The buyers are anonymous, the recipients (i.e. shops/merchants, generally) are not. The idea is that this will effectively prevent money-laundering and tax evasion as merchants wouldn't be able to hide any earnings.
> I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.
The wording on the Taler website is a bit wishy-washy, but I THINK the TL;DR is:
1. They tried to do be a payments processor with assistance from a German bank.
2. That didn't work out for what Taler claims are "unrelated reasons" but I suspect we all can agree it was due to KYC/AML hurdles.
3. The Taler plan now appears to not be a payments processor but rather merely an issuer.
And in that respect, there is plenty of precedent for that passing in the EU, i.e. there are are already many online places you can go swap your Euro for Bitcoin legally.
So, yes, there will still be KYC/AML. You will still need to provide your ID to swap your Euro for your Taler. But after that, Taler has nothing to do with transaction processing, you go spend your Taler balance elsewhere and somebody else's server processes the transaction. Taler will know and be obligated to retain records of who bought how much, when and how but not when and where (of if) they spent it.
At least that's my interpretation of the word-soup on their website.
private and anonymous, especially from the government are two totally separate things.
If I am understanding Taler, it is not like cash coins/paper where the government does not and has no way to know that you, e.g., bought a bottle of wine from a vintner with cash, and that vintner can use that bill/coins in many different ways and the gov't has essentially no way to trace or track that.
The way I am seeing it... please correct me where I'm not understanding something... the Taler architecture would require you to pay cash into an exchange, then you extract (likely IDs/tagged/marked) Taler, you then pay that Taler to a merchant, e.g., who by policy cannot remain anonymous, and that merchant deposits that market Taler into the exchange. So in that scenario, what has happened is that the Taler the merchant received "privately" is clearly associated with the Taler you extracted from the exchange to pay the Taler deposited by the Vintner.
It's maybe private in that the Vintner does not need to know who you are, but you can bet the control freak tyrants in the government will know that you bought that wine.
So what you may say, wine is fine, but what if it's something the government doesn't want you doing, buying, supporting? Maybe wine is now illegal because {fill in the reason}, maybe you are not sufficiently obedient and compliant during an "emergency" and need to be cut off? Maybe you are sanctioned by the EU and all your money is taken and you have no means of even feeding yourself other than the "humanitarian" limit of living on €200/month and you can't even return to your native Switzerland from Brussels because you are not allowed on trains, planes, or allowed to drive across borders like happened to Jaques Baud for speech some tyrannical EU politician or bureaucrat did not like?
This is a surveillance oriented alternative to cryptocurrencies which uses the distraction of complicated cryptography to obfscuate the fact that by design it intentionally undermines the privacy of its users: it attaches the receivers identity to every payment they receive, along with the amount and makes it non-private-- potentially opening the door to abuse by kidnappers, extortionists, marketers responding to income signals, plaintiffs attorneys, and other such scoundrel.
The claims that is is privacy preserving are deceptive, and in my option constitute an act of intentional fraud on the part of its creators -- the fact that people are deceived by the privacy claims is clear in your comment: You ask why would the banks adopt something private. The answer is: it isn't.
Its existence is justified under a fairytale model of how the world works-- a false belief that actually anonymous payments are unlawful and that their compromised alternative is the best possible. In the path of doing so, they not only falsely sell a system with compromised privacy as private, but they also help bring about a dystopia where privacy is unlawful in much the same manner that doing business with companies that refuse to accept cash does.
It would be fair to say that its an upgrade to privacyless systems-- because it doesn't attach the sender's identity to the transactions themselves--, but to characterize it as a private or privacy preserving system is a lie.
Thank you very much for your input! Would you please publish a proper paper with references to code of the project that proves your statements, that would be incredibly helpful. Also it would be of great importance to backup your words with some facts!
The "fraud" claim is kind of bizarre to me, but it's clear (and not hidden) that Taler intentionally provided less privacy for payees than other designs and systems because of a conscious decision that payees should have less privacy.
I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.
It's absolutely deceptive as you're seeing demonstrated in this thread-- I comment on this intentional and-- you believe "not hidden" lack of privacy-- and I get a reply demanding a publish a paper to prove it ("Papers please"... fitting!). This has consistently been the case for Taler. Sure, you and I are aware of the limitations-- but we're domain experts.
People hear that it's private and -- unsurprisingly-- think it's private! :P In my view it's like to Apple's proposed content scanning in end to end encryption that applies a lot of additional cryptographic complexity with language that suggests that it's protecting the user's privacy, but in reality the complexity is entirely there to undermine their privacy (in a somewhat selective way) and a far simpler scheme would give much stronger privacy.
I think it's analogous to promoting a key-escrow cryptosystem as "communicate privately!"-- both in terms of people not getting the privacy from it they would expect and helping to bring about a world where actual privacy is unlawful. The privacy problems of Taler are essentially identical to those of key-escrow: even if you don't have any fear of 'lawful' access, any access that exists may be abused. The only reliable solution to the security/privacy problems is for the access to not exist unless that is literally impossible. But it's clearly not impossible, as many people use more private systems than taler every day including in Germany.
Taler is strictly less private and considerably more complicated than a basic chaum-cash token system-- which actually provides the privacy people expect it to have. So it's not like I'm suggesting blockchain mumbo-jumbo is the only alternative. :)
If I understand correctly, you'll just have payments and receipt correlated at the exchange and you won't even need KYC all while giving the impression of anonymity.
I agree, there is absolutely zero chance that especially the tyrannical government of the EU, which requires total control for the next phases of its very existence, will not fight with any and every dirty trick it can to arrest total control over spending/money.
Where and how people spend money is almost more valuable than communications information and other relationships. Money is intentional, it is committed. You can say all kinds of things in chat, and the European tyrants are already using that to imprison people and are working even harder to simply punish you without even charges, but money changing hands clearly demonstrates far more than just words.
Unfortunately for Europe, if it had only been able to hold on for the last 25 or so years on their own currencies, this kind of payment processing network that is actually anonymous could have fully replaced and made the Europe totally irrelevant and useless by simply making I possible to make a payment in one currency and it arrive instantaneously in another currency. You could have paid for things anonymously just like you could when you had paper and coins, a transaction between you and a product/service provider. The future will be far bleaker in a way that I don't think we can even imagine since there is not a single comparable thing that has existed or happened in all of human history that is remotely similar, losing total anonymity that all the worst dictators, tyrants, and maniacs of all of human history could not have collectively even dreamt of... now in the hands of the illegitimate, and unelected EU Commission and its apparatchiks.
>the tyrannical government of the EU, which requires total control for the next phases of its very existence
When people start saying hyper-opinionated stuff like this, I usually tune out. The rest of your comment, whether or not it has nuggets of merit or insight, is going to be tainted by the fact that you've bought into the whole "evil EU is tyrannical" thing. It's very in vogue right now among the MAGA and alt-right types. They all started hating the EU with a passion of a thousand suns all of a sudden, pretty much in synchrony, and curiously coinciding with anti-EU propaganda campaigns driven by EU's fascist neighbour next door, angry at the EU stopping it from genociding its way through eastern Europe.
Like, your point about one of the Euro's main raison d'etres for the general public - frictionless cross-border transactions without needing to convert currencies - going away with online payments, that's a good point. Too bad about all the talking points you couched it in.
I can assure you the dislike towards the EU is not a MAGA and alt-right exclusive. In fact you can turn it around and try to find the groups which are in favor of the EU at the moment.
Nevertheless my first thought about their endeavor to jump the German bureaucracy hurdles and furthermore the EU ones was indeed how they, the bureaucracy, will pile you up more with each hurdle you pass until you give up. Tyrannical EU is not a stretch.
Never having heard of it before, the moment I read "cash like tokens in your account" I was immediately out. Also claiming buyer privacy when the money ultimately has to come from a bank transaction or another digital transaction leaving some sort of trail is a false illusion.
Yeah, so it isn't intended to you.
It is intended to be electronic cash, where the seller still has accountability for regulators and the buyer has some minimal amount of protection.
I haven't looked at Taler in a while. What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled? Also are transactions final and irreversible?
This is a proposal to operate a regulated payments processor, supervised by BaFin. All the usual, necessary regulations and consumer protections will apply under German law.
I think Taler is designed to be privacy-preserving while being able to comply with national laws. So not the currency you're looking for if you wanna buy something illegal.
>What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled?
It's basicially david chaum's blind-signature money idea. It's centralized but the central issuer can't connect the outputs to the inputs. (but unique inputs signed by the issuer correspond to unique outputs)
>Also are transactions final and irreversible?
I think so unless you are able to reveal the secrets of the transaction. Hmm, however revealing the secret to someone is basicially same as spending it to them (analgous to releasing a signed and finalized transaction into the mempool in cryptocurrency). It's finalized by the issuer signing it.
Like you basicially send the vendor the secret, and then they hand it in to the coin issuer and wait for the issuer to sign a new input, before giving you the merchandise. So idk how it would work reversing the transactions
I thought it looked an awful lot like David Chaum's DigiCash. If they haven't brought Chaum into the discussion, I would be very nervous about using Taler.
> And no, pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies
That's just not true, and I'm not talking about "you can pay with Bitcoin in the store" use case but the stable coin use case for settlement, which you can see Stripe expand a lot in the past years.
I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.
It will be choked out at key junctions with KYC in the same way crypto has.
The buyers are anonymous, the recipients (i.e. shops/merchants, generally) are not. The idea is that this will effectively prevent money-laundering and tax evasion as merchants wouldn't be able to hide any earnings.
Can you buy crypto with this?
> I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.
The wording on the Taler website is a bit wishy-washy, but I THINK the TL;DR is:
1. They tried to do be a payments processor with assistance from a German bank.
2. That didn't work out for what Taler claims are "unrelated reasons" but I suspect we all can agree it was due to KYC/AML hurdles.
3. The Taler plan now appears to not be a payments processor but rather merely an issuer.
And in that respect, there is plenty of precedent for that passing in the EU, i.e. there are are already many online places you can go swap your Euro for Bitcoin legally.
So, yes, there will still be KYC/AML. You will still need to provide your ID to swap your Euro for your Taler. But after that, Taler has nothing to do with transaction processing, you go spend your Taler balance elsewhere and somebody else's server processes the transaction. Taler will know and be obligated to retain records of who bought how much, when and how but not when and where (of if) they spent it.
At least that's my interpretation of the word-soup on their website.
Regulation should not be a problem, there are several past precedents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipknip
I don't get your point. The current proposal for a digital euro supports private peer-to-peer transactions
private and anonymous, especially from the government are two totally separate things.
If I am understanding Taler, it is not like cash coins/paper where the government does not and has no way to know that you, e.g., bought a bottle of wine from a vintner with cash, and that vintner can use that bill/coins in many different ways and the gov't has essentially no way to trace or track that.
The way I am seeing it... please correct me where I'm not understanding something... the Taler architecture would require you to pay cash into an exchange, then you extract (likely IDs/tagged/marked) Taler, you then pay that Taler to a merchant, e.g., who by policy cannot remain anonymous, and that merchant deposits that market Taler into the exchange. So in that scenario, what has happened is that the Taler the merchant received "privately" is clearly associated with the Taler you extracted from the exchange to pay the Taler deposited by the Vintner.
It's maybe private in that the Vintner does not need to know who you are, but you can bet the control freak tyrants in the government will know that you bought that wine.
So what you may say, wine is fine, but what if it's something the government doesn't want you doing, buying, supporting? Maybe wine is now illegal because {fill in the reason}, maybe you are not sufficiently obedient and compliant during an "emergency" and need to be cut off? Maybe you are sanctioned by the EU and all your money is taken and you have no means of even feeding yourself other than the "humanitarian" limit of living on €200/month and you can't even return to your native Switzerland from Brussels because you are not allowed on trains, planes, or allowed to drive across borders like happened to Jaques Baud for speech some tyrannical EU politician or bureaucrat did not like?
This is a surveillance oriented alternative to cryptocurrencies which uses the distraction of complicated cryptography to obfscuate the fact that by design it intentionally undermines the privacy of its users: it attaches the receivers identity to every payment they receive, along with the amount and makes it non-private-- potentially opening the door to abuse by kidnappers, extortionists, marketers responding to income signals, plaintiffs attorneys, and other such scoundrel.
The claims that is is privacy preserving are deceptive, and in my option constitute an act of intentional fraud on the part of its creators -- the fact that people are deceived by the privacy claims is clear in your comment: You ask why would the banks adopt something private. The answer is: it isn't.
Its existence is justified under a fairytale model of how the world works-- a false belief that actually anonymous payments are unlawful and that their compromised alternative is the best possible. In the path of doing so, they not only falsely sell a system with compromised privacy as private, but they also help bring about a dystopia where privacy is unlawful in much the same manner that doing business with companies that refuse to accept cash does.
It would be fair to say that its an upgrade to privacyless systems-- because it doesn't attach the sender's identity to the transactions themselves--, but to characterize it as a private or privacy preserving system is a lie.
Thank you very much for your input! Would you please publish a proper paper with references to code of the project that proves your statements, that would be incredibly helpful. Also it would be of great importance to backup your words with some facts!
The "fraud" claim is kind of bizarre to me, but it's clear (and not hidden) that Taler intentionally provided less privacy for payees than other designs and systems because of a conscious decision that payees should have less privacy.
I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.
It's absolutely deceptive as you're seeing demonstrated in this thread-- I comment on this intentional and-- you believe "not hidden" lack of privacy-- and I get a reply demanding a publish a paper to prove it ("Papers please"... fitting!). This has consistently been the case for Taler. Sure, you and I are aware of the limitations-- but we're domain experts.
People hear that it's private and -- unsurprisingly-- think it's private! :P In my view it's like to Apple's proposed content scanning in end to end encryption that applies a lot of additional cryptographic complexity with language that suggests that it's protecting the user's privacy, but in reality the complexity is entirely there to undermine their privacy (in a somewhat selective way) and a far simpler scheme would give much stronger privacy.
I think it's analogous to promoting a key-escrow cryptosystem as "communicate privately!"-- both in terms of people not getting the privacy from it they would expect and helping to bring about a world where actual privacy is unlawful. The privacy problems of Taler are essentially identical to those of key-escrow: even if you don't have any fear of 'lawful' access, any access that exists may be abused. The only reliable solution to the security/privacy problems is for the access to not exist unless that is literally impossible. But it's clearly not impossible, as many people use more private systems than taler every day including in Germany.
Taler is strictly less private and considerably more complicated than a basic chaum-cash token system-- which actually provides the privacy people expect it to have. So it's not like I'm suggesting blockchain mumbo-jumbo is the only alternative. :)
If I understand correctly, you'll just have payments and receipt correlated at the exchange and you won't even need KYC all while giving the impression of anonymity.
I agree, there is absolutely zero chance that especially the tyrannical government of the EU, which requires total control for the next phases of its very existence, will not fight with any and every dirty trick it can to arrest total control over spending/money.
Where and how people spend money is almost more valuable than communications information and other relationships. Money is intentional, it is committed. You can say all kinds of things in chat, and the European tyrants are already using that to imprison people and are working even harder to simply punish you without even charges, but money changing hands clearly demonstrates far more than just words.
Unfortunately for Europe, if it had only been able to hold on for the last 25 or so years on their own currencies, this kind of payment processing network that is actually anonymous could have fully replaced and made the Europe totally irrelevant and useless by simply making I possible to make a payment in one currency and it arrive instantaneously in another currency. You could have paid for things anonymously just like you could when you had paper and coins, a transaction between you and a product/service provider. The future will be far bleaker in a way that I don't think we can even imagine since there is not a single comparable thing that has existed or happened in all of human history that is remotely similar, losing total anonymity that all the worst dictators, tyrants, and maniacs of all of human history could not have collectively even dreamt of... now in the hands of the illegitimate, and unelected EU Commission and its apparatchiks.
>the tyrannical government of the EU, which requires total control for the next phases of its very existence
When people start saying hyper-opinionated stuff like this, I usually tune out. The rest of your comment, whether or not it has nuggets of merit or insight, is going to be tainted by the fact that you've bought into the whole "evil EU is tyrannical" thing. It's very in vogue right now among the MAGA and alt-right types. They all started hating the EU with a passion of a thousand suns all of a sudden, pretty much in synchrony, and curiously coinciding with anti-EU propaganda campaigns driven by EU's fascist neighbour next door, angry at the EU stopping it from genociding its way through eastern Europe.
Like, your point about one of the Euro's main raison d'etres for the general public - frictionless cross-border transactions without needing to convert currencies - going away with online payments, that's a good point. Too bad about all the talking points you couched it in.
I can assure you the dislike towards the EU is not a MAGA and alt-right exclusive. In fact you can turn it around and try to find the groups which are in favor of the EU at the moment. Nevertheless my first thought about their endeavor to jump the German bureaucracy hurdles and furthermore the EU ones was indeed how they, the bureaucracy, will pile you up more with each hurdle you pass until you give up. Tyrannical EU is not a stretch.
Same, this sentence when I stopped reading and started rolling my eyes.
Never having heard of it before, the moment I read "cash like tokens in your account" I was immediately out. Also claiming buyer privacy when the money ultimately has to come from a bank transaction or another digital transaction leaving some sort of trail is a false illusion.
Yeah, so it isn't intended to you. It is intended to be electronic cash, where the seller still has accountability for regulators and the buyer has some minimal amount of protection.
I haven't looked at Taler in a while. What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled? Also are transactions final and irreversible?
This is a proposal to operate a regulated payments processor, supervised by BaFin. All the usual, necessary regulations and consumer protections will apply under German law.
The announcement claims a "privacy-preserving [...] payment system". Are you saying this would come in conflict with German law?
Taler is privacy-preserving for the payer, but not for the payee. This solves many legal issues such as tax evasion and money laundering.
I think it is the European sense of privacy where the government is implicitly inside everyone's trust circle.
I think Taler is designed to be privacy-preserving while being able to comply with national laws. So not the currency you're looking for if you wanna buy something illegal.
>What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled?
It's basicially david chaum's blind-signature money idea. It's centralized but the central issuer can't connect the outputs to the inputs. (but unique inputs signed by the issuer correspond to unique outputs)
>Also are transactions final and irreversible?
I think so unless you are able to reveal the secrets of the transaction. Hmm, however revealing the secret to someone is basicially same as spending it to them (analgous to releasing a signed and finalized transaction into the mempool in cryptocurrency). It's finalized by the issuer signing it.
Like you basicially send the vendor the secret, and then they hand it in to the coin issuer and wait for the issuer to sign a new input, before giving you the merchandise. So idk how it would work reversing the transactions
I thought it looked an awful lot like David Chaum's DigiCash. If they haven't brought Chaum into the discussion, I would be very nervous about using Taler.
[edit] Yes, he has been involved. https://www.heise.de/en/news/39C3-How-the-open-source-cash-G...
original https://chaum.com/ecash/
new and improved https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/eCash_2.0_9-7-2...
Interesting stumble upon. https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Better-than-mon...
I think GNU Taler missed their chance of adoption since the world has moved on and was impatient with their progress.
Blockchains that support stablecoins are already here and millions of people already use them (and soon agents will use them as well).
All for worldwide, instant and extremely low fee payments and transfers.
Blockchain isn't necessary at all for instant, low fee payments. And no, pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies
> And no, pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies
That's just not true, and I'm not talking about "you can pay with Bitcoin in the store" use case but the stable coin use case for settlement, which you can see Stripe expand a lot in the past years.
>pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies
Step out into the wider world and that isn't remotely true.