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GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
- internetpeso 11y agoThis is good but how does it compare to internetpeso.com?
- chriswarbo 11y agoThat site seems to give no details about how internetpeso works; it confuses "how does it work?" with "how do I use it?". Also, Taler seems to be very much a Free Software project. internetpeso seems to be proprietary, and also self-contradictory: > Other cyber-currencies require that you trust complete strangers to verify transactions. This is a patently unsafe way of handling your life savings. > We leverage best-of-breed closed-source software
- ryan-c 11y agoI suspect that is a parody and you have been trolled.
- davorb 11y ago> Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income So exactly why would I want to use this?
- pragone 11y agoIf I had to guess, automatic calculation of income tax. No need to file taxes.
- skimpycompiler 11y agoIs this not automatic in most of the countries of the world?
- wanderfowl 11y agoNot in the US, sadly.
- radmuzom 11y agoI would guess it is not automatic in most countries of the world, except for a few developed countries.
- alkonaut 11y agoNot even in developed countries! If you go to the US for example you will find people doing everyday transactions such as wage payments, taxis or grocery shopping still using pieces of paper with numbers on them. You have to see it to believe it.
- jessaustin 11y agoThis is true: I know a business that employs about fifteen employees, and one of the owners looks at the withholding tables every two weeks.
- omouse 11y agoBecause there's already enough loopholes for you to use if you really don't want to show your income to the government? I'm not sure what exactly this kind of tracking helps with; it would be nice if they had more examples or case studies.
- radmuzom 11y agoBecause unless the government can track citizen's income it cannot tax it, and without taxes modern society cannot function at all. Technologies like this would be a boon to many developing countries like mine where tax evasion and corruption is rampant. It would enable the government to collect funds for infrastructure, education, environmental protection and healthcare (and yes, I am a progressive liberal who would rather have the government provide these at subsidized cost rather than private entities; even at the cost of "efficiency" if need be).
- oberstein 11y agoIf a government is already having trouble collecting funds it is owed, this currency will not help it. The government would just be faced with two problems instead of one.
- dublinben 11y agoThe question remains, why would anyone choose to use a system like this? Wealthy individuals and companies (aka those with most of the money) have a vested interest in having their transactions not easily tracked by the government.
- alkonaut 11y agoThat is already true, and with the means of transfers available (cash, gold, banking system, etc...) public institutions still give the public some confidence in that they manage to tax everyone, and pursue those who evade. If a currency system was available that made taxation appear entirely optional to the public the trust in the tax system would erode in a hurry (Why should I pay when my neighbor or Acme inc. isn't paying?). Tax morale is alreay too low in many countries. Making more loopholes available would just not be good.
- pzone 11y agoSimple: this aims for regulatory support. If Taler (or a system like Taler) is embraced by governments, and is therefore given the full support of the financial system, Bitcoin could be permanently relegated to black-market-only use.
- limmeau 11y agoThe authors are employed by TU Munich and Inria Rennes, paid for by taxes, so I guess they assume that some taxation is necessary. At least they designed some anonymity into the taxation interface. How much remains to be seen.
- chriswarbo 11y agoI suppose it depends on whether or not you like having a fire service, national health system, comprehensive education, social security, national defense, etc.
- 1ris 11y agoSeems to be Pretty much spot-on. It's (claimed) anonymous crypto-currency without the cryto-anarchism.
- rcthompson 11y agoIt goes both ways: it prevents a corrupt government from trying to overtax you by just saying you made more than you did, and it could prevent corporations from evading taxes.
- StavrosK 11y agoYou do realize that governments make the laws, and that they can just raise taxes rather than try to dispute your tax report?
- rcthompson 11y agoBut then they can't lie about it, at least not as easily. And if they were better able to collect from tax-evading corporations, maybe they wouldn't need to tax individuals as much.
- icebraining 11y agoAnd if they were better able to collect from tax-evading corporations, maybe they wouldn't need to tax individuals as much. - Humphrey, this paper says that if we cancel Trident and bring in conscription, we shall have £1.5 billion for tax cuts, and what do I find? - What do you find, Prime Minister? - The Chancellor opposes me. A great chance to be popular with the voters and he says no. Doesn't that surprise you? - No. - Why doesn't it surprise you? - He's advised by the Treasury and they don't believe in giving money back. - It's not theirs. It's the taxpayers'. - That's not the view the Treasury takes. Not once they've got it. - But if they don't need it? - Sorry? - If they don't need it. - Taxation isn't about what you need. - What is it about? - The Treasury doesn't work out what they need to spend and then think how to raise the money. - What DOES it do? - They pitch for as much as they think they can get away with, then think what to spend it on. If you start giving money back because you don't need it, you're breaking with centuries of tradition!
- copsarebastards 11y agoI can see this as maybe being an alternative to credit cards, which I don't like. That said, I agree, we're surveilled enough thanks.
- omouse 11y agoUnlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes. Taler is thus a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market. HAH, I love it, they lump both BitCoin and cash! as currencies fit for the black market! I wonder how cash-only convenience stores will feel about that, those outlaw troublemakers! ;p
- limmeau 11y agoThis sounds a lot like David Chaum's eCash of the 90s. You transfer ordinary money into a Taler account in a Taler bank and transfer them to other Taler accounts, and from there to ordinary money. That's unlike Bitcoin in pretty much every respect. It takes some courage to make a crypto-payment protocol explicitly taxation-friendly, but they claim the tax man only gets to see the amounts, not the identities. What a pity the design doc isn't yet on their website. And I hope the eCash patents have expired...
- Someone 11y agoFor those who don't know about DigiCash: http://www.chaum.com http://www.chaum.com http://cryptome.org/jya/digicrash.htm http://cryptome.org/jya/digicrash.htm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau...
- mindcrime 11y agoUnlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes. Taler is thus a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market. Sounds pretty useless to me then. I would think, as technologists, we would adhere to a mindset of "we can do better". That is, we can do better than basing our society on a State apparatus that is rooted in the use of violence (or threat, implied or otherwise) of violence, to coerce people into following its dictates. Taxation is damage that we should be creating ways to route around, not something we should be building tools to support.
- rodgerd 11y agoI will take nonsense like this seriously when its proponents no longer avail themselves of the benefits of assets created through taxation. Which would be never.
- evanpw 11y agoThis is just the reverse of the (also bad) argument that people who advocate for higher taxes shouldn't be taken seriously unless they voluntarily donate some of their income to the government. For example: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/04/want-higher-taxes-pay-them-yourself/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/04/want-higher-tax....
- Spivak 11y agoThus taxes should never change as people would rationally never want to pay more nor receive less benefits. Hence we must have exactly the right amount of taxation at all times.
- icebraining 11y agoIf I steal your car and leave you a bike, are you an hypocrite if you use the bike while condemning theft? I am not saying taxes are theft, but if one does believe so, I don't think it's hypocrisy to try to at least get some of it back.
- dacox 11y agoSo GNU just released FedCoin? Interesting...
- pakled_engineer 11y agoUses GNUnet's crypto library to generate keys. Biggest problem I've found is fraud potential, the mint operator can run a fractional reserve since it relies on "government authorities doing regular audits" and also that it touts turning Mastercard/Visa into Taler. Carders will become their own merchants, card a mint to get Taler and then cash it all out before anybody knows what happened. You also can't transfer Taler p2p, all transactions go through the mint to prevent "black markets". Edit: Uses this API http://api.taler.net/ http://api.taler.net/ plus seems to have future GNUnet compatibility built into it's system for payments over it.
- limmeau 11y agoDoes it use GNUnet? I only see them mention REST here, HTTPS there. As to the carder-friendlyness: credit card companies are known to treat payment aggregators with lots of suspicion, so I suppose there just won't be many credit-card-to-Taler "banks".
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mizchief2 11y agoYou can take your liberal bullshit currency someplace else.
- mnx 11y agoI don't mean to be a dick, but the default bootstrap look is not making it easier to take this as a serious project. But I like how this is not a giant project to waste electricity breaking useless hashes.
- choffman 11y agoNo thank you. With regards to my government, I would like to see more privacy rather than less. This seems to give me less. I do like the idea of complete transactional privacy between end users and/or merchants. But we already have this today with CryptoNote based cryptocurrencies like Monero - with optional transparency through "view keys".
- ForHackernews 11y ago> When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money. However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary.
- choffman 11y agoAgain, existing technologies already provide this. And they further empower the user to expressly define how much anonymity they want...down to the transactional level. Empowering governments with additional taxation tools is about the only thing this brings to the table over existing technologies.
- room271 11y agoAs far as I understand it, Taler seems to be great for privacy and society (ensuring income is taxable). Governments can't see how you spend your money, but they can see who receives payments. Bitcoin and others will never succeed because they are too friendly towards illicit behaviour. Taler seems to strike a genuinely interesting and ethical balance here.
- dnautics 11y agoThe underlying assumption is that governments don't care about how you spend money. This is patently untrue, because "liberal" governments explicitly use taxation as global social modification schemes, for all sorts of things beyond income redistribution - from minimizing percieved vices (alcohol, tobacco) to minimizing environmental footprint, etc. The idea that this sort of activity is able to be decoupled from surveillance is one of the more unfortunate delusions in politics.
- fleitz 11y agoFree software for an unfree currency.
- Kenji 11y agoVery well said. As long as our monetary system is not freed from the grasp of the government/central banks/banks in general, reasonable currencies will never be widespread... Sane money is money that cannot be printed in arbitrary amounts. The money monopoly is particularly harmful to economy & citizens.
- Nursie 11y agoThankfully there are not vast numbers of people that buy into that string of assertions.
- jerguismi 11y agoTaxable & anonymous at the same time? The marketing of this sounds shady. I don't know if the "inventors" or whatever really know what they are doing...
- omouse 11y agoIt's in development at a university that's known for its computer science research and work: http://www.inria.fr/ http://www.inria.fr/ For example, Facebook has partnered with the university and it's also the birthplace of the OCAML language. They have some sharp people doing research work there, if this was a VC-backed company or a kickstarter, I would be much more skeptical and think it's shady. However, the bar at a university is much higher so we'll see what they do deliver and how it works whenever they deliver it in the next year.
- blumkvist 11y agoTU Munich too!
- zby 11y agoSo inflows (their amounts) are public (i.e taxable), but outflows are not? Interesting claim.
- atmosx 11y agoI have this strange idea that once the government-agents really understand what e-payments, even block-chain-powered e-currencies bring to the table, in terms of money control, they'll embrace it. It's a no-brainer. That said, taxes are not inherently bad. Governments on the other hand... Have an awfully bad track-record of power abuse.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoSeveral central banks are interested in cryptocurrencies because it allows them to devalue the currency from a central point. Cash is hard because it can be hoarded, therefore indirect measures are taken to devalue said currency. http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=27870 http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=27870 http://in.rbth.com/economics/finance/2015/09/21/rusias-bitruble-to-be-worlds-first-state-controlled-cryptocurrency_426465 http://in.rbth.com/economics/finance/2015/09/21/rusias-bitru... http://cointelegraph.com/news/115312/azerbaijan-mulls-its-own-cryptocurrency-cryptomanat http://cointelegraph.com/news/115312/azerbaijan-mulls-its-ow...
- AndrewBissell 11y ago"If the controls we've imposed aren't working to revive the economy, it must mean we need to use new and ever more intrusive ones!"
- toomuchtodo 11y ago“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Seriously. You have an aging population causing consumption to decline, a global recession along the horizon, ever-increasing productivity replacing the need for labor, and you think your interest rates are going to a damn bit of good? We'll need to keep interest rates at 0 just to keep the whole thing going, forget about negative interest rates (which is going to cause a run on the bank and asset bubbles in commodities, real estate, anything else that can be a value store).
- freshhawk 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- aidenn0 11y agohttp://www.gnu.org/software/taler/ http://www.gnu.org/software/taler/
- pera 11y agoThank you. This actually surprised me.
- nightpool 11y ago> The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money. However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary. > With Taler, the receiver of any form of payment is known, and the payment information comes attached with some details about what the payment was made for (but not the identity of the customer). Thus, governments can use this data to tax buisnesses and individuals based on their income
- npongratz 11y agoAccording to [0]: "2-2015: Taler becomes an official GNU package ... Taler was accepted into the GNU project today. GNU will offer advice, advocacy and cooperation --- and host our official public mailinglist taler@gnu.org." Also, RMS is listed on the About page [1], though it doesn't say in what capacity (unless "Ethics enthusiast" is a job title). Edit: fixed reference to footnote [0] http://taler.net/news http://taler.net/news [1] http://taler.net/about http://taler.net/about
- flowerpot 11y agoI've recently been at an event where Richard Stallman was promoting this. I'm pretty sure it's part of the GNU Project.
- dacox 11y ago> Unlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes. Taler is thus a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market. This simultaneously implies that both Bitcoin and cash are not suitable for the mainstream economy. I think the opinion that cash should be given up would be fairly controversial, even today. Furthermore, a law abiding citizen will still pay taxes on their Bitcoin income - the same way they would for cash. Just because Bitcoin makes it harder to prove tax evasion doesn't mean we should eschew Bitcoin and cash. The technology exists regardless, governments will have to adapt. > When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money. However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary. This feature is offering nothing not already available, although it seems to imply that one could not prove payment with Bitcoin, which is false, as it is trivial.
- dacox 11y agodownvotes? Is something I said wrong?
- dragonwriter 11y ago> This simultaneously implies that both Bitcoin and cash are not suitable for the mainstream economy. No, it implies that Bitcoin and cash are both alike in not simultaneously being: (a) suitable for the mainstream economy, and (b) not suitable for the black market. It neither states nor strongly implies which of those two things bitcoin or cash fail on (nor does it state or strongly apply that they each fail on the same one of those two things), though there's a fairly weak implication that Bitcoin and cash both fail on the second (that, whether or not they are suitable for the mainstream economy, they are quite suitable for the black market.)
- ijktdot 11y agoThis is a digital payment scheme that respects the customers privacy, when buying from merchants. The alternative besides a cryptocurrency, would be a prepaid cc you buy with cash in a store, but then VISA knows everything you buy with it, whereas this system the payment provider (the "mint") and merchant are separated. If you directly buy things with SEPA then your bank knows everything you buy. This allows for lawful payments, allows any company to become a mint (no payment monopolies) and is free software so you can make your own wallet client and not have to rely on proprietary software wallet apps. People can still become a black market escrow, keep creating new merchants and facilitate user to user transactions unless there is some kind of cost or identification required to accept Taler payments, or exchange Taler for bitcoin. US law makers will likely try to prohibit Taler though if any online gambling accepts it as payment, for example Paysafecard had to design a special UIGEA compliant card in order for it not to be able to be plugged into a gambling site to get into the US payments market. Speaking of bitcoin pretty much every online exchange will start accepting Taler, then they aren't so exposed to banks shutting them down and can trade in any currency.
- yarrel 11y agoThis seems to bake in some curious assumptions.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoLets make it quite simple. If you can't mail order LSD with it, in privacy, then it's too submissive to the state.
- hackuser 11y agoConsider how valuable this could be to privacy. Governments likely will insist on a mechanism to track electronic currencies, for tax, regulatory and other reasons. Governments seem to have very little concern for privacy. So the mechanism they choose could very well ignore privacy. By building a mechanism that meets government needs and by being an early mover, Taler could be the de facto solution by the time governments get around to dealing with this issue, and could make privacy the policy.
- ijktdot 11y agoThere's a global racket in market data mining too, to track demographics and see what they are buying. This system defeats any large payment entity from payment tracking. Taler can also compete with Ukash, since it's free/open any merchant can implement their own Taler for cash business without signing large exclusive contracts with Ukash or waiting a month to be settled by them, as you can freely choose which Mint to do business with.
- zerebubuth 11y ago> This system defeats any large payment entity from payment tracking. Merchants of physical goods must know the identity and delivery address of their customers in order to deliver them. Given how easy many companies find it to embed 3rd party trackers or adverts on their site, it seems reasonable to believe that they will also find it easy to sell this data ("to help detect and prevent fraud") to the payment processing companies.
- ijktdot 11y agoTrue, but at least Taler allows for the consumer to chose merchants who specify they don't sell data. Right now I can't buy anything online and not be tracked by the payment provider unless I use bitcoin. The prepaid credit cards here all require online registration and in store identification, Visa/Mc/Amex then track my purchases. If I show ID to buy $200 worth of Taler in a 7-11, there's no way for my Taler provider to see what I used it for.
- plutooo 11y agoFrom http://taler.net/governments http://taler.net/governments > Thus, Taler will enable competition and avoid the monopolization of payment systems that threatens global political and financial stability today. The irony.
- scythe 11y agoWhat's crucially important, and conspicuously unmentioned, is not taxes but monetary policy as a whole: can the central bank (or "mint") control the interest rate? Is inflation possible?
- icebraining 11y agoIt's right on the home page: Taler uses an electronic mint holding financial reserves in existing currencies. This means that Taler is not a new currency with the inherent currency fluctuation risks, but instead the cryptographic coins correspond to existing currencies, such as US Dollars, Euros or even BitCoins. So, yes, inflation is possible, since the digital coins are tied to existing currencies.
- oneJob 11y agoMuch love and respect to Richard Stallman / the GNU Project for all the pioneering work and advocacy they did in OSS, but I personally don't want them near my $s. The number of religious / flame wars persistently raging in OSS circles just can not, would not be tolerated in this domain.
- paxcoder 11y agoYour comment is completely baseless FUD, I wonder if you actually believe it. P.S. Stallman is a FS advocate, not an OSS advocate.
- davout 11y agosounds like a shitty version of OpenTransactions
- VMG 11y agoeven shittier?
- fiatjaf 11y agoThis is a sheep that goes walking to the wolf and hopes to be devoured.
- wyager 11y agoWhy, as a rational actor, would I voluntarily choose this system over one that gives me the freedom to decide what the government sees about my spending?
- alkonaut 11y agoVery simple: a system like this could become a legally accepted standard.
- bildung 11y ago> Why, as a rational actor, would I voluntarily choose this system over one that gives me the freedom to decide what the government sees about my spending? Because this system ensures fair play of all participants, therefore making cooperative behaviour the rational choice, therefore enabling more efficient solutions on a societal level. Proper game theory (which I assume you were referring to) is bit more complex than the prisoner's dilemma.
- wyager 11y agoIt doesn't ensure fair play of the most powerful participant (the government), and it doesn't ensure fair play of people who have the knowledge or material means to escape surveillance.
- sjudson 11y agoAs I understand the scheme, I inform the mint I will have, say $200, wired to it. It gives me a code which I give to my bank when they do the transfer, so that the mint knows the money I told it would be arriving did actually arrive from me. I then get a cryptographic assertion that I have $200 in my wallet. Anonymous purchases work, as when I go to buy something all the information I need to give the seller is the assertion I have the available amount of money, and essentially the seller bills the mint for the cost of the game, which the mint transfers to the seller's bank. The first question is how is bookkeeping done so that money can't be spent twice? One option would be that when I go to buy, say a $60 video game the system cryptographically bounds the purchase to my wallet, so if I go to another retailer it says that I have spent $60 of the original $200 in the wallet, and therefore have $140 left. The other option would be that any transfer into my wallet can only be used once and in full. The discussion does say the wallet holds a transaction history, but that doesn't delinate which of the two previous modes of operation is the case. There are a few issues with this if using the "wallet-bookeeping option" where proofs-of-purchase are bound to the wallet. One, it doesn't protect against dishonest sellers. Say a customer comes in with a wallet that originally held $200 but they've spent $80. The seller can still bill the mint for $150, and there is no way for the mint to confirm that the customer didn't have that much still left over from their transfer to the mint. Secondly, presumably the proof-of-purchase is cryptographically bound to the wallet, else the buyer will simply discard it. With it bound, discarding the proof-of-purchase discards the remaining money on it. However, for this to work, there must be no recourse for the buyer to recoup the money in a lost wallet. But the user can do this by backing up (which the discussion of Taler notes can be done), which would allow the user to simply discard the version of the wallet with a payment and simply return to the one without it. Because of this, it seems likely that Taler would make any transfers one-use only, to prevent against this issues. In such a case, the user would then transfer the exact amount of funds needed (or something close, hoping to get change in cash, which wouldn't be sustainable for the sellers if all their buyers are using Taler) as needed right before making their purchase. In that case, it is fully reasonable for the mint to be able to link purchases to bank transfers, since there will only be so many $273.67 transfers (remember, the mint knows who the transfers are from) followed within the next five minutes by $273.67 purchases (and the mint will know the name of the seller). Fundementally, the issue with all these schemes is that for the mint to not be able to track the purchase, it needs to be able to decouple the processes of taking deposits and paying out purchases among the folks who have money in the mint. It can do this either by making the money holder responsible for the bookkeeping, opening the door to fraud, or to make (as Chaum's Digicash did) each certification a one-time use only, which incentivizes buyers to transfer funds as needed, which allows for at least partial linkability, probably not something which would standup in court in and of itself, but would probably be sufficent circumstantial evidence in a number of cases. I'm wondering if I'm misunderstanding something, since these issues have all been pointed out with previous anonymized e-cash attempts, and it seems unlikely GNU would go to build a scheme that has these well-known weaknesses. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there is some additional information here that I'm misunderstanding or has yet to be presented. Also, for a useful read on this type of thing see Brands' criticism of Chaum's pseudonym approach in "Building in Privacy: Rethinking Public Key Infrastructrures and Digital Certificates" (pgs. 25-32, although the whole intro is very useful). EDIT: Making my points more clear, got pretty jumbled in my original post...
- pornel 11y agoFrom the description it seems like "GNU PayPal" or "XMPP for Stripe". To me it seems quite desirable: a decentralized protocol for sending government-backed money in a way that is legal (strong crypto isn't protection from being arrested for money laundering), and yet offers better privacy and is more open to competition than existing networks of banks/credit cards/PayPal.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago> From the description it seems like "GNU PayPal" or "XMPP for Stripe. The name itself screams "money": a taler is a thaler is a dollar and they all come from from the valley of Saint Joachim (Joachimsthal) where they had a silver mine. You may thank the Holy Roman Empire for making good coinage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoIs it just me - I cannot understand how it works? There are diagrams and explanations about banks and wallets but no actual "how"?
- benwerd 11y agoThis is the most political open source project I've seen in a while. I love the idea that it's designed to sit inside a progressive society where we all agree we have a social contract to the state. That is very different to a lot of similar efforts, and at the very least it's an important part of the discussion. Right now it's vaporware, but I'm very interested in its release. I'd love to help give it a friendly face and integrate it with existing open source social platforms, to make it easier to send and receive money regardless of your technical ability.
- plutooo 11y agoWhere is this social contract? What are its terms and where is my signature?
- rtkwe 11y agoIn the case of modern countries: The contract is the law + the Constitution (or your local equivalent if not in the US) and your signature is living in and benefiting from the nation/society you live in.
- placeybordeaux 11y agoI don't understand why people seem to constantly associate bitcoin with tax free. There are no inherent reasons why cash transactions are taxable or non-taxable, it just turns out that people don't want to be destroyed by the IRS so they make an effort to pay their taxes.
- e12e 11y agoThere's also the aspect of currency vs goods. If I've understood correctly, bitcoin is taxed as (virtual) goods in Norway, meaning that if you make money from price change, the tax is much higher than it would be for making money off of stock/currency etc (which would be 28% off the profit, or a 28% deduction from the loss). Just because some people would like bitcoin to be a currency doesn't make it so (in the eyes of the taxman). I'm not sure how/if thaler would change that -- but it's worth keeping in mind that "new" assets will be taxed according to how the government thinks it should be taxed, not according to how you might feel it should be taxed.
- stvswn 11y agoIs the word "liberal" being used ironically?
- kijin 11y ago"Liberal" has many definitions depending on who you ask, so your definition may very well be different from that of the authors. Having said that, this is a GNU project so I would have preferred "free" to "liberal". A payment system consisting entirely of free software, perhaps.
- belorn 11y agoLiberty is to be under no restraint apart from standing rules to live by that are common to everyone in the society. Persons have a right to follow their own will in all things that the law has not prohibited and not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others. Is that a acceptable definition for you?
- pervycreeper 11y agoI'm not sure how desirable the new features are compared to existing currencies. It also doesn't seem any freer. Don't know what the association with GNU entails. Furthermore, its name is easily confused with the ancient denomination of "Thaler", I guess it's on purpose, but, once again, maybe not the greatest idea. If they want to centralize a currency, perhaps that would be better done by a government or other experienced institution.
- saalweachter 11y agoAs near as I can tell, they aren't trying to be a digital currency, just a digital payment system. This is really an iteration on PayPal (and similar businesses): the new feature is that it is a system for letting multiple PayPals compete. Instead of being forced to make an account with a specific company, you can pick from a hopefully-large number of mints, who will be competing on things like fees and the customer experience. That will hopefully make things suck less. BitCoin solves a lot of problems most people don't care about. Most people don't care about Byzentine Generals or trustless transactions or very limited forms of anonymity. What most people care about are low-cost transactions which don't suck. We'll have to wait and see if Taler can actually deliver.
- pervycreeper 11y ago>a digital payment system Existing cryptocurrencies already perform this function well. If that's the sole claimed advantage of Taler, it's a step backwards.
- saalweachter 11y agoCryptocurrencies (by which I mean, Bitcoin, since it is the one with significant adoption) perform this function, but not particularly well. For a payment system, being a currency is a negative -- fluctuations between the value of the digital currency and the value of the currency goods are priced in is a headache few people enjoy. A payment system that is set up as a payment system -- instead of a decentralized trustless network -- can also better optimize things like transaction time (transactions can happen ~instantly if you're willing to trust central agencies) or having a known transaction cost. Right now Bitcoin's transaction cost is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- some combination of inflation from printing money to pay the miners and direct payments to the miners per transaction and payments to the exchanges to put cash in or take cash out and the risk of currency fluctuations mid-transaction. Regardless of whether it costs a little more or a little less, just knowing the transaction cost is a huge benefit to consumers and merchants.
- e12e 11y agoNot sure how one can both have traceability with merchants and: "However, we also want to stay out of the immediate personal domain, so sharing funds within a family or copying coins between devices should not be subject to monitoring by the state." I'm guessing this means that you have either "free" trust (help from the thaler system to ensure fair transactions), or "no" trust -- essentially you hand over cash, and hope the other party gives you goods in return? I have a hard time seeing how you could prevent "anonymous transfer of coins" from one device from the other -- across the Internet (provided the parties are prepared to risk fraud)?
- werber 11y agoThis just seems like the Hurd of digital currencies.