12 ms·

GNU Taler: An anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography

271 points by harporoeder 5y ago

grammers 5y ago
Sounds rather awesome, but does it have the potential to go mainstream?
zajio1am 5y ago
One thing i really do not like on GNU Taler is separate customer and merchant accounts with restriction of receiving money for merchant account only. In contrast to banking, where one has an account that works pretty much the same regardless of role of clients and nature of their transactions.
- grothoff 5y ago
  This will change in the future once we have implemented P2P payments. So consider it a feature on our roadmap. See https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/013-peer-to-peer-payments.html https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/013-peer-to-peer-pay...
- lisper 5y ago
  I dunno, one of the problems with modern banking is that the same account number is used for both incoming and outgoing transfers. That combined with the general lack of security makes it impossible for me to enable someone to put money into my account without also granting them the ability to take money out. Having separate accounts for incoming and outgoing would fix that. Of course, authorizing transactions with digital signatures fixes that too, but having separate accounts makes me feel kinda warm and fuzzy.
  - oceanofsolaris 5y ago
    But that is just an implementation detail of who is allowed to initiate outgoing transfers from your account. For me, I needed to send a signed letter to my bank to allow recurring debiting to my landlord (and since I stopped that, no entity except myself is allowed to initiate outbound transfers from my account). That's not to say the Taler model can't work or anything, just that having one number for inbound and one for outbound transfers isn't really necessary for basic account security. The "everyone who knows my account number can draw money from my account" problem seems weird to have (and trivially solvable) .... in which country is this the default?
    - lisper 5y ago
      That policy is particular to your bank. My bank (Chase) doesn't do that. Anyone who knows my account number and has access to ACH can drain my account. (I solve this by having two accounts, one of which I use for ACH, and the other which actually holds most of my money. I have to actively transfer money from one to the other on a regular basis, but it's worth the effort to me to mitigate the risk.)
      - zajio1am 5y ago
        > That policy is particular to your bank. Anyone who knows my account number and has access to ACH can drain my account. That is unimaginable to me. Here (Czechia), banks require explicit confirmation of direct debit transfers (limit for value per period of time for each initiator of direct debit).
        lisper 5y ago
        Yes it is rather shocking. The financial system in the US is screwed up in many ways. Sometimes I’m amazed that it works at all.
danShumway 5y ago
This comes up every so often on HN, it's been in development for a while. I do see at least some technical work happening in Taler (https://taler.net/en/news/index.html https://taler.net/en/news/index.html) so it doesn't look like the project is dead, but I'm having a hard time finding a roadmap. What is the overall state of Taler today? How close is this to being something tangible that I can hand to my parents where they can actually make real payments with it for an online product? Are there any businesses supporting it as a payment method yet? I vaguely remember last time I checked that it was still trying to get buy-in from banks? But I could be remembering wrong.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  GNU Taler is a nice software project. The problem with privacy-preserving centralized payment systems is that "writing software" remains the relatively easy part of the deployment puzzle: in practice you need to convince centralized banks and payment systems to deploy it for some application. Unfortunately, cryptographers have been trying to do this since the 1980s and DigiCash... with extremely limited success. Decentralized payment systems have changed the equation and now we're seeing a great deal of progress in the area of privacy-preserving payments, some for better and some for worse. I wish Taler could find some applications over there, but the developers don't seem interested. Which is only fair. (Disclosure: I've worked on decentralized private payment systems.)
  - bjelkeman-again 5y ago
    Completely agree on where the difficulties lie in getting something like this used. Eventually it will happen though. To me it is a question of timing.
- grothoff 5y ago
  There is no public roadmap on the business side as the commercial banks we are talking to are not yet willing to have their names disclosed to the public. They're rather conservative institutions (by nature), so they want things to be checked and double-checked and ready to go before going public. Plus it is not trivial (for them) to check all of the regulatory, technical and business checkboxes. I remain hopeful that we'll get through this mess "soon", but I've been too optimistic in the past. What I can say is that we have presented GNU Taler to over a dozen central banks already. We're trying to convince them that they must give citizens privacy and that an account-based system would give them too much power. So while the business side is not exactly transparent, what we do technically is all out there. And it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra time to reduce the list of known bugs before we go live. :-)
panick21_ 5y ago
I think GNUNet GNS system is really nice. I wish they would find an application that actually uses it. The problem with all that GNUNet stuff its that its almost all research, no real active open source project built around them. I really like re:claimID, basically OpenID Connect auth against your local device. But it would of course need much more work to be practical. https://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/de/fields-of-expertise/projekte/reclaim.html https://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/de/fields-of-expertise/proje... Overall its all very cool and this is in no way criticism on anybody that works on it. I am just point out to people that if you want to get involved or build on top of it what it is. I would them to work together with some of those Peer-to-peer chat systems or something like that. PS: New GnuNet release: https://www.gnunet.org/en/news/2022-02-0.16.0.html https://www.gnunet.org/en/news/2022-02-0.16.0.html
- lxgr 5y ago
  Is GnuNet related to Taler (other than also being developed under the GNU umbrella)?
  - grothoff 5y ago
    GNU Taler uses some libraries from GNUnet (and there is some overlap in core developers), but GNU Taler does not use the P2P (or GNS) functionality of GNUnet.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      I thought Taler did you the P2P stuff. Thanks for the correction. Thank you for your work!
Comevius 5y ago
It's a great project, but there is nothing in it for grifters. There is not much hype or fervor for innovation these days that doesn't involve potential bagholders.
- rvz 5y ago
  You mean the Signal Messenger, and MobileCoin pump and dump hype scheme?
CryptoPunk 5y ago
[flagged]
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  If you're talking about the "taxibility" aspect of it, that's not a back door because it's right there in the front of the house, with a big banner and a red arrow pointing at it painted on the driveway. Whether you'd like that particular house to have a door is a different matter entirely, but the design of Taler seems to be aiming for "let's make digital cash that a central bank might actually want to issue" and VAT is absolutely a part of that.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Encryption backdoors are not exclusively covert: https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/all-about-encryption-backdoors/ https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/all-about-encryption-backdo... This is a backdoor, and puts to a lie the idea that this is in any way "anonymous". It's a tool of the state, to further centralize power around it.
    - samhw 5y ago
      Backdoors are covert by definition. You're talking about an avowed feature you don't like. There's a difference (and finding some random blog post that makes the same mistake is not a proof of anything).
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        That is not how the term is defined. Note from the article: >>An encryption backdoor is any method that allows a user (whether authorized or not) to bypass encryption and gain access to a system. Nothing in there about the method having to be covert. When the Clipper Chip was proposed in the early 1990s, or when governments publicly propose encryption bypasses today, the mainstream news coverage refers to these mechanisms as "backdoors", despite no covert element in it.
joshuajill 5y ago
GNU Taler is already operational at Bern University of Applied Sciences https://taler.net/en/news/2020-09.html https://taler.net/en/news/2020-09.html Last thing I've learnt they were in touch with some Spanish bank institution to work on an implementation. I guess a lot goes on behind closed doors.
gyulai 5y ago
taxable? bug or feature?
- can16358p 5y ago
  Feature for developed countries, bug for corrupt ones.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
This is a really cool idea. I am interested in seeing other types of cryptographically secure payment or monetary systems come about, but decidedly not ones you'd call "crypto," much like Taler very carefully explains it is not. For example, deflationary gold-like digital currencies just don't work. Fundamentally. It's a futile exercise to debate. But debt-based digital currencies run into some really hard problems. How do you know if someone is good for their IOUs? If someone takes out a large amount of debt, what prevents them from dropping their wallet/identity and moving on to a new one and wiping themselves clear of their debts? Are all of these social issues? Does a new credit system built into such a currency serve as the basis for preventing someone from not paying their debts back to the network? Even if a credit system was built into the digital currency, someone can always create a new identity if there is no requirement for verification, but how do you design a system that does not require it?
adrianmonk 5y ago
> As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers. Pulling this off in the United States sounds somewhere between very challenging and impossible. Sales tax is not uniform. Rates vary not only by state but also at a local level. In some states, sales taxes can be imposed by the state, by counties, by cities, by school districts, by transit authorities, and by other entities like special purpose districts[1]. Which ones (plural) of these sales taxes (plural) apply to a transaction depends on the buyer's location. In many cases, knowing the buyer's city, state, and zip code is not granular enough. For example, the boundaries of a school district may not correspond to zip code or city. The typical approach today is to collect the buyer's full address. From that, there are databases that will tell you the list of jurisdictions and taxes that apply. Obviously, that's not very anonymous. Maybe you could have the buyer determine all of the jurisdictions/taxes that apply to them and send only that info instead. That's less granular, but in some cases it might give away a lot of information. (Sort of like browser fingerprinting.) But if you do that, I'm not sure what the implications would be for sellers. Sellers are required to collect the sales tax and remit it to the state. They can get in trouble for not doing it right. Governments don't like it when their taxes don't get collected, so they sometimes create laws that put the burden of compliance on the seller. --- [1] Special purpose districts could allow a county or local government to, for example, pick an arbitrary area and impose a sales tax within it just to support libraries that serve that area. Or crime prevention, road improvement, emergency services, hospitals, parks, economic development, etc.
- MoSattler 5y ago
  Maybe they merely point out that merchants cannot hide their identity and hence be identified and taxed. Not that it would be deducted automatically.
  - grothoff 5y ago
    Correct. The income is merely made visible. Paying taxes is still something each merchant has to do (and calculate correctly).
  - 5y ago
jqpabc123 5y ago
Sorry, I just don't get it. Seems like a lot of work to offer a less functional alternative to a VISA gift card purchased with cash. The only real advantage I see is you don't need to stop by WalMart. Maybe the activation fees with Taler are less but I'm sure it's also less widely accepted. VISA eGift cards are now available for purchase online with funds deposited to a digital wallet. These won't be totally anonymous but then as far as I can tell, neither is Taler --- to provide all the functionality they claim, they will need to maintain records of both purchaser and merchant.
- summm 5y ago
  In addition to the huge advantage of not needing to get cash from an ATM and physically carry it to the card vendor: Transactions made on the same eGift card wallet are tied together. With Taler you have a wallet with coins you can spend separately, and which cannot be correlated, neither by your bank nor the merchant. What makes you believe anyone (except maybe the purchaser themselves) needs to maintain records about the purchaser? As far as I understood it, their claim is that exactly this is not necessary.
  - jqpabc123 5y ago
    What makes you believe anyone (except maybe the purchaser themselves) needs to maintain records about the purchaser? Unless you buy your digital coins using cash, the exchanges have the identity of those who purchase and redeem coins/tokens. From the documentation: Taler is compatible with anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) regulation, as well as data protection regulation (such as GDPR). AML and KYC are all about removing anonymity. Merchants may not have the ability to correlate a purchase to you but the exchanges do; otherwise, they wouldn't be able to comply.
    - summm 5y ago
      If you buy a coin, you have the bank sign it blindly, that means, after you unblind it, it is mathematically not possible to deeive any correlation between the coin and what the bank saw. The bank only knows the value of the coin(s) you bought, not the identity, and, apparently this seems enough to fulfill those regulations? If you draw cash from an ATM, the bank also has an exact record from that ATM. And in addition might have recorded serial numbers of the banknotes... The exchange gets information about the merchant, but not about the purchaser (at least from the coin. The merchant might submit info about the purchaser such as the shipping address, but that is independent of the payment mechanism). That's strictly less than any credit card transaction.
dang 5y ago
Related: GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850143 - Jan 2022 (48 comments) GNU Taler 0.8 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301172 - Aug 2021 (9 comments) GNU Taler – A free software, privacy-friendly payment system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302634 - May 2021 (1 comment) GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261314 - Feb 2021 (110 comments) GNU Taler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274110 - Sept 2017 (147 comments) GNU Taler 0.0.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11840453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11840453 - June 2016 (187 comments) GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258312 - Sept 2015 (183 comments)
godelski 5y ago
I'm always confused why taxability is a concern when it comes to cryptocurrencies. It is often brought up, including in the congressional hearings. How would it be any different than when we worked with cash? We were working with cash or checks until very recently. It seems rather simple to me. Employers still have to declare pay, stores still charge sales tax, and you can even build in a consumption tax (state level or federal) that applies to every transaction. A fully anonymous cryptocurrency doesn't seem to interfere with taxation in any way (in fact, if you built in a consumption tax to the gas fees you could essentially collect taxes from other countries). Is there something I'm missing here?
- mattnewton 5y ago
  I think it would be a major selling point for state adoption. Cracking down on cash based tax evasion is often a major benefit touted when economies look to move to digital currencies, and most digital solutions to this problem "solve" it by throwing away anonymity. I most often see cashless solutions presented as a choice between do you want this system to be rampant with tax evasion and illicit activities but anonymous like bitcoin, or do you want someone keeping full plaintext records on every party in every transaction down to their street address and IP where the transaction was made like paypal.
  - godelski 5y ago
    How much tax is being avoid by cash payments? I can't imagine very much. If you're a business then there's too high of a risk unless you're a small fry. Maybe I'm missing something. But I imagine 90% of taxes aren't coming from those small enough to slip by. I also see an easy solution: 0.5% transaction fee built into the cryptocurrency.
gojomo 5y ago
On the one hand, this seems to prioritize... • a dependency on a central exchange whose failure, or compromise, harms users; & • vigorous enforcement of taxes – & potentially other onerous regulatory limitations That may make it less of interest to many early adopters of cryptocurrencies. On the other hand, there's technologically lots of potential for proving compliance with tax & regulatory regimes in a strong, minimal, privay-preserving way – helping refactor cooperation with legitimate governance in ways that don't create extra, incidental vulnerabilities to other privacy or extra-legal coercive abuses. This could help advance those practices & highlight future design choices. Whether intentional or not, there's a hint of the word 'Thaler' in the name – originally derived from a place name ('Joachimstal' in modern Czechia) near historically-iimportant silver mining, and also a precursor of the modern English word 'dollar'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler#Joachimsthaler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler#Joachimsthaler
kkfx 5y ago
Honestly I consider cryptos a trap even worse than actual "official fiat money": yes, formally they are able to operate peer to peer without a central bank/a banking system. Unfortunately they relay on an append-only "big file". No matter how efficient it can be in storage terms, no matter how much it can be tweaked, a day or another, after years of usage, it will grow too much to be used by essentially all people except those with big datacenters. I see the same mechanic behind "free services" that start "gratis" and one took off start adding small fees, more small fees, not-so-small fees etc until they get classic commercial-only services and users now deeply tied with them can't escape. Not counting the fact that without a network and relevant hw and sw we can't just exchange money, with cash we just need to have them and a third party with a hand. It's a bit condensed but I think the point it's clear enough...
xrd 5y ago
I'm interested in trying this but after creating an account on their bank, I could not use the Android app to connect to it. It would be great to have a better onboarding experience. Because it is GNU I've got more hope that this is a reputable payment cryptocurrency.

271 points by harporoeder 5y ago

Sounds rather awesome, but does it have the potential to go mainstream?

One thing i really do not like on GNU Taler is separate customer and merchant accounts with restriction of receiving money for merchant account only. In contrast to banking, where one has an account that works pretty much the same regardless of role of clients and nature of their transactions.

grothoff 5y ago
This will change in the future once we have implemented P2P payments. So consider it a feature on our roadmap. See https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/013-peer-to-peer-payments.html https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/013-peer-to-peer-pay...
lisper 5y ago
I dunno, one of the problems with modern banking is that the same account number is used for both incoming and outgoing transfers. That combined with the general lack of security makes it impossible for me to enable someone to put money into my account without also granting them the ability to take money out. Having separate accounts for incoming and outgoing would fix that. Of course, authorizing transactions with digital signatures fixes that too, but having separate accounts makes me feel kinda warm and fuzzy.
- oceanofsolaris 5y ago
  But that is just an implementation detail of who is allowed to initiate outgoing transfers from your account. For me, I needed to send a signed letter to my bank to allow recurring debiting to my landlord (and since I stopped that, no entity except myself is allowed to initiate outbound transfers from my account). That's not to say the Taler model can't work or anything, just that having one number for inbound and one for outbound transfers isn't really necessary for basic account security. The "everyone who knows my account number can draw money from my account" problem seems weird to have (and trivially solvable) .... in which country is this the default?
  - lisper 5y ago
    That policy is particular to your bank. My bank (Chase) doesn't do that. Anyone who knows my account number and has access to ACH can drain my account. (I solve this by having two accounts, one of which I use for ACH, and the other which actually holds most of my money. I have to actively transfer money from one to the other on a regular basis, but it's worth the effort to me to mitigate the risk.)
    - zajio1am 5y ago
      > That policy is particular to your bank. Anyone who knows my account number and has access to ACH can drain my account. That is unimaginable to me. Here (Czechia), banks require explicit confirmation of direct debit transfers (limit for value per period of time for each initiator of direct debit).
      - lisper 5y ago
        Yes it is rather shocking. The financial system in the US is screwed up in many ways. Sometimes I’m amazed that it works at all.

danShumway 5y ago

This comes up every so often on HN, it's been in development for a while. I do see at least some technical work happening in Taler (https://taler.net/en/news/index.html https://taler.net/en/news/index.html) so it doesn't look like the project is dead, but I'm having a hard time finding a roadmap. What is the overall state of Taler today? How close is this to being something tangible that I can hand to my parents where they can actually make real payments with it for an online product? Are there any businesses supporting it as a payment method yet? I vaguely remember last time I checked that it was still trying to get buy-in from banks? But I could be remembering wrong.

matthewdgreen 5y ago
GNU Taler is a nice software project. The problem with privacy-preserving centralized payment systems is that "writing software" remains the relatively easy part of the deployment puzzle: in practice you need to convince centralized banks and payment systems to deploy it for some application. Unfortunately, cryptographers have been trying to do this since the 1980s and DigiCash... with extremely limited success. Decentralized payment systems have changed the equation and now we're seeing a great deal of progress in the area of privacy-preserving payments, some for better and some for worse. I wish Taler could find some applications over there, but the developers don't seem interested. Which is only fair. (Disclosure: I've worked on decentralized private payment systems.)
- bjelkeman-again 5y ago
  Completely agree on where the difficulties lie in getting something like this used. Eventually it will happen though. To me it is a question of timing.
grothoff 5y ago
There is no public roadmap on the business side as the commercial banks we are talking to are not yet willing to have their names disclosed to the public. They're rather conservative institutions (by nature), so they want things to be checked and double-checked and ready to go before going public. Plus it is not trivial (for them) to check all of the regulatory, technical and business checkboxes. I remain hopeful that we'll get through this mess "soon", but I've been too optimistic in the past. What I can say is that we have presented GNU Taler to over a dozen central banks already. We're trying to convince them that they must give citizens privacy and that an account-based system would give them too much power. So while the business side is not exactly transparent, what we do technically is all out there. And it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra time to reduce the list of known bugs before we go live. :-)

panick21_ 5y ago

I think GNUNet GNS system is really nice. I wish they would find an application that actually uses it. The problem with all that GNUNet stuff its that its almost all research, no real active open source project built around them. I really like re:claimID, basically OpenID Connect auth against your local device. But it would of course need much more work to be practical. https://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/de/fields-of-expertise/projekte/reclaim.html https://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/de/fields-of-expertise/proje... Overall its all very cool and this is in no way criticism on anybody that works on it. I am just point out to people that if you want to get involved or build on top of it what it is. I would them to work together with some of those Peer-to-peer chat systems or something like that. PS: New GnuNet release: https://www.gnunet.org/en/news/2022-02-0.16.0.html https://www.gnunet.org/en/news/2022-02-0.16.0.html

lxgr 5y ago
Is GnuNet related to Taler (other than also being developed under the GNU umbrella)?
- grothoff 5y ago
  GNU Taler uses some libraries from GNUnet (and there is some overlap in core developers), but GNU Taler does not use the P2P (or GNS) functionality of GNUnet.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    I thought Taler did you the P2P stuff. Thanks for the correction. Thank you for your work!

Comevius 5y ago

It's a great project, but there is nothing in it for grifters. There is not much hype or fervor for innovation these days that doesn't involve potential bagholders.

rvz 5y ago
You mean the Signal Messenger, and MobileCoin pump and dump hype scheme?

CryptoPunk 5y ago

[flagged]

black_puppydog 5y ago
If you're talking about the "taxibility" aspect of it, that's not a back door because it's right there in the front of the house, with a big banner and a red arrow pointing at it painted on the driveway. Whether you'd like that particular house to have a door is a different matter entirely, but the design of Taler seems to be aiming for "let's make digital cash that a central bank might actually want to issue" and VAT is absolutely a part of that.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Encryption backdoors are not exclusively covert: https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/all-about-encryption-backdoors/ https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/all-about-encryption-backdo... This is a backdoor, and puts to a lie the idea that this is in any way "anonymous". It's a tool of the state, to further centralize power around it.
  - samhw 5y ago
    Backdoors are covert by definition. You're talking about an avowed feature you don't like. There's a difference (and finding some random blog post that makes the same mistake is not a proof of anything).
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      That is not how the term is defined. Note from the article: >>An encryption backdoor is any method that allows a user (whether authorized or not) to bypass encryption and gain access to a system. Nothing in there about the method having to be covert. When the Clipper Chip was proposed in the early 1990s, or when governments publicly propose encryption bypasses today, the mainstream news coverage refers to these mechanisms as "backdoors", despite no covert element in it.

joshuajill 5y ago

GNU Taler is already operational at Bern University of Applied Sciences https://taler.net/en/news/2020-09.html https://taler.net/en/news/2020-09.html Last thing I've learnt they were in touch with some Spanish bank institution to work on an implementation. I guess a lot goes on behind closed doors.

gyulai 5y ago

taxable? bug or feature?

can16358p 5y ago
Feature for developed countries, bug for corrupt ones.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

This is a really cool idea. I am interested in seeing other types of cryptographically secure payment or monetary systems come about, but decidedly not ones you'd call "crypto," much like Taler very carefully explains it is not. For example, deflationary gold-like digital currencies just don't work. Fundamentally. It's a futile exercise to debate. But debt-based digital currencies run into some really hard problems. How do you know if someone is good for their IOUs? If someone takes out a large amount of debt, what prevents them from dropping their wallet/identity and moving on to a new one and wiping themselves clear of their debts? Are all of these social issues? Does a new credit system built into such a currency serve as the basis for preventing someone from not paying their debts back to the network? Even if a credit system was built into the digital currency, someone can always create a new identity if there is no requirement for verification, but how do you design a system that does not require it?

adrianmonk 5y ago

> As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers. Pulling this off in the United States sounds somewhere between very challenging and impossible. Sales tax is not uniform. Rates vary not only by state but also at a local level. In some states, sales taxes can be imposed by the state, by counties, by cities, by school districts, by transit authorities, and by other entities like special purpose districts[1]. Which ones (plural) of these sales taxes (plural) apply to a transaction depends on the buyer's location. In many cases, knowing the buyer's city, state, and zip code is not granular enough. For example, the boundaries of a school district may not correspond to zip code or city. The typical approach today is to collect the buyer's full address. From that, there are databases that will tell you the list of jurisdictions and taxes that apply. Obviously, that's not very anonymous. Maybe you could have the buyer determine all of the jurisdictions/taxes that apply to them and send only that info instead. That's less granular, but in some cases it might give away a lot of information. (Sort of like browser fingerprinting.) But if you do that, I'm not sure what the implications would be for sellers. Sellers are required to collect the sales tax and remit it to the state. They can get in trouble for not doing it right. Governments don't like it when their taxes don't get collected, so they sometimes create laws that put the burden of compliance on the seller. --- [1] Special purpose districts could allow a county or local government to, for example, pick an arbitrary area and impose a sales tax within it just to support libraries that serve that area. Or crime prevention, road improvement, emergency services, hospitals, parks, economic development, etc.

MoSattler 5y ago
Maybe they merely point out that merchants cannot hide their identity and hence be identified and taxed. Not that it would be deducted automatically.
- grothoff 5y ago
  Correct. The income is merely made visible. Paying taxes is still something each merchant has to do (and calculate correctly).
- 5y ago

jqpabc123 5y ago

Sorry, I just don't get it. Seems like a lot of work to offer a less functional alternative to a VISA gift card purchased with cash. The only real advantage I see is you don't need to stop by WalMart. Maybe the activation fees with Taler are less but I'm sure it's also less widely accepted. VISA eGift cards are now available for purchase online with funds deposited to a digital wallet. These won't be totally anonymous but then as far as I can tell, neither is Taler --- to provide all the functionality they claim, they will need to maintain records of both purchaser and merchant.

summm 5y ago
In addition to the huge advantage of not needing to get cash from an ATM and physically carry it to the card vendor: Transactions made on the same eGift card wallet are tied together. With Taler you have a wallet with coins you can spend separately, and which cannot be correlated, neither by your bank nor the merchant. What makes you believe anyone (except maybe the purchaser themselves) needs to maintain records about the purchaser? As far as I understood it, their claim is that exactly this is not necessary.
- jqpabc123 5y ago
  What makes you believe anyone (except maybe the purchaser themselves) needs to maintain records about the purchaser? Unless you buy your digital coins using cash, the exchanges have the identity of those who purchase and redeem coins/tokens. From the documentation: Taler is compatible with anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) regulation, as well as data protection regulation (such as GDPR). AML and KYC are all about removing anonymity. Merchants may not have the ability to correlate a purchase to you but the exchanges do; otherwise, they wouldn't be able to comply.
  - summm 5y ago
    If you buy a coin, you have the bank sign it blindly, that means, after you unblind it, it is mathematically not possible to deeive any correlation between the coin and what the bank saw. The bank only knows the value of the coin(s) you bought, not the identity, and, apparently this seems enough to fulfill those regulations? If you draw cash from an ATM, the bank also has an exact record from that ATM. And in addition might have recorded serial numbers of the banknotes... The exchange gets information about the merchant, but not about the purchaser (at least from the coin. The merchant might submit info about the purchaser such as the shipping address, but that is independent of the payment mechanism). That's strictly less than any credit card transaction.

dang 5y ago

Related: GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850143 - Jan 2022 (48 comments) GNU Taler 0.8 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301172 - Aug 2021 (9 comments) GNU Taler – A free software, privacy-friendly payment system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302634 - May 2021 (1 comment) GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261314 - Feb 2021 (110 comments) GNU Taler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274110 - Sept 2017 (147 comments) GNU Taler 0.0.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11840453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11840453 - June 2016 (187 comments) GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258312 - Sept 2015 (183 comments)

godelski 5y ago

I'm always confused why taxability is a concern when it comes to cryptocurrencies. It is often brought up, including in the congressional hearings. How would it be any different than when we worked with cash? We were working with cash or checks until very recently. It seems rather simple to me. Employers still have to declare pay, stores still charge sales tax, and you can even build in a consumption tax (state level or federal) that applies to every transaction. A fully anonymous cryptocurrency doesn't seem to interfere with taxation in any way (in fact, if you built in a consumption tax to the gas fees you could essentially collect taxes from other countries). Is there something I'm missing here?

mattnewton 5y ago
I think it would be a major selling point for state adoption. Cracking down on cash based tax evasion is often a major benefit touted when economies look to move to digital currencies, and most digital solutions to this problem "solve" it by throwing away anonymity. I most often see cashless solutions presented as a choice between do you want this system to be rampant with tax evasion and illicit activities but anonymous like bitcoin, or do you want someone keeping full plaintext records on every party in every transaction down to their street address and IP where the transaction was made like paypal.
- godelski 5y ago
  How much tax is being avoid by cash payments? I can't imagine very much. If you're a business then there's too high of a risk unless you're a small fry. Maybe I'm missing something. But I imagine 90% of taxes aren't coming from those small enough to slip by. I also see an easy solution: 0.5% transaction fee built into the cryptocurrency.

gojomo 5y ago

On the one hand, this seems to prioritize... • a dependency on a central exchange whose failure, or compromise, harms users; & • vigorous enforcement of taxes – & potentially other onerous regulatory limitations That may make it less of interest to many early adopters of cryptocurrencies. On the other hand, there's technologically lots of potential for proving compliance with tax & regulatory regimes in a strong, minimal, privay-preserving way – helping refactor cooperation with legitimate governance in ways that don't create extra, incidental vulnerabilities to other privacy or extra-legal coercive abuses. This could help advance those practices & highlight future design choices. Whether intentional or not, there's a hint of the word 'Thaler' in the name – originally derived from a place name ('Joachimstal' in modern Czechia) near historically-iimportant silver mining, and also a precursor of the modern English word 'dollar'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler#Joachimsthaler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler#Joachimsthaler

kkfx 5y ago

Honestly I consider cryptos a trap even worse than actual "official fiat money": yes, formally they are able to operate peer to peer without a central bank/a banking system. Unfortunately they relay on an append-only "big file". No matter how efficient it can be in storage terms, no matter how much it can be tweaked, a day or another, after years of usage, it will grow too much to be used by essentially all people except those with big datacenters. I see the same mechanic behind "free services" that start "gratis" and one took off start adding small fees, more small fees, not-so-small fees etc until they get classic commercial-only services and users now deeply tied with them can't escape. Not counting the fact that without a network and relevant hw and sw we can't just exchange money, with cash we just need to have them and a third party with a hand. It's a bit condensed but I think the point it's clear enough...

xrd 5y ago

I'm interested in trying this but after creating an account on their bank, I could not use the Android app to connect to it. It would be great to have a better onboarding experience. Because it is GNU I've got more hope that this is a reputable payment cryptocurrency.