> Taler is designed to deprive people of financial privacy Taler is designed to make it harder to avoid taxes, it is orthogonal whether or not that impacts pri

> Taler is designed to deprive people of financial privacy Taler is designed to make it harder to avoid taxes, it is orthogonal whether or not that impacts privacy. The comparison to the clipper chip is wildly inappropriate, there is a difference between taxation and the ability of the state to monitor literally all encrypted messaging between parties. There is obviously a difference between those two things. > the majority of people looking at Taler are saying its design around auditability isn't a backdoor; therefore it's not, because language is descriptive and not perscriptive. [...] Citation needed. That language is descriptive and not perscriptive? Merriam Webster and Ludwig Wittgenstein. That people widely aren't looking at Taler's design as a backdoor? This comment thread and the responses of security professionals and prominent privacy advocates. Your original comments about a backdoor wouldn't be this far down the page if the community agreed with them. The response to GNU Taler from people embedded in the Free/Libre software movement would be different if people thought this was a covert spying operation. They don't. > Why on Earth would a person want to lose privacy vis-a-vis the state? They might like living in a society with public roads. This might be difficult to hear, but the majority of people in the US don't want taxation abolished, that's not a popular political position. It's fine for you to believe that taxation is theft and it's fine for you to advocate that taxation is theft, but even you sincerely believe that taxation is theft you still have to be able to go into these kinds of conversations understanding that's a minority position, even among a lot of people producing and selling goods.