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.
By what definition is that?
That they can peg them to a currency like the USD. Unless you are the United States of America, that is literally impossible. But even if you discard that technical impossibility, none have even close to the assets required to even approximate a peg, so it is a scam both theoretically and practically.
Here’s DAI’s peg over time. Over the past year it’s had a high point of $1.0012 and a low of $0.9979, neither extreme lasting more than a brief spike. Seems like a pretty good peg to me. The mechanism by which it maintains its peg is complex, but fully transparent since it happens entirely on-chain.
Here’s LUSD, another similarly algorithmically-pegged stabletoken. It’s smaller than DAI so it’s a bit less stable, it had one spike this year where it went all the way up to $1.029. But the mechanism is much simpler so if you’re having trouble understanding DAI it might be an easier place to start.
I have no problem understanding that scams need to look good for a while to attract victims…