On P2P payments from their FAQ: “While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete.”
How about, no? How about me paying €50 to my friend for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated, KYCed, and blocked if they don’t approve of it or know who the recipient is? How about it’s none of the government’s business how I split the bill at dinner with friends? This level of surveillance is madness, especially coming from an app that touts “privacy” as a feature.
GNU Taler is a trojan horse to enable CBDC adoption. They are the friendly face to an absolutely terrifying level of government control in our lives funded by the same government that tries every year to implement chat control. Imagine your least favourite political party gaining power. Now imagine they can see and control every transaction you make. No thanks.
GNU Taler is not your enemy. It may not solve every problem you’d like it to, but its adoption by the masses would be a vast improvement in privacy compared to the current state of commerce in every country where it has the slightest chance of happening any time soon.
I have a feeling its adoption would bring the end of cash a big step closer.
The suggestions like this also scare me in that it might require you to carry a smartphone all the time for things as basic as payment.
This is totally unrelated to GNU Taler though, and if it comes to that you will be happy to have GNU Taler as an privacy preserving option.
Oh, I just realized that OP is the crypto-guy.
You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.
Sure, a crypto wallet might not have your name on it when created, but good luck buying or selling any without giving away your identity.
So does encryption, and peer to peer conversations, and talking to your neighbor, and trading things at the swap meet.
Requiring absolute central control removes freedom from people and removes accountability from governments.
You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.
There’s some truth to this but it’s also not really the case.
- Each address is pseudononymous even in original Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin lightning transactions are completely opaque to the network, they are never on-chain. At this point, there are vastly more transactions on lightning than on-chain. They confirm instantly and are known only to your node, the receiver’s wallet, and intermediary nodes (if any). Lightning inherits security from the main chain while giving you sub-second transaction confirmation times.
- Monero exists, coinjoin (Bitcoin) exist, changing addresses and having multiple wallets exists, liquidity swaps exist. The chain analysis game is getting harder and more complex every year.
You’ll need a gun when the glowies go after you for not using Windows 12 with TPM 2.0 and latest updates applied.
Yes, most crypto are totally useless, for privacy or anything else other than lottery and heating the home. But why are those discussed any further than just telling not to use them?
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/
Because everything in life has a trade-off, and talking about the utility, and the costs, is a reasonable thing to do. And yes there are ways to enable greater levels of privacy online using cryptocurrency then any other method available to us. So it is worth a discussion sometimes
Yes, Taler by design allows identifiction of the receiver.
It does not reveal the sender.
It allows you to create and arbitrate your own tokens and to create your own “bank”.
CBDCs are coming whether you like it or not and a GNU Taler based payment system is currently our best mitigation strategy against them.
It’s pointless to compare GNU Taler to crypto-currencies as it is a payment system and not a pseudo-currency.
CBDCs are coming whether you like it or not and a GNU Taler based payment system is currently our best mitigation strategy against them.
The best mitigation strategy is to refuse to use them and to point out when systems, like Taler, are actively working to further their introduction of use. Using your national currency is mandatory to pay taxes, it’s not mandatory for anything else in most countries. We have the option to opt out, just like we do with every other privacy-attacking technology. Assuming it’s inevitable is how they win.
