5 ms·

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 ar

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.
    - croes 5y ago
      Where does it say that the encryption is bypassed?
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > Note from the article The "SSLStore" is not the definitive source on the definition of a backdoor. It's just an EV certificate merchant. Authorization plays a role in whether or not something is a backdoor. It's not a rigid definition because language isn't actually rigid, backdoors are defined in part by whether or not they're expected and wanted by the end-user, which is inherently a fuzzy category. But it's silly to say that any access method authorized or not is a backdoor, by that logic my own encrypted computer hard drive has a glaring backdoor in the form of me knowing the passphrase for it.
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        If you google the term, and find any article on the term, you'll see that it is not limited to access methods that are covert. Here's another top 10 result: https://www.klemchuk.com/ideate/encryption-backdoors-and-balancing-privacy https://www.klemchuk.com/ideate/encryption-backdoors-and-bal... Pubicly proposed interception mechanisms, like the Clipper Chip, were widely referred to as a backdoor, as have those put forth by the UK government recently for encrypted messaging apps https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/1556283/uk-government-prepares-to-launch-attack-whatsapp-facebook-messenger-end-to-end-encryption https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/1556... >>backdoors are defined in part by whether or not they're expected and wanted by the end-user, This would not be wanted by the end-user. The backdoor in this case is just an imposition on the receiving party, i.e. the merchant, that they'd rather do without. No tool to let the state eavesdrop on or surveil one's private affairs is wanted by the party being subjected to it. This is unequivocally a backdoor, and it would only win out in the market if tools without backdoors are eliminated from the market by the state, using the state's apparatus of violence (the police, courts and prisons that gain compliance with government edicts).
        danShumway 5y ago
        > If you google the term, and find any article on the term, you'll see that it is not limited to access methods that are covert Random company blogs and random UK news blogs aren't the authorities on what a backdoor is. You look at something like, for example, Wikipedia, and it basically agrees with my take above: backdoors are usually covert, but are intrinsically somewhat fuzzy to define. This is how the word is typically used in common conversation. > This would not be wanted by the end-user. The backdoor in this case is just an imposition on the receiving party, i.e. the merchant, that they'd rather do without. Speak for yourself, this is literally the selling point of GNU Taler, this is one of the reasons people are interested in it. They put "taxable" in the tagline not just out of an interest in transparency but because it's their main "hook" to get people interested in the system. Once again, I talked about this above, but backdoors are a fuzzy concept where different communities can end up with different conclusions about what does or doesn't fall into the category of a backdoor. The fact that you personally don't want income levels for merchants to be auditable by the state does not mean no one else wants that transparency (merchants included). Once again, taking that idea to its logical conclusion would be absurd. A nontrivial number of software merchants would like it if my browser didn't have inspector tools and didn't let me look at the source code of pages that they sent me. A lot of web publishers would like it if browsers didn't have tools that let people intercept and modify HTML before it gets rendered to the page. That doesn't mean my browser inspector or my adblocker is a backdoor. These terms are in part socially defined, and yes, expectation and transparency are a part of how we do that. They're not the only part, but they are a part. You posit a world where any disclosure of any information where anyone would prefer that information to be private is a backdoor, and that broadens the definition of a backdoor beyond the point of usefulness and beyond the scope of how most people and most articles online use the term.
dbrgn 5y ago
As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-to-person payments, but for person-to-service-provider payments. The idea of taxability is that the person sending the money (the customer) is anonymous, while the recipient of the money (the webshop, for example) is not anonymous. This allows taxing the companies, while giving more privacy to the customers than with the current system. While this is a very different idea than decentralized cryptocurrencies, what it would give us as consumers is a much more privacy-preserving alternative to credit cards, Apple Pay and PayPal when buying things online (or in a store). At the same time, it is controllable enough for governments and banks that they could consider introducing such a system.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-to-person payments, but for person-to-service-provider payments. As far as I'm concerned, this is an arbitrary distinction to rationalize depriving some class of interactions between individuals of the right to privacy. >>At the same time, it is controllable enough for governments and banks that they could consider introducing such a system. I find this very defeatist, and this attitude becoming pervasive would guarantee that the trend toward mass-surveillance of all private interactions would continue unabated. Perhaps it's true that this is the type of system that governments and banks might be willing to introduce today. Afterall, privacy in financial interaction is not acceptable to the mainstream institutions. Over the last century, and especially since the early 1990s, the Overton window has shifted toward greater state control and less privacy. The proof of this is in the fact if cash were introduced today, it would be made illegal. And instead of pushing back against this trend toward mass-surveillance, Taler cows to it, with ideological rationalizations to boot. Cryptocurrency has a real potential to reverse the trend towards a dystopian surveillance state controlled by a handful of governments and payment processors, and the people behind Taler are too enamoured with their left-wing political ideology, and visions of taxing every one, to support it.
- usrusr 5y ago
  I've been imagining a taxation system where any bank account is actually two bank accounts, one pre-tax and one post, with an obvious identification difference (like odd/even ID numbers). Then you could pay e.g. your plumber knowing that your payment will be properly taxed, and all deductibility games your tax system might like to have would simply be dealt with by paying from the pre-tax account. IRS equivalents would have access to the pre-tax transactions, done. That would be all the tax bureaucracy you could ever need. Perhaps pre-tax purchases could even be public? Not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing, I'd like to hope that it might shift public perception of tax loopholes from "something clever" to "something to be ashamed of". Taler sounds like it could eventually lead to a setup like 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.
  - croes 5y ago
    Where does it say that the encryption is bypassed?
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > Note from the article The "SSLStore" is not the definitive source on the definition of a backdoor. It's just an EV certificate merchant. Authorization plays a role in whether or not something is a backdoor. It's not a rigid definition because language isn't actually rigid, backdoors are defined in part by whether or not they're expected and wanted by the end-user, which is inherently a fuzzy category. But it's silly to say that any access method authorized or not is a backdoor, by that logic my own encrypted computer hard drive has a glaring backdoor in the form of me knowing the passphrase for it.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      If you google the term, and find any article on the term, you'll see that it is not limited to access methods that are covert. Here's another top 10 result: https://www.klemchuk.com/ideate/encryption-backdoors-and-balancing-privacy https://www.klemchuk.com/ideate/encryption-backdoors-and-bal... Pubicly proposed interception mechanisms, like the Clipper Chip, were widely referred to as a backdoor, as have those put forth by the UK government recently for encrypted messaging apps https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/1556283/uk-government-prepares-to-launch-attack-whatsapp-facebook-messenger-end-to-end-encryption https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/1556... >>backdoors are defined in part by whether or not they're expected and wanted by the end-user, This would not be wanted by the end-user. The backdoor in this case is just an imposition on the receiving party, i.e. the merchant, that they'd rather do without. No tool to let the state eavesdrop on or surveil one's private affairs is wanted by the party being subjected to it. This is unequivocally a backdoor, and it would only win out in the market if tools without backdoors are eliminated from the market by the state, using the state's apparatus of violence (the police, courts and prisons that gain compliance with government edicts).
      - danShumway 5y ago
        > If you google the term, and find any article on the term, you'll see that it is not limited to access methods that are covert Random company blogs and random UK news blogs aren't the authorities on what a backdoor is. You look at something like, for example, Wikipedia, and it basically agrees with my take above: backdoors are usually covert, but are intrinsically somewhat fuzzy to define. This is how the word is typically used in common conversation. > This would not be wanted by the end-user. The backdoor in this case is just an imposition on the receiving party, i.e. the merchant, that they'd rather do without. Speak for yourself, this is literally the selling point of GNU Taler, this is one of the reasons people are interested in it. They put "taxable" in the tagline not just out of an interest in transparency but because it's their main "hook" to get people interested in the system. Once again, I talked about this above, but backdoors are a fuzzy concept where different communities can end up with different conclusions about what does or doesn't fall into the category of a backdoor. The fact that you personally don't want income levels for merchants to be auditable by the state does not mean no one else wants that transparency (merchants included). Once again, taking that idea to its logical conclusion would be absurd. A nontrivial number of software merchants would like it if my browser didn't have inspector tools and didn't let me look at the source code of pages that they sent me. A lot of web publishers would like it if browsers didn't have tools that let people intercept and modify HTML before it gets rendered to the page. That doesn't mean my browser inspector or my adblocker is a backdoor. These terms are in part socially defined, and yes, expectation and transparency are a part of how we do that. They're not the only part, but they are a part. You posit a world where any disclosure of any information where anyone would prefer that information to be private is a backdoor, and that broadens the definition of a backdoor beyond the point of usefulness and beyond the scope of how most people and most articles online use the term.

dbrgn 5y ago

As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-to-person payments, but for person-to-service-provider payments. The idea of taxability is that the person sending the money (the customer) is anonymous, while the recipient of the money (the webshop, for example) is not anonymous. This allows taxing the companies, while giving more privacy to the customers than with the current system. While this is a very different idea than decentralized cryptocurrencies, what it would give us as consumers is a much more privacy-preserving alternative to credit cards, Apple Pay and PayPal when buying things online (or in a store). At the same time, it is controllable enough for governments and banks that they could consider introducing such a system.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-to-person payments, but for person-to-service-provider payments. As far as I'm concerned, this is an arbitrary distinction to rationalize depriving some class of interactions between individuals of the right to privacy. >>At the same time, it is controllable enough for governments and banks that they could consider introducing such a system. I find this very defeatist, and this attitude becoming pervasive would guarantee that the trend toward mass-surveillance of all private interactions would continue unabated. Perhaps it's true that this is the type of system that governments and banks might be willing to introduce today. Afterall, privacy in financial interaction is not acceptable to the mainstream institutions. Over the last century, and especially since the early 1990s, the Overton window has shifted toward greater state control and less privacy. The proof of this is in the fact if cash were introduced today, it would be made illegal. And instead of pushing back against this trend toward mass-surveillance, Taler cows to it, with ideological rationalizations to boot. Cryptocurrency has a real potential to reverse the trend towards a dystopian surveillance state controlled by a handful of governments and payment processors, and the people behind Taler are too enamoured with their left-wing political ideology, and visions of taxing every one, to support it.
usrusr 5y ago
I've been imagining a taxation system where any bank account is actually two bank accounts, one pre-tax and one post, with an obvious identification difference (like odd/even ID numbers). Then you could pay e.g. your plumber knowing that your payment will be properly taxed, and all deductibility games your tax system might like to have would simply be dealt with by paying from the pre-tax account. IRS equivalents would have access to the pre-tax transactions, done. That would be all the tax bureaucracy you could ever need. Perhaps pre-tax purchases could even be public? Not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing, I'd like to hope that it might shift public perception of tax loopholes from "something clever" to "something to be ashamed of". Taler sounds like it could eventually lead to a setup like that.