13 ms·

GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions

346 points by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago

FloDo 6y ago
Related, a working paper published by the Swiss National Bank on using this technology for a central bank digital currency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260524
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  Thanks for this - although I think that working paper referred to a centralised payment system - whereas this one seems to be community driven.
  - grothoff 6y ago
    I am the GNU Taler co-maintainer and working paper co-author. The development is community-driven. But as you see from the paper, the community is talking with central banks about deploying it. There is no contradiction.
    - herodoturtle 6y ago
      Thanks for weighing in - I stand corrected.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
greatgib 6y ago
Very nice concept, but I guess that if you try to create an exchange or accept payments with that: governments, tax offices and FATF institutions will come after you. TLDR with my understanding of the concept: At the opposite of crypto, the concept is that anyone can create an "exchange" acting as a bank, and all transactions are public in an encrypted form. So you can check the transactions if you know the key of your transaction. But it is not crypto in the sense that you have to trust one authority (the exchange) as a bank. It is the one that will hold user credits in the end. The very fun thing is to create a "bank" like that for you and your friends. It is like an IOU bank.
- captn3m0 6y ago
  Have you read the paper or website? Taler explicitly envisions exchanges as regulated and audited entities. The central bank should audit exchanges, and it even provides mechanisms to make this simpler. One leg of the exchange runs on traditional finance rails (ACH) as well. It isn’t anyone can be a bank, it is “regulated audited entities should be able to exchange a ACH transfer for digital tokens”.
  - greatgib 6y ago
    You a speaking about the Swiss white paper, but when I look at Taler website, doc and tech: it allows things to be "regulated", but there is nothing forcing that. Whoever can spin up his "own bank" like that. And whoever else can connect with this first bank. And you can use Kudos, of whatever digital virtual currency that you want. And most of what is interesting about this project is especially that. Not that traditional regulated entities could use it to spin up something new to basically do what they are already doing.
    - captn3m0 6y ago
      Sorry, I meant the original Taler paper: https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/taler2016space.pdf https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/taler2016.... >but there is nothing forcing that. Regulations can never be forced into a technology, they can merely be adopted. PCI-DSS exists as a regulation in different jurisdictions, but there is nothing forcing it either - its the contract your processor signs with their bank, and other many agreements similarly. An exchange exists to convert Fiat to Tokens. A merchant can only accept tokens signed from an exchange. The Fiat<>Kudo transfer happens on an exchange and requires traditional regulated finance rails. Could you build a cash-backed exchange? Yes, but then merchants accepting that specific exchange will need a way to exchange it back to fiat, and that doesn't work. There isn't a separate digital virtual currency in Taler. Taler is an electronic payment system that uses existing currencies (such as USD/EUR). Kudos is only used for the demo, but in a real deployment, it will be USD/EUR/etc.
deepstack 6y ago
Brave or maybe chrome keep on insisting that it is http://taleo.net http://taleo.net and forward me to https://www.oracle.com/human-capital-management/taleo/ https://www.oracle.com/human-capital-management/taleo/ Shame on your brave!
- coderdan 6y ago
  The domain is set that way, it has nothing to do with the browser and doesn't seem to have anything to do with taler.net either.
im3w1l 6y ago
So if I understand correctly Taler avoids double spending by having a trusted central authority? Foss version of Visa/Mastercard basically?
- dbrgn 6y ago
  As far as I understand it, this is meant as an open and standardized payment protocol that provides payment interoperability between different banks, but that protects the privacy of the sender (but not the recipient, due to tax reasons). It doesn't have anything to do with crypto currencies like Bitcoin.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    This feels like it wouldn't square with Know-Your-Customer requirements. Although: those only kick in legally above certain transaction and spend levels, so simply rejecting anonymous payments at those levels (or structured payments below those) would make it legally viable. It does make me feel good to see a GNU project like this out there - at the core of the free world IMO, the bits of glue which get our society running, it should really be all open-source and open licenses.
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      How can you tell whether the payments are structured if senders are anonymous?
      - XorNot 6y ago
        Because the recipients can't be anonymous, basically by definition. So money moving in an apparently ordered way to a receiver would draw attention to the recipient, who would then have to explain why they were accepting the payments. If they're converting to physical goods, they also have to be sending them somewhere - which is much harder to anonymize.
    - helen___keller 6y ago
      > This feels like it wouldn't square with Know-Your-Customer requirements My understanding is that exchanges would do their due diligence before exchanging your fiat for tokens, and separately shops may do due diligance if necessary before accepting your tokens; the exchange does not know that you performed a transaction at this shop, and the shop does not know with whom you exchange[0], but both those relationships have separately done due diligence. In particular I don't believe there could be a such thing as a "darknet shop" or "darknet exchange" using Taler. If any one entity is not following regulations, it should be possible to track them down and subject them to the law. If a merchant isn't following regulations, then they can't redeem their tokens to fiat at the exchange. If the exchange isn't following regulations, then the auditor/government shuts them down. [0] not sure about this one
dbrgn 6y ago
Here are the core principles behind Taler: https://taler.net/en/principles.html https://taler.net/en/principles.html Note: Taler is not a cryptocurrency. It's an electronic payment system.
- wrycoder 6y ago
  And the IRS should treat transactions like they do gift cards or pre-funded debit cards. While the IRS treats bitcoin transactions like security transactions - they are taxed on gain/loss of the bitcoins involved.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    That's because Bitcoin taxed the same way as other forex, at least to my knowledge. If you buy goods with Bitcoin you should presumably pay sales tax, not capital gains tax.
    - wrycoder 6y ago
      You would pay both - sales tax is collected by the seller. The gain on the Bitcoin is the value of the transaction, less your basis for the Bitcoin involved. That gain can be long term or short term and is taxed accordingly.
      - nerdponx 6y ago
        So how does this work outside of cryptocurrency? Suppose I change a bunch of USD for EUR at an airport. Six months later, the Euro has appreciated significantly vs the US Dollar. I go on another trip, and buy some stuff with the Euros I changed several months ago. Do I technically owe capital gains tax?
        wrycoder 6y ago
        Not if you paid for the stuff in Euros. But if you changed the appreciated Euros back into dollars, you’d at least theoretically owe tax on a foreign exchange gain. For pocket money, no one is going to bother with it. But I’ve been in situations involving hundreds of thousands of dollars held for long periods in foreign currencies, where the tax consequences were real. There’s a line on the 1040 to account for foreign exchange gain/loss.
xvilka 6y ago
Such systems should be written using a safer language, like some of the modern cryptocurrencies do. Rust, Haskell, OCaml, F# would be a perfect fit.
- rowland66 6y ago
  That seems completely irrelevant.
  - adwn 6y ago
    > That seems completely irrelevant. Safety is irrelevant for a payment system?
    - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
      Are there any real examples of exploits of unsafe payment systems that could have been fixed by programming language features?
      - adwn 6y ago
        That's the wrong question to ask. The right questions are: 1) Are there any real examples of software exploits that could have been fixed by programming language features? 2) Is there an incentive to exploit software bugs in a payment system? To which the answers are 1) almost too many to count, and 2) yes, definitely.
        dbrgn 6y ago
        Here's a recent USENIX talk on the topic of memory unsafety and the choice of programming languages: https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2021/presentation/gaynor https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2021/presentation/ga... Slides can be downloaded. I hope the talk recording will be available as well.
        otabdeveloper4 6y ago
helen___keller 6y ago
I read about Taler a few years back, and I'm excited to see that it is still under development. In my opinion, for those of us who aren't anti-government, Taler represents an ethical future of digital spending: It is interoperable, so unlike our current Visa situation, the free market should be able to bid down payment fees to a fair rate. It's insane to me that Visa and Mastercard have basically positioned themselves as exclusive middlemen on the vast majority of digital transactions, in an age when so much commerce necessarily is digital. It offers privacy that Visa / PayPal / etc cannot. It makes income traceable in a way that bitcoin does not, to facilitate lawful taxation. It is inherently scalable in a way that bitcoin arguably is not (bitcoin has offchain scaling mechanisms, sure, but if you're being honest it's a stretch) It's not introducing a new currency or coin that will be endlessly speculated on, unlike most every crypto solution out there (even stablecoins rely on eth or others for transaction fees)
- olah_1 6y ago
  It sounds like Taler is not competing with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just as much about improving money in general as it is about preserving and transferring wealth. Before WWI, a large part of the world was all on the gold standard. I think a Bitcoin standard would be similar to that but with improvements to consensus. Perhaps Taler is more competing with Lightning networks or decentralized exchanges?
  - helen___keller 6y ago
    Taler isn't competing with bitcoin per se, but it's competing with a particular vision of the bitcoin network (or any blockchain) as "the future of digital payments". Lots of people are into bitcoin as a digital asset, as some kind of inflation-protecting security, etc. For these purposes, Taler is completely orthogonal and not a competitor at all.
  - 99_00 6y ago
    How is bitcoin an improvement on money? Why is a standard on a physical or digital asset desirable, especially when the asset is rare. Wouldn't this unnecessarily restrict monetary policy?
wheybags 6y ago
So are there any real world instances running? Can we actually use this today? If not, is there a roadmap for opening one?
throaway876627 6y ago
Well, in practice buyers aren't going to be anonymous either: who has ever paid online without first being required to create an account on the seller's website before even having access to the payment page? And why would a business choose not to require account creation when it is in their best interest to require one to increase the lifetime value of the buyer (or even just simply to follow up with the order)? So this doesn't help with buyer privacy, and the exchanges will be banks in practice, and banks too are in the business of selling consumer spending data to data brokers... My point is, the only value proposition of GNU Taler therefore is standardizing online payments. But the W3C does a much better job at it with the Web Payments and Credit Transfers specifications.
elric 6y ago
What are the intended use cases here? Not many business are in the business of using custom currencies?
aarchi 6y ago
Great name. The word “Taler” derives from the “Joachimsthaler Guldengroschen” currency (Guilder groschen of St. Joachin's Valley), or “Thaler” for short. The coin was introduced in 1518 in the Holy Roman Empire and many currencies in Europe became named after the Thaler. The Dutch brought their “leeuwendaler” (lit. lion daler) coin to New Netherlands (now New York), lending its name to the US Dollar. I presume Taler was used for this project to match modern German orthography and to avoid confusion with the English ‘th’ ‹θ› sound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1chymov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1chymov
- 1f60c 6y ago
  > The Dutch brought their “leeuwendaler” (lit. lion daler) coin to New Netherlands (now New York), lending its name to the US Dollar. I had to say "daler" a couple times fast before the penny dropped (no pun intended). That's so cool.
bokohut 6y ago
At this very moment the U.S. Financial Service Committee is holding a hearing on 'terrorism' and one would not be surprised to learn that 'cryptocurrency' is the main discussion. What is sacrificed when one is no longer able to "Follow the money."? edit
- seany 6y ago
  Nothing
  - bokohut 6y ago
    I no AML/KYC expert but I have written software systems for fraud purposes before and with that in mind such systems, founded in data collection, are used every hour of every day to link people to activities, legal or not. Given the prolific prosecutorial proof available online as it relates to the value of "who took the money", "who was paid", "who has the money" in such legal cases clearly the institutions tasked with 'security' see a great threat in not being able to follow it.
    - seany 6y ago
      I was assuming the question was open to "moral" interpretations, rather than strictly legal ones. In turn I keep my position even with your concerns, because the utilitarian calculus of comparing "being able to pay for things anonymously" vs "this is helpful for fraud prevention" is basically a non question in my mind.
      - bokohut 6y ago
        My time spent in architecting and coding a fraud system was for employment and income which is not particularly representative of my views about personal privacy per say that we seem to share. I can pay cash for burner phones in stores with no point of purchase surveillance coverage or I can go into a big box and pay with credit and be all kinds of recorded. All about understanding the long game objective as the execution is the easy part.
- 6y ago
sneak 6y ago
In a rare case of where judging a book by its cover is actually valid, I am going to call it right now: the fact that this project can't even display their logo on their webpage correctly is an indicator of the general level of competence/seriousness brought to the table wrt competing with an existing global financial system that, to put it plainly, is competent and serious.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  > this project can't even display their logo on their webpage Could you expand on what you mean? I can see a logo.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Loading the linked webpage on the most popular web browsing device in the world displays their logo with an incorrect aspect ratio. It's pretty obvious that none of these free software zealots tested their software with an iPhone, a device that their target market actually uses. A refusal to use or promote nonfree software comes into slight conflict at times when developing consumer products, as the markets are captured by nonfree software distribution channels, a tragic fact. You have to be willing to bend your own rules slightly while remaining true to your principles, such as testing your website on an iPhone to make sure it works right when nonfree software users visit it to learn about why free software is better.
tom_mellior 6y ago
This looks exciting. Did anyone manage to work through the demo, though? I first installed the Taler Wallet for Android via F-Droid, and it can scan the QR code for withdrawing from the demo bank, but the actual withdrawal fails with some generic message that "withdrawals are currently not possible". Then I tried the browser extension in Firefox 84. It detects that it should be doing something, but never actually completes a withdrawal either.

346 points by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago

Related, a working paper published by the Swiss National Bank on using this technology for a central bank digital currency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260524

herodoturtle 6y ago
Thanks for this - although I think that working paper referred to a centralised payment system - whereas this one seems to be community driven.
- grothoff 6y ago
  I am the GNU Taler co-maintainer and working paper co-author. The development is community-driven. But as you see from the paper, the community is talking with central banks about deploying it. There is no contradiction.
  - herodoturtle 6y ago
    Thanks for weighing in - I stand corrected.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

greatgib 6y ago

Very nice concept, but I guess that if you try to create an exchange or accept payments with that: governments, tax offices and FATF institutions will come after you. TLDR with my understanding of the concept: At the opposite of crypto, the concept is that anyone can create an "exchange" acting as a bank, and all transactions are public in an encrypted form. So you can check the transactions if you know the key of your transaction. But it is not crypto in the sense that you have to trust one authority (the exchange) as a bank. It is the one that will hold user credits in the end. The very fun thing is to create a "bank" like that for you and your friends. It is like an IOU bank.

captn3m0 6y ago
Have you read the paper or website? Taler explicitly envisions exchanges as regulated and audited entities. The central bank should audit exchanges, and it even provides mechanisms to make this simpler. One leg of the exchange runs on traditional finance rails (ACH) as well. It isn’t anyone can be a bank, it is “regulated audited entities should be able to exchange a ACH transfer for digital tokens”.
- greatgib 6y ago
  You a speaking about the Swiss white paper, but when I look at Taler website, doc and tech: it allows things to be "regulated", but there is nothing forcing that. Whoever can spin up his "own bank" like that. And whoever else can connect with this first bank. And you can use Kudos, of whatever digital virtual currency that you want. And most of what is interesting about this project is especially that. Not that traditional regulated entities could use it to spin up something new to basically do what they are already doing.
  - captn3m0 6y ago
    Sorry, I meant the original Taler paper: https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/taler2016space.pdf https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/taler2016.... >but there is nothing forcing that. Regulations can never be forced into a technology, they can merely be adopted. PCI-DSS exists as a regulation in different jurisdictions, but there is nothing forcing it either - its the contract your processor signs with their bank, and other many agreements similarly. An exchange exists to convert Fiat to Tokens. A merchant can only accept tokens signed from an exchange. The Fiat<>Kudo transfer happens on an exchange and requires traditional regulated finance rails. Could you build a cash-backed exchange? Yes, but then merchants accepting that specific exchange will need a way to exchange it back to fiat, and that doesn't work. There isn't a separate digital virtual currency in Taler. Taler is an electronic payment system that uses existing currencies (such as USD/EUR). Kudos is only used for the demo, but in a real deployment, it will be USD/EUR/etc.

deepstack 6y ago

Brave or maybe chrome keep on insisting that it is http://taleo.net http://taleo.net and forward me to https://www.oracle.com/human-capital-management/taleo/ https://www.oracle.com/human-capital-management/taleo/ Shame on your brave!

coderdan 6y ago
The domain is set that way, it has nothing to do with the browser and doesn't seem to have anything to do with taler.net either.

im3w1l 6y ago

So if I understand correctly Taler avoids double spending by having a trusted central authority? Foss version of Visa/Mastercard basically?

dbrgn 6y ago
As far as I understand it, this is meant as an open and standardized payment protocol that provides payment interoperability between different banks, but that protects the privacy of the sender (but not the recipient, due to tax reasons). It doesn't have anything to do with crypto currencies like Bitcoin.
- XorNot 6y ago
  This feels like it wouldn't square with Know-Your-Customer requirements. Although: those only kick in legally above certain transaction and spend levels, so simply rejecting anonymous payments at those levels (or structured payments below those) would make it legally viable. It does make me feel good to see a GNU project like this out there - at the core of the free world IMO, the bits of glue which get our society running, it should really be all open-source and open licenses.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    How can you tell whether the payments are structured if senders are anonymous?
    - XorNot 6y ago
      Because the recipients can't be anonymous, basically by definition. So money moving in an apparently ordered way to a receiver would draw attention to the recipient, who would then have to explain why they were accepting the payments. If they're converting to physical goods, they also have to be sending them somewhere - which is much harder to anonymize.
  - helen___keller 6y ago
    > This feels like it wouldn't square with Know-Your-Customer requirements My understanding is that exchanges would do their due diligence before exchanging your fiat for tokens, and separately shops may do due diligance if necessary before accepting your tokens; the exchange does not know that you performed a transaction at this shop, and the shop does not know with whom you exchange[0], but both those relationships have separately done due diligence. In particular I don't believe there could be a such thing as a "darknet shop" or "darknet exchange" using Taler. If any one entity is not following regulations, it should be possible to track them down and subject them to the law. If a merchant isn't following regulations, then they can't redeem their tokens to fiat at the exchange. If the exchange isn't following regulations, then the auditor/government shuts them down. [0] not sure about this one

dbrgn 6y ago

Here are the core principles behind Taler: https://taler.net/en/principles.html https://taler.net/en/principles.html Note: Taler is not a cryptocurrency. It's an electronic payment system.

wrycoder 6y ago
And the IRS should treat transactions like they do gift cards or pre-funded debit cards. While the IRS treats bitcoin transactions like security transactions - they are taxed on gain/loss of the bitcoins involved.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  That's because Bitcoin taxed the same way as other forex, at least to my knowledge. If you buy goods with Bitcoin you should presumably pay sales tax, not capital gains tax.
  - wrycoder 6y ago
    You would pay both - sales tax is collected by the seller. The gain on the Bitcoin is the value of the transaction, less your basis for the Bitcoin involved. That gain can be long term or short term and is taxed accordingly.
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      So how does this work outside of cryptocurrency? Suppose I change a bunch of USD for EUR at an airport. Six months later, the Euro has appreciated significantly vs the US Dollar. I go on another trip, and buy some stuff with the Euros I changed several months ago. Do I technically owe capital gains tax?
      - wrycoder 6y ago
        Not if you paid for the stuff in Euros. But if you changed the appreciated Euros back into dollars, you’d at least theoretically owe tax on a foreign exchange gain. For pocket money, no one is going to bother with it. But I’ve been in situations involving hundreds of thousands of dollars held for long periods in foreign currencies, where the tax consequences were real. There’s a line on the 1040 to account for foreign exchange gain/loss.

xvilka 6y ago

Such systems should be written using a safer language, like some of the modern cryptocurrencies do. Rust, Haskell, OCaml, F# would be a perfect fit.

rowland66 6y ago
That seems completely irrelevant.
- adwn 6y ago
  > That seems completely irrelevant. Safety is irrelevant for a payment system?
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    Are there any real examples of exploits of unsafe payment systems that could have been fixed by programming language features?
    - adwn 6y ago
      That's the wrong question to ask. The right questions are: 1) Are there any real examples of software exploits that could have been fixed by programming language features? 2) Is there an incentive to exploit software bugs in a payment system? To which the answers are 1) almost too many to count, and 2) yes, definitely.
      - dbrgn 6y ago
        Here's a recent USENIX talk on the topic of memory unsafety and the choice of programming languages: https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2021/presentation/gaynor https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2021/presentation/ga... Slides can be downloaded. I hope the talk recording will be available as well.
        otabdeveloper4 6y ago

helen___keller 6y ago

I read about Taler a few years back, and I'm excited to see that it is still under development. In my opinion, for those of us who aren't anti-government, Taler represents an ethical future of digital spending: It is interoperable, so unlike our current Visa situation, the free market should be able to bid down payment fees to a fair rate. It's insane to me that Visa and Mastercard have basically positioned themselves as exclusive middlemen on the vast majority of digital transactions, in an age when so much commerce necessarily is digital. It offers privacy that Visa / PayPal / etc cannot. It makes income traceable in a way that bitcoin does not, to facilitate lawful taxation. It is inherently scalable in a way that bitcoin arguably is not (bitcoin has offchain scaling mechanisms, sure, but if you're being honest it's a stretch) It's not introducing a new currency or coin that will be endlessly speculated on, unlike most every crypto solution out there (even stablecoins rely on eth or others for transaction fees)

olah_1 6y ago
It sounds like Taler is not competing with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just as much about improving money in general as it is about preserving and transferring wealth. Before WWI, a large part of the world was all on the gold standard. I think a Bitcoin standard would be similar to that but with improvements to consensus. Perhaps Taler is more competing with Lightning networks or decentralized exchanges?
- helen___keller 6y ago
  Taler isn't competing with bitcoin per se, but it's competing with a particular vision of the bitcoin network (or any blockchain) as "the future of digital payments". Lots of people are into bitcoin as a digital asset, as some kind of inflation-protecting security, etc. For these purposes, Taler is completely orthogonal and not a competitor at all.
- 99_00 6y ago
  How is bitcoin an improvement on money? Why is a standard on a physical or digital asset desirable, especially when the asset is rare. Wouldn't this unnecessarily restrict monetary policy?

wheybags 6y ago

So are there any real world instances running? Can we actually use this today? If not, is there a roadmap for opening one?

throaway876627 6y ago

Well, in practice buyers aren't going to be anonymous either: who has ever paid online without first being required to create an account on the seller's website before even having access to the payment page? And why would a business choose not to require account creation when it is in their best interest to require one to increase the lifetime value of the buyer (or even just simply to follow up with the order)? So this doesn't help with buyer privacy, and the exchanges will be banks in practice, and banks too are in the business of selling consumer spending data to data brokers... My point is, the only value proposition of GNU Taler therefore is standardizing online payments. But the W3C does a much better job at it with the Web Payments and Credit Transfers specifications.

elric 6y ago

What are the intended use cases here? Not many business are in the business of using custom currencies?

aarchi 6y ago

Great name. The word “Taler” derives from the “Joachimsthaler Guldengroschen” currency (Guilder groschen of St. Joachin's Valley), or “Thaler” for short. The coin was introduced in 1518 in the Holy Roman Empire and many currencies in Europe became named after the Thaler. The Dutch brought their “leeuwendaler” (lit. lion daler) coin to New Netherlands (now New York), lending its name to the US Dollar. I presume Taler was used for this project to match modern German orthography and to avoid confusion with the English ‘th’ ‹θ› sound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1chymov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1chymov

1f60c 6y ago
> The Dutch brought their “leeuwendaler” (lit. lion daler) coin to New Netherlands (now New York), lending its name to the US Dollar. I had to say "daler" a couple times fast before the penny dropped (no pun intended). That's so cool.

bokohut 6y ago

At this very moment the U.S. Financial Service Committee is holding a hearing on 'terrorism' and one would not be surprised to learn that 'cryptocurrency' is the main discussion. What is sacrificed when one is no longer able to "Follow the money."? edit

seany 6y ago
Nothing
- bokohut 6y ago
  I no AML/KYC expert but I have written software systems for fraud purposes before and with that in mind such systems, founded in data collection, are used every hour of every day to link people to activities, legal or not. Given the prolific prosecutorial proof available online as it relates to the value of "who took the money", "who was paid", "who has the money" in such legal cases clearly the institutions tasked with 'security' see a great threat in not being able to follow it.
  - seany 6y ago
    I was assuming the question was open to "moral" interpretations, rather than strictly legal ones. In turn I keep my position even with your concerns, because the utilitarian calculus of comparing "being able to pay for things anonymously" vs "this is helpful for fraud prevention" is basically a non question in my mind.
    - bokohut 6y ago
      My time spent in architecting and coding a fraud system was for employment and income which is not particularly representative of my views about personal privacy per say that we seem to share. I can pay cash for burner phones in stores with no point of purchase surveillance coverage or I can go into a big box and pay with credit and be all kinds of recorded. All about understanding the long game objective as the execution is the easy part.
6y ago

sneak 6y ago

In a rare case of where judging a book by its cover is actually valid, I am going to call it right now: the fact that this project can't even display their logo on their webpage correctly is an indicator of the general level of competence/seriousness brought to the table wrt competing with an existing global financial system that, to put it plainly, is competent and serious.

tom_mellior 6y ago
> this project can't even display their logo on their webpage Could you expand on what you mean? I can see a logo.
- sneak 6y ago
  Loading the linked webpage on the most popular web browsing device in the world displays their logo with an incorrect aspect ratio. It's pretty obvious that none of these free software zealots tested their software with an iPhone, a device that their target market actually uses. A refusal to use or promote nonfree software comes into slight conflict at times when developing consumer products, as the markets are captured by nonfree software distribution channels, a tragic fact. You have to be willing to bend your own rules slightly while remaining true to your principles, such as testing your website on an iPhone to make sure it works right when nonfree software users visit it to learn about why free software is better.

tom_mellior 6y ago

This looks exciting. Did anyone manage to work through the demo, though? I first installed the Taler Wallet for Android via F-Droid, and it can scan the QR code for withdrawing from the demo bank, but the actual withdrawal fails with some generic message that "withdrawals are currently not possible". Then I tried the browser extension in Firefox 84. It detects that it should be doing something, but never actually completes a withdrawal either.