GNU Taler begins operating in Switzerland, distributed by the Taler Operations AG. Gnu Taler aims to be a “digital wallet” and has been used by the swiss national bank as well as the european national bank as a example for how a digital currency handed out by the state could work. It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.
Currently the Taler is brought out by a special organisation, the “Taler Operations AG”, and not the national bank, although both the national bank as well as the Taler Team have shown interest in a official digial currency by the national bank based on the Taler. But we need to relativate as the national council has stated that the introduction of a digital currency would probably take relatively major legislative changes and therefore take a bit of time.
It must be about ten years that Taler has stood unopposed as a proposed system for digital payments that’s pretty good and might actually happen. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything else that exists. It’s been a lot of years of tests, audits, experiments, and demos that occasionally turn up in my news feed — it was beginning to look like vapourware. I guess it’ll be another several years before it gets to my part of the world, but it’s good to see it finally getting started.
There are couple multi-billion euro companies (all the Payment Service Processors, Visa, Mastercard, etc) that would necessarily become several million euro companies if Taler was successful though. That’s a lot of concentrated power that doesn’t want Taler to succeed.
That’s kinda cool news. Hope it grows to be an alternative to these american systems.
*USAian
US-American we say in Switzerland
You a Saiyan
“I’m insane, from space”
It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.
So I could buy a VPN with it and then order some Swedish porn (edit: life streams), and no authority would be able to track me down?
Basically yes, but the seller needs to register a business account with a Swedish Taler bank exchange, and if that bank figures out that the seller is breaking Swedish law they can terminate that account.
Why would anyone want to track you down for watching porn?
In Sweden you can buy porn but you are not allowed to buy life streams and tell actors what to do to prevent abuse of power imbalances.
Stupid law. The performer can simply not do what they don’t wish, in the safety and comfort of their own home. Nothing anyone can do about it. It doesn’t get much safer than this.
That seems like a reasonable law.
That depends on whether you believe that a ban leads to an overall reduction of such problematic imbalances, rather than just shifting shifting the whole industry into illegal markets that are unregulated and hidden, where they might actually get amplified. By banning it you are also giving up your opportunity to regulate.
Prostitution presents a similar dilemma, which countries handle in various ways. Some ban it completely, others like sweden have the “nordic/swedish” model where only the buyer gets penalized, and in some contries like Germany it is legal (either with or without additional regulations in place). Based on a brief search i think it’s still up for debate whether the nordic model has the desired effects, with the opaqure nature of illegal markets making it hard to properly study the subject.
Does it though?
I see.
Ask the Swedes, they’re the ones being weird about it
Haaaave you met Baptists?
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afaik you don’t even need a VPN because communication happens through gnunet, which is somewhat like I2P and Tor
The ECB also wants to introduce a digital Euro. I wonder how exchanging my digital Euros to digital Swiss Francs and vise versa would work. Currently with physical cash you need to exchange your money at an intermediary. But with digital coins it’s surely possible for the national bank to handle this.
If you ever paid with your card in a non-Euro country, you already did something like that.
Revolut will on the fly convert between your currencies.
Cyberpunk is now, old man.
It is very easy lol but it’s likely Mastercard/Visa doing the conversion (taking ~ 0.5% each time), exactly what we want to avoid :P
That is still a corporate intermediary who does the conversion young man. And they are converting your digital money that is stored at the corporate private bank.
Digital currency is going to be the equivalent of cash. Digital money that is stored on your phone and is minted by the national bank like cash. Not the same as your money at the bank.
Last time i checked, users had to exchange their funds on cendral exchanges. The funds you got from exchange A can not be used on exchange B. So from my understanding, it’s like you needed to use the same bank to interact (not just the same currency). How can this even be considered for adoption?
The Idea is that the central banks adopt them.
The same way there is obly one Euro and you can only get it from the central bank, there will only be one Euro-Taler from the european central bank, one Frank-Taler from the swiss national bank etc
The european central bank does not run an exchange at the moment. That means that all the other european banks and all european Taller users will need to switch eventually?
And what about transactions in foreign currencies? I guess we would need a central private party for that, similar to visa.
When the alternative is using digital payment methods from a fascist country?
A bunch of not-ideal products are about to get adopted by other countries and then are about to gain all of the features that the U.S. monopolies always fought against.
someone quickly send me € 10 Mil. I wanna see if it’s working 😆
sure
taler://pay-push/exchange.demo.taler.net/7VJWX736EABRDZ4X84B29QM6M1CZV6CTKQGSX3X57FAG03PZQ8S0
It is working (I didn’t hit Receive so they can get it). Here’s about tree fiddy for you neons
it worked, ty! 🙌
Hi androidul here are 10 Kudos for you to get you started (lacking the Mil.€ at the moment 😄)
Awesome!
Is there some sort of an overview of all the components that are required for the whole system to work? Are there opportunities for new PSPs to emerge and try to topple the existing ones with better and cheaper service?
https://www.taler.net/en/docs.html
If you want to exchange official fiat currencies you need something that libeufin can talk to via the standartized banking api. Everything else is included in Taler and ready to be used with unofficial regional currencies for example.
taler://pay-push/exchange.demo.taler.net/ZXHDJF9DHN97DBZCR8CABC838ZHR3C6M55JRCR9M00GZM5SEZ9EG
For whoever is testing taler
Sadly, the demo is broken :-(
I’ve just got the app from f-droid and withdrawn some KUDOS 😄 someone wants to try exchanging them via link/QR?
Let me know how it goes Magnus
taler://pay-push/exchange.demo.taler.net/80XCKRJWTHQREPWMZ5WEP2C8BYZG79D9AYJPPY69CPHAH1FBEE9G
Nice thanks! I had to paste it in “Enter URI”
Here’s double back your way: 💸💸
Not sure about the anonymity is good or not: why is that necessary? Current bank systems are already anonymous
Could you explain how the current banking system is anonymous?
Banking secrecy, alternatively known as financial privacy, banking discretion, or bank safety, is a conditional agreement between a bank and its clients that all foregoing activities remain secure, confidential, and private.
That means private, not anonymous. The bank still knows who you are, that you have a bank account (or multiple) there, how much money the bank accounts have, who transferred money to the bank account and who took it out. Bank transfers require knowledge of a name, bank number, bank account number, and sometimes even more information e.g if a transfer above 10k is made it has to be reported to the IRS (same applies in Europe) - if you were anonymous, that wouldn’t be possible.
Also, that wiki page links to more pages about banking privacy in multiple countries. Nowhere does it mention anonymity.
Privacy != anonymity
100% anonymity is usually associated with criminality. Nobody cares about your dildo
Taler is specifically designed to prevent tax fraud and money laundering. I invite you to learn about it before passing judgement based on incorrect assumptions.
Nobody cares about your dildo
Well, you’re wrong about that too
You should probably inform yourself about privacy and anonymity. I don’t have good works describing the difference and their importance, but there is one Why privacy matters by Glenn Greenwald. There are interviews of Snowden which are good as they explore his reasons for revealing the mass surveillance machine that the USA employs. Especially why “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is a fallacy where he said
Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide, is like arguing that you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
While is disagree with the harsh tone of u/als@lemmy.blahaj.zone and u/altro_city@fedia.io here, The current banking systems are not anonymous. Anonymity is important to protect our privacy, to prevent us being manipulated and, in the worst case, to protect our security.
Imagine something like the US. A ultra-conservative government gets to power and decides that anyone that has ever bought a Dildo is a threat to children and needs to be put on a watchlist. The GNU Taler prevents that by hiding that you ever bought a Dildo.
The GNU Taler also has the advantage of not being 100% private. While the buyer is, in fact, completely private, the seller is not. This protects the buyer, as noone can see who bought something or prove a specific person bought anything, but still prevents the seller (the one receiving money) from evading taxes, as the government can clearly see that he received money, even if it doesn’t know from whom.
The GNU Taler aims to be a perfect balance of the advantages of cash and digital payments and it manages to do so pretty well in my opinion.
The GNU Taler prevents that by hiding that you ever bought a Dildo.
I mean, not really right? The government can still ask the webshop, that probably took your name and address. Or the PSP that facilitated the transaction, they likely know too. It’s not like Visa/MasterCard/banks are the only parties that know it now, and the others are usually also beholden to laws that let government agencies query things.
obviously, but that’s not something you can fix via the payment method ;P
Absolutely true, but it does place some question marks after the supposed benefit of Taler. Not due to any fault of Taler ofc.
That’s a problem that can’t really be solved with technology.
No, the current system isn’t anonymous at all. It’s the exact opposite.
