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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/in

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. :-)
- dbrgn 5y ago
  Could Taler be used in a smaller scope already? For example, could it be used as an "account system" inside an association (like a hackerspace), where members can charge their accounts with Talers and then use these to pay drinks from the fridge, etc? Setups like this could be used to test the system in practice.
  - grothoff 5y ago
    Yes, but we still need to make it easier to setup/deploy this.
    - dbrgn 5y ago
      Once that goal is reached, I'd be happy to try it!
- jdfedgon 5y ago
  Even though I read the GNU Taler FAQ please excuse any lack of deeper knowledge about it. When dealing with those commercial banks what is currently the biggest challenge? Is it more the political arguments or the technical arguments of such a payment system that you need to stress? And, I couldn't find no definite answer to that: Could GNU Taler ultimately replace Bitcoin?
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    Given that for many larger banks, medieval things like overdraft fees and "re-ordering" same-day transactions so that deposits appear later in order to create additional overdraft fees are a huge part of their bottom-line, it doesn't surprise me that they would avoid relinquishing control to an open and fair standard they can't override. Also, I'm sure anti-money-laundering legislation complicates things in terms of the anonymity feature, despite the fact that merchants are fully auditable, though I assume users aren't able to transfer funds to non-merchants? Still, I'm sure the laws as written complicate this in some jurisdictions. For example, you could have a completely legitimate business registered as a merchant function as a money-laundering front that could then take in illicit funds from anonymous users working for the illicit org which actually secretly owns the merchant. I'm fine with that happening in the wild because the benefits of privacy for consumers are obvious to me and outweigh the negatives, but I bet regulators aren't so forgiving. In the wild this often happens -- there are plenty of "DDoS protection" services that by day offer legitimate services in the open and by night actually attack potential customers who they then offer their protection services to, so it is not at all unheard of for an illegitimate org to have a legitimate front. This sort of thing is rampant in the world of high-end minecraft servers, I'm told.

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. :-)

dbrgn 5y ago
Could Taler be used in a smaller scope already? For example, could it be used as an "account system" inside an association (like a hackerspace), where members can charge their accounts with Talers and then use these to pay drinks from the fridge, etc? Setups like this could be used to test the system in practice.
- grothoff 5y ago
  Yes, but we still need to make it easier to setup/deploy this.
  - dbrgn 5y ago
    Once that goal is reached, I'd be happy to try it!
jdfedgon 5y ago
Even though I read the GNU Taler FAQ please excuse any lack of deeper knowledge about it. When dealing with those commercial banks what is currently the biggest challenge? Is it more the political arguments or the technical arguments of such a payment system that you need to stress? And, I couldn't find no definite answer to that: Could GNU Taler ultimately replace Bitcoin?
- sam0x17 5y ago
  Given that for many larger banks, medieval things like overdraft fees and "re-ordering" same-day transactions so that deposits appear later in order to create additional overdraft fees are a huge part of their bottom-line, it doesn't surprise me that they would avoid relinquishing control to an open and fair standard they can't override. Also, I'm sure anti-money-laundering legislation complicates things in terms of the anonymity feature, despite the fact that merchants are fully auditable, though I assume users aren't able to transfer funds to non-merchants? Still, I'm sure the laws as written complicate this in some jurisdictions. For example, you could have a completely legitimate business registered as a merchant function as a money-laundering front that could then take in illicit funds from anonymous users working for the illicit org which actually secretly owns the merchant. I'm fine with that happening in the wild because the benefits of privacy for consumers are obvious to me and outweigh the negatives, but I bet regulators aren't so forgiving. In the wild this often happens -- there are plenty of "DDoS protection" services that by day offer legitimate services in the open and by night actually attack potential customers who they then offer their protection services to, so it is not at all unheard of for an illegitimate org to have a legitimate front. This sort of thing is rampant in the world of high-end minecraft servers, I'm told.