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.
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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”.
Yeah, the fact that out payment system is so centralised is definitely a bad thing. But GNU Taler, from what I understand, is just trying to work within that system. It didn’t create the system, and it doesn’t have the power to replace it.
It didn’t create the system, and it doesn’t have the power to replace it.
But it does support the system by being a part of it
If only there was some other technology that came along that could :(
Please show me the crypto that just has the stability needed to be used as day-to-day currency. Not even accounting for ease of use, wide adoption etc., which none of them have, they’re all volatile shit shows only suitable for gambling, more resembling stocks than currency.
Please show me the crypto that just has the stability needed to be used as day-to-day currency
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.
Not even accounting for ease of use, wide adoption etc., which none of them have,
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.
Sure, it’s worse than monero and cash in terms of privacy, but that’s not what it’s supposed to replace. There are plans to use Taler as an alternative to card payments in the EU and that would be a great improvement. Currently all payment data is visible to multiple of companies, the shop, the bank, and many middle man and is often sold off to other commerical entities. Taler would stop that.
CBDC?
When crypto bros stop shilling anti-libre software, maybe i’ll start to care.
Your first example is tax fraud if you hide it
Edit: it looks like you edited your post to state the guy repairing your bike is “your friend”.
Noone is going to go after him if he just fixes your bike. But if he fixes the bike of his 1000 friends each month, they will go after him if he didn’t declare it.
That may technically be true, but it’s currently very normalized. Do we actually want to denormalize it? Should the government know about every trivial transaction?
not if they’re only covering the cost of parts
GNU Taler is inferior anyway, and it has been existing for many years with exact zero of usage.
Imagine reinventing Chaumian e-cash 40 year later and promoting it as a innovative approach in digital payments.
Recently read an ELI5 of the digital euro and was pleasantly surprised. If it works as designed, you can perform offline payments from one device to another, which sounds like your use case. No central servers, no blockchain.
If you can do a P2P transaction like that, you need either a central server or a blockchain or equivalent to prevent double-spends. There is no other way. Satoshi’s innovation for Bitcoin was developing a system (blockchain) that can do this without a central server.
I don’t know how the technical implementation will work, but here is a post I found.
The idea is that you transfer money from the bank to your device, just like withdrawing cash from an ATM. Transferring money from one wallet to another should be able to be offline.
It seems like privacy is a priority, if only to satisfy privacy groups and improve acceptance.
I disagree. Taler also individuals to stay private while preventing crime. I personally could never use crypto as it empowers criminals and is very unpredictable. Taler uses flat currency so you don’t need to worry about it losing value overnight.
It isn’t done yet and it may get abandoned but it is a start. For now it is a interesting project to watch. Also cash is king
Taler uses flat currency so you don’t need to worry about it losing value overnight.
There are a number of stabletokens that you also wouldn’t need to worry about losing value overnight.
Stablecoins are the worst of crypto and central banking combined.
- They are centralized, even more centralized than central banks since they are run by a single company not an board appointed by an elected government
- They can rug you at any time
- They only have value because they are “pegged” to a certain currency and the “backing” must exist to maintain that peg.
- Their source of the backing is often “trust me bro”
- Even if the backing was solid, market shocks and other problems can reduce the value of that backing, leading to them being insolvent and the stablecoin losing its value. And guess what, it wasn’t insured!
- They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely, so you have no reason to trust their claims and probably can’t seek any real remedy if they are lies
- They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation
Several of them have already collapsed spectacularly. More will in time. Avoid stablecoins.
Some stablecoins are centralized, but it’s not a fundamental requirement of how they operate. Stabletokens such as DAI or Liquity are run without a central company. They cannot “rug” you because they’re based on smart contracts.
They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely
Isn’t that kind of the point?
so you have no reason to trust their claims
Smart contract code can be audited by anyone and trusted to run exactly as it’s written.
They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation
Stablecoins aren’t required to peg to any specific measure of value (I assume you’re referring to US dollars?). There are stabletokens pegged to gold, for example, if you really want something like that.
Since US dollars work just fine for commerce, though, using a stabletoken that’s pegged to US dollars works fine for commerce too.
That’s just smoke and mirrors. If there was a “bank run” on a stable coin all of them would immediately collapse as there is nothing of real value backing them.
Anything of value is capable of losing its value under some circumstances, since value is assigned by humans. Obviously you pick and choose based on your use cases.
That’s a cop-out to avoid discussing that none of the stable coins have anywhere close to the assets they claim to have and which would be necessary to peg the value.
You can examine the MakerDAO contract, for example, and see all of the assets they claim to have sitting right there under its control on the blockchain. You can see the contract logic behind how those assets enter and exit its control.
/c/Libertarian is that way:
/c/Cryptocurrency is over there:
