GNU Taler is not your friend
GNU Taler is not your friend
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.
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.
You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.
Sure, a crypto wallet might not have your name on it when created, but good luck buying or selling any without giving away your identity.
You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.
There's some truth to this but it's also not really the case.
- Each address is pseudononymous even in original Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin lightning transactions are completely opaque to the network, they are never on-chain. At this point, there are vastly more transactions on lightning than on-chain. They confirm instantly and are known only to your node, the receiver's wallet, and intermediary nodes (if any). Lightning inherits security from the main chain while giving you sub-second transaction confirmation times.
- Monero exists, coinjoin (Bitcoin) exist, changing addresses and having multiple wallets exists, liquidity swaps exist. The chain analysis game is getting harder and more complex every year.
good luck
except there are many sites dedicated to doing exactly that. you can send cash in the mail, giftcards, exchange via other cryptocurrencies, etc.
Yes. But the draw is that it is still leagues easier use privately than the traditional banking system. With cryptocurrency, you "only" need proper understanding of OPSEC. With banking system - you also need to break the law somewhere in the KYC process.
Yes, most crypto are totally useless, for privacy or anything else other than lottery and heating the home. But why are those discussed any further than just telling not to use them?
CBDCs are coming whether you like it or not and a GNU Taler based payment system is currently our best mitigation strategy against them.
It's pointless to compare GNU Taler to crypto-currencies as it is a payment system and not a pseudo-currency.
CBDCs are coming whether you like it or not and a GNU Taler based payment system is currently our best mitigation strategy against them.
The best mitigation strategy is to refuse to use them and to point out when systems, like Taler, are actively working to further their introduction of use. Using your national currency is mandatory to pay taxes, it's not mandatory for anything else in most countries. We have the option to opt out, just like we do with every other privacy-attacking technology. Assuming it's inevitable is how they win.
I didn't say the use will be inevitable, and great if you try to opt out. But the majority are already using cashless payment systems, and will happily switch to a CBDC if it becomes available and promises lower fees than credit cards etc.
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".
Your first example is tax fraud if you hide it
Edit: it looks like you edited your post to state the guy repairing your bike is "your friend".
Noone is going to go after him if he just fixes your bike. But if he fixes the bike of his 1000 friends each month, they will go after him if he didn't declare it.
That may technically be true, but it's currently very normalized. Do we actually want to denormalize it? Should the government know about every trivial transaction?
For small sum in-person payments, regular cash is still the best option and will continue to be so, GNU Taler or not.
There is a middle ground. Cash has a physical trace but it isn't known by the government right away. We need digital cash that actually functions like cash.
not if they're only covering the cost of parts
Which jurisdiction are you referring to? GNU Taler isn't specific to any particular country or currency.
I think you are misinterpreting things.
/c/Libertarian is that way:
/c/Cryptocurrency is over there:
Only the correct kinds of privacy are allowed here, after all.
CBDC?
Central Bank Digital Currency. Its a controversial project by many central banks around the world to establish a digital cash alternative, but the current proposals are usually not very privacy friendly.
Funny how we're big into privacy here, and then money comes up and lots of people are "wait no, not that kind of privacy."
I do not like drugs and human trafficking.
Ah yes, must keep that war on drugs going, it's totally worth sacrificing everyones' privacy to make sure the Devil's Cabbage is kept off the streets. Reefer Madness is epidemic.
And human trafficking, yes, we can't have people sending remittances to their families in destitute foreign countries so that they might be able to afford to immigrate too. So many poor foreigners trying to get in!
Or maybe this is actually too complicated an issue to dismiss with a simple "if people have done nothing wrong they have nothing to hide?"
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.
When crypto bros stop shilling anti-libre software, maybe i'll start to care.
Recently read an ELI5 of the digital euro and was pleasantly surprised. If it works as designed, you can perform offline payments from one device to another, which sounds like your use case. No central servers, no blockchain.
If you can do a P2P transaction like that, you need either a central server or a blockchain or equivalent to prevent double-spends. There is no other way. Satoshi's innovation for Bitcoin was developing a system (blockchain) that can do this without a central server.
I don't know how the technical implementation will work, but here is a post I found.
The idea is that you transfer money from the bank to your device, just like withdrawing cash from an ATM. Transferring money from one wallet to another should be able to be offline.
It seems like privacy is a priority, if only to satisfy privacy groups and improve acceptance.
GNU Taler is inferior anyway, and it has been existing for many years with exact zero of usage.
Imagine reinventing Chaumian e-cash 40 year later and promoting it as a innovative approach in digital payments.
It takes time to do it right. I have no idea if it will be usable with real currencies at some point but for now you can use it with your own made up currency.
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.
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.