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Taler Systems SA is looking for investors for development of GNU Taler
- imagineerschool 4y agoI want to work on this! I'm looking forward to helping raise these millions and making the wheels turn. 5 million is really not that big of an ask here.
- iguessthislldo 4y agoI know they say it isn't a currency on their main page, but my first thought after reading it was a GNU-backed payment platform was "Stallman-bucks".
- tedd4u 4y ago"Stallbucks?"
- nonrandomstring 4y agoPutting aside the problems inherent to all forms of non-physical cash, it's one of those projects that, if I had a few spare lifetimes, I'd volunteer to work on for free. Perhaps the only credible, open, democratising, taxable, pseudonymous electronic approximation to actual "digital cash"?
- ETH_start 4y ago
- imtringued 4y agoDigital receipts are not a back door.
- riedel 4y agoMany crypto currencies provide a backdoor for hyper capitalists, organized crime, foreign bad actors and tax criminals into our system. It is totally OK IMHO to affront this part of the 'free society' from time to time. Beyond that I would not describe taxability as a backdoor...
- ETH_start 4y ago
- riedel 4y agoInteresting that you know what I believe in. What I believe is though, that if one has totalitarian intention you would opt to support other things rather than taler. (Like payment via WeChat or Google Pay)
- ETH_start 4y agoIf you don't support prohibiting fully electronic cash and don't support mass surveillance, I don't see why you would support a surveillance payment system that could only gain market adoption by the government banning its more private alternatives. As to your second point, one may be inclined toward socialism, and so prefer a more fully government controlled, less corporate friendly brand of totalitarian mass-surveillance.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoIt's not a "back door" it's a front door for taxation. It says so on the tin!
- ETH_start 4y agoWhatever you want to call it, it explicitly invades people's privacy. It would only gain adoption if the alternative, which is digital cash, is prohibited, in which case privacy in private financial interactions would be criminalized and we would be subject to warrantless mass surveillance.
- cowtools 4y agoThis is false.
- ETH_start 4y agoCan you elaborate? Because I'm certain it's not.
- kube-system 4y agoBitcoin publishes every transaction anyone has ever done in plaintext.
- ETH_start 4y agoThere are blockchains that don't do that.
- recuter 4y agoThat is a lot to put aside. Of course physical/legacy cash has its own problems. They are all the same problems at root though what with human nature being what it is. You're simply eager to trade one set of problems for the other as nobody can stop you from writing software but you are not authorized to write laws. Say you were god-emperor of the world with the power to redesign, and enforce, how physical cash and existing monetary/payments systems work in real life - it becomes a distinction without a difference. Somehow - despite all the good intentions - we always end up with an eclectic mix of nerds reinventing wheels, self righteous power mad Che Guevara's, opportunistic grifters, and lottery players.
- imtringued 4y agoObviously because that is how the system was designed. What did you expect? Without the ability to express negative interest rates the only way for the system to continue is through grifting. I mean think about for a second. Positive rates mean more want to borrow than others want to save. Negative rates mean less people want to borrow than others want to save. If you don't think borrowers have a right to repay their debts then what exactly did people expect to happen? Are we supposed to blame debtors for their systematic inability to pay even though we decided they don't have the right to repay?
- recuter 4y ago> Without the ability to express negative interest rates the only way for the system to continue is through grifting. I mean think about for a second. Positive rates mean more want to borrow than others want to save. I'm not sure what you mean. The European Central Bank has dabbled with negative interest rates. So have others. Anything you can express in a system like Taler you could conceivably replicate in existing financial systems, it always just comes down to political will.
- kybernetyk 4y ago>taxable nah thanks
- Spivak 4y agoIf your vision for the future is a form of money that enables massive scale tax evasion you probably won’t get a whole lot of buy-in from the people with guns who are funded by taxes.
- kybernetyk 4y agoThe thugs who take your money by force using guns don’t like the idea of not taking your money? You don’t say.
- isitmadeofglass 4y agoThere’s little chance that any form of digital currency that does not allow for tax evasion at then same level we currently have will ever take off. The people doing the tax evasion are the ones running the world.
- _alex_ 4y agohas anyone been able to withdraw taler tokens from the demo bank? Getting an error `could not find any exchange`. Don't think it's my setup.
- prognu 4y agoDo you have a wallet v0.9.0? Which wallet are you using? Last I checked it worked fine with the Firefox wallet and the Android wallet.
- codetrotter 4y agoTowards the end of the video, when talking about anonymity they use graphics associated with the loosely defined “Anonymous”. I wonder what /g/ and /biz/ feel about GNU Taler. I feel like /g/ ought to like it. I don’t know if the opinion of /g/ and /biz/ on this matters anyway though :p The “Anonymous” graphics just got me to think of them. Also it’s interesting to hear in the video that GNU Taler can work in conjunction with cryptocurrencies, while GNU Taler itself is not a cryptocurrency, and that GNU Taler does not add any additional volatility on top of the volatility of the underlaying payment currency itself. Makes me wonder if they have any resources on accepting payments in BTC or ETH using GNU Taler.
- prognu 4y agohttps://arbor.bfh.ch/17195/ https://arbor.bfh.ch/17195/ describes how to accept BTC or ETH using GNU Taler.
- cowtools 4y agoI have never seen /g/ discuss it outside of DigiCash's failure. In /biz/ there is a general sense of dread about anything related to "CBDCs". /biz/xmr has a more balanced opinion You comment about cryptocurrency backed chaumian cash, there is already a project for this aimed at increasing the efficiency and privacy of bitcoin spends: https://fedimint.org/ https://fedimint.org/
- doorman2 4y agoGNU Taler seems totally obsoleted by something like Monero. Can anyone enlighten me on the advantages of Taler?
- psychphysic 4y agoTaler does not even appear to come close. It requires a central authority. It seems distinctly less useful than bitcoin. And I despise bitcoin.
- majewsky 4y agoThe T in Taler stands for "taxable", and that's a big difference. Depending on where you (or your government) stand on the spectrum between maximum privacy and maximum accountability, Taler may be a better fit than Monero.
- cowtools 4y agoOne is a chaumian cash system, the other is cryptocurrency with sender-obfuscation by ring-signatures. The technical differences are too many for me to enumerate here. They are completely different technologies that make different efficiency-privacy-decentralization tradeoffs. Functionally, Taler (and other forms of chaumian cash) are payment systems and not currencies. It requires a bank to implement it, in this sense it is less de-centralized, but likely much more efficient as there is no need for network consensus (because it depends on a central entity's blind signatures, etc. anyway). It has different (possibly better) privacy charichteristics than monero. They are both free and open source projects.
- 4y ago
- hrbf 4y ago”Chief moral officer” – is this some kind of weird in-joke or meant verbatim as stated? I don’t get it.
- wmf 4y agoIt's not a joke. Taler is all about scolding crypto people for not paying taxes.
- codetrotter 4y agoI took it more to mean that the role held by RMS is to ensure that Taler remains free software (as in freedom) as defined by FSF. He also mentions in the video that he is there to ensure that Taler remains free software (as in freedom). It is my impression that in the eyes of RMS and FSF, non-free software is immoral. And hence the title, I think.
- hrbf 4y agoI see. It appears to be yet another instance of Stallman being Stallman. I’m going to be very surprised if this goes anywhere at all.
- version_five 4y agoWhen I clicked the link, my browser (Brave on Android) gave a popup saying "did you mean taleo.net, lots of scam websites try and make similar names. I've never seen a warning like that, but it's at least an interesting coincidence given Brave is vaguely crypto-scam focused. I don't know enough about either Brave or Taler to know of there is any overlap in their interests, it's more likely just a coincidence, but still odd
- samatman 4y agoWith an edit distance of one from the suggested URL, it's more likely to be a misfire of a well-intentioned system.
- Cilvic 4y agoI'm interested in the business plan for Taler SA. I find it super cool to have a for-profit company provide a paid service with the open source software with the (non-profit) goal to promote the adoption of the software/system.
- grothoff 4y agoShort version: see RedHat. Long version: contact us.
- nerdponx 4y agoBut who are the customers for that business model? Central banks looking to roll out their own digital currency? companies involved with complicated supply chains that want to use some kind of pseudo-monetary credits for managing internal resources? payment processors that want to accept a cryptocurrency unburdened by a reputation for money laundering, sex trafficking, and drug dealing?
- jesushax 4y ago> GNU Taler is developed as part of the GNU project for the GNU operating system. Ha, yes, the GNU operating system. I appreciate GNU's commitment to this idea notion that they are developing an operating system (for which Linux is just the kernel)! And, I mean, I understand their thinking (I think). But it stills makes me chuckle for some reason.
- nullc 4y agoHighly unethical project: It's a centralized digital cash premised on pervasive always-on surveillance. It's marketed by dishonest descriptions of how taxation regimes work or need to work in order to pretend that it's unprecedented surveillance is in any way normal or acceptable or useful for any purpose. I stopped supporting FSF over their backing of this.
- kube-system 4y agoAs opposed to pretending that money laundering and tax evasion is normal or acceptable?
- nullc 4y agoDo you also think that everyone who doesn't support a government installed camera in their bedroom is pretending that raping children is acceptable? GNU Taler is an unprecedented mass surveillance system.
- kube-system 4y agoIf you don’t want your transactions recorded, you have two options: don’t record them, or launder the records. Electronic transactions are inherently recorded.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- teddyh 4y agoHow is it centralized? All the descriptions of GNU Taler calls it decentralized. > pervasive always-on surveillance What is surveilled, except for the amount an anonymous entity has paid you? > I stopped supporting FSF over their backing of this. So this was six years ago?
- nullc 4y ago> How is it centralized? The system is a simple chauvinism digital cash with integrated surveillance. All transactions in the system must be cleared by a centralized server that checks against double spends and validates that each transaction contains the required key-escrowed surveillance data. > All the descriptions of GNU Taler calls it decentralized. Unethical actors like the creators of GNU Taler are willing to lie. Surprise. > So this was six years ago? In 2016, I believe, yes.
- eukara 4y agoMassive potential here. They're not asking for much either.