cash) bought wine. Please do read up on cryptography, how to do this is known since 1989.
Private and anonymous are different but the digital euro proposal is for both things, it is supposed to be equivalent to cash but only for small sums.
I have no idea how that's supposed to work.
Your whole argument is looney. Do you live in the EU?
Then these "regulators" must be put in jail for treason.
Putin is committing his genocide to Ukrainians; Trump is siding with him. It is time to call those who weaken Europeans as enemies.
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>the tyrannical government of the EU, which requires total control for the next phases of its very existence
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.
I can assure you the dislike towards the EU is not a MAGA and alt-right exclusive. In fact you can turn it around and try to find the groups which are in favor of the EU at the moment. Nevertheless my first thought about their endeavor to jump the German bureaucracy hurdles and furthermore the EU ones was indeed how they, the bureaucracy, will pile you up more with each hurdle you pass until you give up. Tyrannical EU is not a stretch.
EU is just a talking club for a couple of countries. It just serves as a scape goat for failures of national policy.
Same, this sentence when I stopped reading and started rolling my eyes.
This is a surveillance oriented alternative to cryptocurrencies which uses the distraction of complicated cryptography to obfscuate the fact that by design it intentionally undermines the privacy of its users: it attaches the receivers identity to every payment they receive, along with the amount and makes it non-private-- potentially opening the door to abuse by kidnappers, extortionists, marketers responding to income signals, plaintiffs attorneys, and other such scoundrel.
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.
Taler is meant to be private and anonymous for the payer (customer) and not for the payee (merchant). I feel they’ve always been very clear about this, so unless you disagree about the premise, calling them deceptive seems unreasonable.
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.
Thank you very much for your input! Would you please publish a proper paper with references to code of the project that proves your statements, that would be incredibly helpful. Also it would be of great importance to backup your words with some facts!
The "fraud" claim is kind of bizarre to me, but it's clear (and not hidden) that Taler intentionally provided less privacy for payees than other designs and systems because of a conscious decision that payees should have less privacy.
I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.
It's absolutely deceptive as you're seeing demonstrated in this thread-- I comment on this intentional and-- you believe "not hidden" lack of privacy-- and I get a reply demanding a publish a paper to prove it ("Papers please"... fitting!). This has consistently been the case for Taler. Sure, you and I are aware of the limitations-- but we're domain experts.
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. :)
The system was designed by people who value taxation as something important to a functioning state. You can call that a conspiracy, I would rather call it social market economy.
Almost a decade ago I had a conversation with a GNU Taler proponent in Germany. I pointed out the risks that come with additional government surveillance of payments in the face of potential future governments that may not value liberty as much as the current one does. His pushback was that the german voters would never elect someone as crazy and corrupt as Trump (this was during his first term) and he can fully trust the future german government. It was a somewhat surreal conversation, and feels more surreal with the current shift towards AfD...
That seems to be the widespread attitude in Germany, that the current systems were set up to prevent a repeat of the bad stuff that happened, and as long as those systems are functioning, the bad stuff cannot happen again.
The tradeoffs of the design itself sacrifice payee safety and philosophically imply that the lives of its users are secondary to socially engineering goals which they dishonestly deny are incompatible with same.
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.
Indeed, taxation today and historically is not based on mass surveillance and doesn't depend on mass surveillance.
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.
It's "money" but it has to be permanently connected to the Internet and it *expires* if disconnected for too long?? This is infinitely worse than Bitcoin.
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's "money" but it has to be permanently connected to the Internet and it *expires* if disconnected for too long??
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.
To be fair, in today's clown world inflation has eaten 50% of your cash holding real value in 5 years. The only way to stay "ahead" is to dispose of your cash in exchange for securities (and not whatever this is).
Taler is a payment system used with existing currencies. It’s neither a currency nor an investment asset. It’s a way to pay for stuff without giving up your privacy, not for staying ‘ahead’.
Alas being it not as anonymous as actual cash, I wonder how it preserve privacy.
From the FAQ https://www.taler.net/en/faq.html
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.
The total value in the financial system will always be forced to match the total value existing in the real world, one way or another. This is inevitable with any financial system, and it usually takes place by a rapid devaluation of whatever people are holding lots of.
That doesn't mean the number of units in the financial system has to go up. Their value can simply go up.
That incentives not participating in the economy instead of participating in the economy.
People are still buying electronics even if their prices go down. Reality doesn't agree with the idea that inflation is necessary for consumption.
There was once the idea of expiring money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_currency
GNU Taler seems more like an expiring invoice that requires paying in a specific timeframe.
"permanently" is overstating it. Usually this is configured to be like once per year or even every couple of years.
> This is infinitely worse than Bitcoin.
It's not meant to be like Bitcoin. If you want Bitcoin, use Bitcoin.
So this is trying to compete against Wero, which is being backed by most major western European banks? I wish them luck, but I somewhat doubt they can compete against that.
It might be an advantage actually. Wero is a clusterfuck in Germany because it is backed by banks. In Germany there is not a single Wero App, but every bank wanted to implement it in their own app. Now you have the situation that a) some people cannot use it, because their bank decided to not implement at all b) each bank decides what features they implement as well as the timeframe. Some can pay online others cannot, yet, some won't at all. Some can pay in stores, others cannot, yet, some won't at all.
It's essentially dead before it has started. This is something Taler could do better. The real danger for Taker is the digital Euro, which I hope they really implement.
> It's essentially dead before it has started
It literally just launched in 2-3 markets only, and it has the baking of banks, EU, regulatory bodies. Which is a big hurdle to clear and Taler is not even at the first hurdle yet, they got rejected in fact.
Having it integrated in every banks app is actually better, so people don’t have to set up another app and register for something. Why should they, if it’s build for being interoperable…just like using your banks Visa or Mastercard like right now.
Just give it some years, it also took a while to get instant transactions or Apple Pay and other mobile payment systems. It’s not like a web app you just deploy and you are online worldwide.
Wero, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Twint. The usual GNU story: FLOSS competes against AT&T, SCO, SGI, IBM, Sun, HP, ...
The other half of the usual story is that: the user gets confused by all the possibilities and non-cohesive implementations of the FLOSS version and just pays some US startup which offers a single straightforward package.
The struggle for human rights is always an uphill one, isn’t it?
Wero also looks like the wrong solution tbh, because it doesn’t seem to have card infra. Fintech is one of the few bastions of European excellence, I’m annoyed the EU haven’t mandated an alternative card network into existence.
If this does not have any connection to any american company they need to make that clear. It would be a huge selling point.
> GNU Taler is a privacy-preserving payment system. Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering.
> The primary use case of GNU Taler is payments; it is not meant as a store of value. Payments are always backed by an existing currency.
This looks like it could be useful anywhere.
tldr of my understanding (do correct me if I'm wrong):
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.
> In a free society we should be able to both purchase and publish e-books about Tiananmen Square
What? You can definitely publish about it in a free society, and cash anonymity has nothing to do with it.
Of course in Germany you can purchase and publish e-books about Tiananmen Square, but I think that Tiananmen Square was just a placeholder to be replaced by something your government really doesn't like.
I think I have your understanding of it, and if that's correct then what's happening is that Taler isn't helping somebody sell books about US support of Nazi militias in overthrowing the elected government and ethnically cleansing ethnic Russians from Ukraine, it's just enabling them not to necessarily reveal the buyers. If they want to make money from this publishing without the government seeing, they'd have to come up with another reason to have been receiving Taler that wouldn't make the government suspicious.
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.
I haven't looked at Taler in a while. What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled? Also are transactions final and irreversible?
>What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled?
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
I thought it looked an awful lot like David Chaum's DigiCash. If they haven't brought Chaum into the discussion, I would be very nervous about using Taler.
[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...
Also: https://www.snb.ch/en/publications/research/working-papers/2...
Good find! Thanks.
This is a proposal to operate a regulated payments processor, supervised by BaFin. All the usual, necessary regulations and consumer protections will apply under German law.
The announcement claims a "privacy-preserving [...] payment system". Are you saying this would come in conflict with German law?
Taler is privacy-preserving for the payer, but not for the payee. This solves many legal issues such as tax evasion and money laundering.
I think it is the European sense of privacy where the government is implicitly inside everyone's trust circle.
no
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
I think Taler is designed to be privacy-preserving while being able to comply with national laws. So not the currency you're looking for if you wanna buy something illegal.
Nor something that you want to remain private.
I think the proper comparison point is not something like Monero, but multinational credit card companies. Taler is obviously much more private than those.
private from whom
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
The problem with this line of reasoning is that is works for all values of "they", "criminal", "investigation", and "fascists". Right now we probably don't think it's a problem that you can't buy drugs with this system. In the future, if they ban books about Tiananmen Square, and this system gets introduced and it also doesn't let you buy books about Tiananmen Square, we won't think that's a problem either.
Sounds like that's the only thing it's good for. As far as I can understand it's designed so the merchant has to report it in order to verify it exists. I find it really hard to understand, but I think the thing I'm missing is that the person who buys Taler in the first place simply has to trust the issuer - because they can't verify that they've actually received any without leaving a record i.e. becoming a merchant who is receiving Taler in exchange for cash.
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.
> buys Taler
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.
GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying. You cannot create an open system in line with FOSS principles and be compliant with laws that mandate centralized control. That's why this project began with an architecture that prefaces dependence on the backdoor key holders, and is now going even more pronouncedly in the direction of asymmetrical power relationships, by becoming an entirely centralized bank. This is the only way it can remain compliant with the laws in question.
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.
There is no backdoor. There may be bugs (point those out, we'll fix!), and there is the very clear and documented statement that the receiver of funds is subject to legitimization based on the legal requirements under which the exchange operates. That is not a backdoor. Backdoor implies secrecy, we have no secrets other than our private keys. ;-)
> GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying.
And that backdoor for spying in this entirely free/libre software is…?
The centralised state-run exchange that you have to connect to to make the software useful?
My understanding is that you (the buyer) connect to the exchange to get tokens, and the seller later connects to the exchange to get money for your tokens. The exchange doesn’t know where, how and when you spend your tokens. Where’s the backdoor?
(And I think the exchanges aren’t expected to be run directly by the state, but that’s probably irrelevant to the topic at hand.)
I think GNU Taler missed their chance of adoption since the world has moved on and was impatient with their progress.
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.
Blockchain isn't necessary at all for instant, low fee payments. And no, pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies
> And no, pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies
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.
I wouldn't say "pretty much nobody" uses cryptocurrency.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. But in terms of mass adoption? I wouldn't say that has happened, because there is still too much friction in terms of dealing with your own opsec, keeping your keys secure, etc. Like I don't see average Joes going into it en masse. But anyone with enough determination will use it.
I say this as someone who is personally opposed to the technology on principle, but I'm not deluded to think that nobody else is using it either. It has a market.
>pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies
Step out into the wider world and that isn't remotely true.
apart from criminals for crime, politicians for corruption and grandma sending her savings to a scammer, who is using crypto?
People gambling on measles
https://polymarket.us/event/measles-us-2026-12-31
The sooner Europeans decouple themselves - including security, including a nuclear arsenal - from crazy Trump the better. In all aspects. Without exceptions.
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.
Sadly Trump is not the only person who has to be decoupled from. Germany has its own locally grown problems too - I'm not sure it's better to trust Germany than to trust America.
You can barely use non-EC debit cards in Germany, if any card at all.
I’m all for fast-forwarding and you can pull this off I will donate towards a statue in your honour.
no, that hasn't been correct since COVID. Some places are even card-only now.