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> Taler proposes an extraordinarily unethical panopticon, where unaccountable entities (both commercial and governmental) without any due process can surveil ev

> Taler proposes an extraordinarily unethical panopticon, where unaccountable entities (both commercial and governmental) without any due process can surveil every transaction you make. No, actually, you are describing the current state of affairs with mainstream online payment systems like PayPal and Venmo Taler uses blind signatures which means that your exchange has no knowledge of where you are spending your tokens. In essence, when you make a payment the merchant knows you have an IOU to the exchange, the exchange knows it's a valid IOU, but since it was issued with a blind signature the exchange is not aware that it's an IOU that was issued to you. This gives you privacy that parallels the use of real world cash.

nullc 6y ago
Chaumian digital cash is fine, but that isn't what taler actually implements. Instead, it requires the recipient to identify themselves and the amounts for every payments. This is a continuous realtime surveillance which does not exist for cash. Used perfectly it might be potentially more private than paypal, but no one is under any illusion that paypal is particularly private. On a scale of ethical behavior providing strong privacy is superior to providing limited privacy but both are vastly superior to falsely claiming something has strong privacy when it is limited. Taler takes matters a step further a falsely claim that its continuous realtime mass surveillance is required to facilitate lawful taxation. This claim is false-- an outright lie in fact. Not only is it technically not required, it's not legally required either and taxation has existed for countless generations when this kind of electronic surveillance was unimaginable.
- helen___keller 6y ago
  > falsely claiming something has strong privacy when it is limited Taler provides strong privacy for buyers, not for merchants. It's important to note that Taler is not a peer-to-peer system for transferring money (there are claims for interest in implementing such a system in the future, but it does not exist), so the receiver is always a merchant Personally I don't mind that businesses are surveilled when I purchase at them, because businesses are not people and do not have the right to avoid surveillance. I would be very concerned if such surveillance could extend to me, but as discussed Taler provides buyers privacy and blindly signed tokens cannot be traced to me.
  - hdevalence 6y ago
    At the end of the day, balance sheets always balance, every transaction has two sides, and privacy for only one side of every transaction is impossible.
    - igorkraw 6y ago
      Yes it is. You just write down "got 5 bucks from customer" and submit it to the tax office. Now one side is anonymous (customers) and the other not (merchant)
      - Ar-Curunir 6y ago
        And before that the customer writes down “received 5 bucks”. Then you match up the two and can track the customer’s spending habits
        littlestymaar 6y ago
        Well, If all you have is “A spent $5” and “B received $5” you are still missing a lot of info to identify that A and B are part of the same transaction (there are thousands of $5 trades every day) But that's not even how Taler works: you withdraw an arbitrary amount of Taler (say $50), this is what is recorded on the consumer side, but then you have anonymous tokens (exactly like coins and bills) that you can spend without connecting to anything: only the supplier need to have a connection to a certification entity (which ensure no double spending).
        runeks 6y ago
        What is the denomination of these tokens? Do I hand over 500 one-cent tokens to pay $5?
        littlestymaar 6y ago
        That's the coolest thing about Taler: there is a thing called “the refresh protocol”[1] which allows you to obtain change after a transaction: that is, for instance you pay with a $7 token for your $5 transaction, and you get a $2 change token! [1]: section “4.7.4. Refreshing and Linking” in this paper https://ged.univ-rennes1.fr/nuxeo/site/esupversions/41aac1ac-3074-4b0e-9087-cee5f58ce0b2?inline https://ged.univ-rennes1.fr/nuxeo/site/esupversions/41aac1ac...
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  I would take this even a step further. To state the obvious, the hard part of building a private currency system is building the private currency system. Once you've done that, it's relatively easy to deliberately relax the privacy guarantees of the system in straightforward ways if that is something you want to do. (Whether this is advisable is totally orthogonal. I'm speaking strictly at a technical level.) Think about this like having a perfect invisibility device. Once you have such a technology, it's relatively easy to make yourself deliberately more visible: e.g., throw a can of paint over your invisible body.* But Taler doesn't start out by building what I consider to be a very strong privacy base and then allowing for optional relaxations. Instead it makes a series of design decisions that begin with the idea that privacy will be limited in certain ways, and then bakes those design choices all the way down to the foundations of the protocol. This means the designers have chosen the deployment parameters, rather than the people and democracies who might actually want to make the decisions. This rubs me the wrong way. * This has in the past been interpreted by people as me saying "I think backdoors are great", which is funny and also not true.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    The main problem is that certain guarantees about behavior are fundamentally incompatible with certain attributes of transactions; you can have meaningful assertions that hold only if all transactions meet some criteria and there is no optionality, because the intentional abuse will simply choose the set of options that circumvent whatever conditions you want to enforce. Using your own example, if your "world" supports a perfect invisibility device, then your world can't provide any guarantees that under certain conditions specific things will be seen - you can't have your cake and eat it too, if you want or need such guarantees, then you need to design a world where a perfect invisibility device is impossible. Stability of any financial system needs an ability to protect against malicious, resourceful actors. Just as a proof-of-work coin needs to protect against double-spending and miner collusion, a Taler-like system needs to protect against malicious exchanges (so, the requirements foor auditability) and against malicious fraudulent merchants (so, the requirements to ensure that there's no option that a malicious merchant might use to cash out anonymously after receiving a payment). Perhaps there is some way to satisfy all needs, but I personally doubt that, there are too many fundamentally opposite requirements (anonymity vs AML; circumventing gov't control vs ability to take legal action; irreversibility vs reversibility of fraud, etc) - and a system has to choose! If 99% of your transactions use a reversible mode and 1% are irreversible and untraceable, well, you can't have fraud protection for hacked wallets since those will use the irreversible and untraceable option; if you want feature A, you have to ensure that feature B is impossible.

nullc 6y ago

Chaumian digital cash is fine, but that isn't what taler actually implements. Instead, it requires the recipient to identify themselves and the amounts for every payments. This is a continuous realtime surveillance which does not exist for cash. Used perfectly it might be potentially more private than paypal, but no one is under any illusion that paypal is particularly private. On a scale of ethical behavior providing strong privacy is superior to providing limited privacy but both are vastly superior to falsely claiming something has strong privacy when it is limited. Taler takes matters a step further a falsely claim that its continuous realtime mass surveillance is required to facilitate lawful taxation. This claim is false-- an outright lie in fact. Not only is it technically not required, it's not legally required either and taxation has existed for countless generations when this kind of electronic surveillance was unimaginable.

helen___keller 6y ago
> falsely claiming something has strong privacy when it is limited Taler provides strong privacy for buyers, not for merchants. It's important to note that Taler is not a peer-to-peer system for transferring money (there are claims for interest in implementing such a system in the future, but it does not exist), so the receiver is always a merchant Personally I don't mind that businesses are surveilled when I purchase at them, because businesses are not people and do not have the right to avoid surveillance. I would be very concerned if such surveillance could extend to me, but as discussed Taler provides buyers privacy and blindly signed tokens cannot be traced to me.
- hdevalence 6y ago
  At the end of the day, balance sheets always balance, every transaction has two sides, and privacy for only one side of every transaction is impossible.
  - igorkraw 6y ago
    Yes it is. You just write down "got 5 bucks from customer" and submit it to the tax office. Now one side is anonymous (customers) and the other not (merchant)
    - Ar-Curunir 6y ago
      And before that the customer writes down “received 5 bucks”. Then you match up the two and can track the customer’s spending habits
      - littlestymaar 6y ago
        Well, If all you have is “A spent $5” and “B received $5” you are still missing a lot of info to identify that A and B are part of the same transaction (there are thousands of $5 trades every day) But that's not even how Taler works: you withdraw an arbitrary amount of Taler (say $50), this is what is recorded on the consumer side, but then you have anonymous tokens (exactly like coins and bills) that you can spend without connecting to anything: only the supplier need to have a connection to a certification entity (which ensure no double spending).
        runeks 6y ago
        What is the denomination of these tokens? Do I hand over 500 one-cent tokens to pay $5?
        littlestymaar 6y ago
        That's the coolest thing about Taler: there is a thing called “the refresh protocol”[1] which allows you to obtain change after a transaction: that is, for instance you pay with a $7 token for your $5 transaction, and you get a $2 change token! [1]: section “4.7.4. Refreshing and Linking” in this paper https://ged.univ-rennes1.fr/nuxeo/site/esupversions/41aac1ac-3074-4b0e-9087-cee5f58ce0b2?inline https://ged.univ-rennes1.fr/nuxeo/site/esupversions/41aac1ac...
matthewdgreen 6y ago
I would take this even a step further. To state the obvious, the hard part of building a private currency system is building the private currency system. Once you've done that, it's relatively easy to deliberately relax the privacy guarantees of the system in straightforward ways if that is something you want to do. (Whether this is advisable is totally orthogonal. I'm speaking strictly at a technical level.) Think about this like having a perfect invisibility device. Once you have such a technology, it's relatively easy to make yourself deliberately more visible: e.g., throw a can of paint over your invisible body.* But Taler doesn't start out by building what I consider to be a very strong privacy base and then allowing for optional relaxations. Instead it makes a series of design decisions that begin with the idea that privacy will be limited in certain ways, and then bakes those design choices all the way down to the foundations of the protocol. This means the designers have chosen the deployment parameters, rather than the people and democracies who might actually want to make the decisions. This rubs me the wrong way. * This has in the past been interpreted by people as me saying "I think backdoors are great", which is funny and also not true.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  The main problem is that certain guarantees about behavior are fundamentally incompatible with certain attributes of transactions; you can have meaningful assertions that hold only if all transactions meet some criteria and there is no optionality, because the intentional abuse will simply choose the set of options that circumvent whatever conditions you want to enforce. Using your own example, if your "world" supports a perfect invisibility device, then your world can't provide any guarantees that under certain conditions specific things will be seen - you can't have your cake and eat it too, if you want or need such guarantees, then you need to design a world where a perfect invisibility device is impossible. Stability of any financial system needs an ability to protect against malicious, resourceful actors. Just as a proof-of-work coin needs to protect against double-spending and miner collusion, a Taler-like system needs to protect against malicious exchanges (so, the requirements foor auditability) and against malicious fraudulent merchants (so, the requirements to ensure that there's no option that a malicious merchant might use to cash out anonymously after receiving a payment). Perhaps there is some way to satisfy all needs, but I personally doubt that, there are too many fundamentally opposite requirements (anonymity vs AML; circumventing gov't control vs ability to take legal action; irreversibility vs reversibility of fraud, etc) - and a system has to choose! If 99% of your transactions use a reversible mode and 1% are irreversible and untraceable, well, you can't have fraud protection for hacked wallets since those will use the irreversible and untraceable option; if you want feature A, you have to ensure that feature B is impossible.