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.
Bitcoin is already more stable than most national currencies and gets past the issue where you have to trust a central bank to correctly regulate the production of currency. Ask anybody in Argentina, Turkey, or Zimbabwe how much they trust their national currency. You can use Bitcoin as an everyday currency without holding onto it, plenty of people do this, particularly since it’s simply better for international transactions than many alternatives. Bitcoin gets more stable with time as more people use it.
All currencies experience volatility. People in some countries are very lucky to have a “stable” currency to use. But due to its inflationary nature, currencies like the EUR and USD are designed to lose value over time. 2-3% per year in good years. How had the purchasing power of that currency held up in recent years? Because Bitcoin has held up pretty well. Volatility has many sources, not all of which can be controlled. Bitcoin fixes the total supply in circulation which helps control at least one of those variables. If I have to pick between a currency that is guaranteed to lose value and a currency which may gain or lose value, the choice is pretty clear to me.
Bitcoin’s user base, transaction volume, total market cap, number of full nodes etc, on average trend have increased or improved year after year for 15 years. You can send money to anybody on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees. And it’s as easy to use as Venmo. The dollar can’t do that, it needs a crazy complex series of international agreements and banks to make happen and it’s expensive and slow. Nobody’s making people use Bitcoin, in fact, there are often some hurdles to doing so, but they choose to because they see some value in doing so. But who knows, maybe on year 16 you’ll finally be right and people will finally realize it’s useless and stop using it!
Most “western” countries, like the US or western European countries, have very stabile currencies. You cherry picked three countries known for ridiculous instability in their currencies, that doesn’t show much TBH. For my day-to-day living, I’ll definitely pick the currency I know with very high certainty I can pay rent with in a year.
They have to be stabile enough to enable me to receive them from my employer as payment, and not risking my ability to pay rent because the value suddenly reduced significantly.
Nobody’s gonna make you, unlike a CBDC.