On P2P payments from their FAQ: “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.”
How about, no? How about me paying €50 to my friend for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated, KYCed, and blocked if they don’t approve of it or know who the recipient is? How about it’s none of the government’s business how I split the bill at dinner with friends? This level of surveillance is madness, especially coming from an app that touts “privacy” as a feature.
GNU Taler is a trojan horse to enable CBDC adoption. They are the friendly face to an absolutely terrifying level of government control in our lives funded by the same government that tries every year to implement chat control. Imagine your least favourite political party gaining power. Now imagine they can see and control every transaction you make. No thanks.
Sure, it’s worse than monero and cash in terms of privacy, but that’s not what it’s supposed to replace. There are plans to use Taler as an alternative to card payments in the EU and that would be a great improvement. Currently all payment data is visible to multiple of companies, the shop, the bank, and many middle man and is often sold off to other commerical entities. Taler would stop that.
GNU Taler is not your enemy. It may not solve every problem you’d like it to, but its adoption by the masses would be a vast improvement in privacy compared to the current state of commerce in every country where it has the slightest chance of happening any time soon.
I have a feeling its adoption would bring the end of cash a big step closer.
Not any closer than already existing commercial cashless payment solutions (which are much, much worse for privacy).
The suggestions like this also scare me in that it might require you to carry a smartphone all the time for things as basic as payment.
This is totally unrelated to GNU Taler though, and if it comes to that you will be happy to have GNU Taler as an privacy preserving option.
When it comes to in-person payment, would Taler be usable without a mobile device? Say, with just a card like normal banking? I would have it much rather coexist with cash anyway.
But yea, sounds like an improvement when it comes to online payments.
The person accepting the money needs online access, or at least some sort of way to receive a validation code. As for the buyer, I think currently there is no implementation of it, but according to my understanding of it it would be technically possible to load Taler tokens on a card chip and use them from that.
Yes, Taler by design allows identifiction of the receiver.
It does not reveal the sender.
It allows you to create and arbitrate your own tokens and to create your own “bank”.
When crypto bros stop shilling anti-libre software, maybe i’ll start to care.
I disagree. Taler also individuals to stay private while preventing crime. I personally could never use crypto as it empowers criminals and is very unpredictable. Taler uses flat currency so you don’t need to worry about it losing value overnight.
It isn’t done yet and it may get abandoned but it is a start. For now it is a interesting project to watch. Also cash is king
Criminality is unfortunately a very subjective term. Data brokers are not criminals, neither corrupt politicians, but you can easily become one by not doing any harm, but going on a protest, or standing up to bad things imposed on you or other people.
True but in this case I’m talking about dark web illegal activity
Taler can be used for custom currencies too. Anyone can run a mint for their own currency, and anyone can participate in handing out coins of a given currency,
problemprobably in exchange for things outside of the system. The reporting capability of Taler is tied to the currency.We will probably see it if it can really be done, but I think “traditional” cryptocurrencies could be implemented on top of taler.
You could use Crypto with Taler but it wouldn’t make a lot of sense as crypto is digital anyway. It also would have all the draw backs of crypto.
Taler uses flat currency so you don’t need to worry about it losing value overnight.
There are a number of stabletokens that you also wouldn’t need to worry about losing value overnight.
Stablecoins are the worst of crypto and central banking combined.
- They are centralized, even more centralized than central banks since they are run by a single company not an board appointed by an elected government
- They can rug you at any time
- They only have value because they are “pegged” to a certain currency and the “backing” must exist to maintain that peg.
- Their source of the backing is often “trust me bro”
- Even if the backing was solid, market shocks and other problems can reduce the value of that backing, leading to them being insolvent and the stablecoin losing its value. And guess what, it wasn’t insured!
- They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely, so you have no reason to trust their claims and probably can’t seek any real remedy if they are lies
- They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation
Several of them have already collapsed spectacularly. More will in time. Avoid stablecoins.
Some stablecoins are centralized, but it’s not a fundamental requirement of how they operate. Stabletokens such as DAI or Liquity are run without a central company. They cannot “rug” you because they’re based on smart contracts.
They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely
Isn’t that kind of the point?
so you have no reason to trust their claims
Smart contract code can be audited by anyone and trusted to run exactly as it’s written.
They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation
Stablecoins aren’t required to peg to any specific measure of value (I assume you’re referring to US dollars?). There are stabletokens pegged to gold, for example, if you really want something like that.
Since US dollars work just fine for commerce, though, using a stabletoken that’s pegged to US dollars works fine for commerce too.
That’s just smoke and mirrors. If there was a “bank run” on a stable coin all of them would immediately collapse as there is nothing of real value backing them.
Anything of value is capable of losing its value under some circumstances, since value is assigned by humans. Obviously you pick and choose based on your use cases.
That’s a cop-out to avoid discussing that none of the stable coins have anywhere close to the assets they claim to have and which would be necessary to peg the value.
You can examine the MakerDAO contract, for example, and see all of the assets they claim to have sitting right there under its control on the blockchain. You can see the contract logic behind how those assets enter and exit its control.
