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.
>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.
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.
This is a surveillance oriented alternative to cryptocurrencies which uses the distraction complicated cryptography to obfscuate the fact that by design it intentionally undermines the privacy of its users.
The claim that is is privacy preserving are deceptive, and in my option constitute an act of intentional fraud on the part of its creators.
Its existence is justified under a fairytale model of how the world works-- a false believe 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.
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!
Taler is meant to be private and anonymous for the payer (customer) and not for the payee (merchant). I feel they’ve always been very clear about this, so unless you disagree about the premise, calling them deceptive seems unreasonable.
Moreover, I don’t know in which part of the world you live where private on-line payments are commonplace, but the only cashless payment options I tend to see are with bank transfers, credit or debit cards and payment processors like PayPal. My understanding is that compared to those, Taler gives payers privacy and doesn’t make things any worse for payees than they already are, which makes it an enormous step forward for privacy. Perhaps I’ve missed something, because saying it helps bring about dystopia when it only strives to make things much better than they are right now seems terribly out of touch.
> 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.
On your point #2, just a small hint: At https://taler-ops.ch/ we legally operate GNU Taler in Switzerland already. Now, Switzerland is a bit easier (lower capital requirements, no DORA), but actually quite similar in terms of KYC/AML as FATF provides a common reference frame.
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?
"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." -- actually no. Because the digital cash you "extracted" from the exchange was blindly signed, the exchange/central bank would NOT learn that you bought wine. Only that someone (anyone who previously withdrew a sufficient amount of digital cash) bought wine. Please do read up on cryptography, how to do this is known since 1989.
It's not the primary path you should be thinking about. It has been revealed in many cases, situations, and through many different methods that the primary path is effectively neutralized by circumventing it altogether, well before 1989 too.
It's never the primary battlefront that is really important, it's always the flanks my friend.
One point of Taler's architecture is that blind signatures are used to create tokens, so the issuer doesn't know which coin was issued to which person. Then the merchant doesn't know who the coin was issued to but can redeem it with the issuer if it's valid. So if there's enough transaction volume it'll be hard for issue of coins and redemption at merchants to be correlated.
> > In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.
And also I don't think they have a privacy-preserving solution for money transfers between consumers. So if I wanted to give you 20€ I think that has to be represented as a burning of tokens and a reissue, so the central issuer learns all those transactions even though purchases at merchants are private.
> 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
Adding the relevant context: Jacques Baud, someone who is actively supporting Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Europe. Taking active part in attempting to destabilize European democracies.
Somehow that never fails. Anytime a comment complains about a tyrannical EU it’s always coming from Russian apologists…
You are a perverse petty tyrant no matter how much you try to use manipulation, gaslighting, and emotive abuse to try to beat people down. You are not talking to your wife or other weak people you abuse, you can dispense with that childish tyrannical mindset when you talk to a man.
If words scare you so much you are a mere animal. But you know that.
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.
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.
> The NGI TALER project is funded under Horizon Europe (Pilots for the Next Generation Internet) with the aim of bringing GNU Taler to market across Europe.
https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
Taler is _not_ a fully anonymous payment system nor does it claims so.
It solves two specific problems:
- merchants get way more personal information about you then they actually need (merchants as e.g. your grocery store)
- alternative payments system implementations not owned by visa
non of this points include, or pretend to include, that your transactions are anonymous to auditors. Taler is in it's documentation pretty clear about that. It's a improvement to existing payment systems in the framework and limitations of existing payment transactions.
For being a honeypot you normally discrepancy between disclosed information and actual situation or other way to try to trick people to disclose things they don't want to disclose.
Just because some improvement to existing payment systems isn't hitting some legally impossible ideal doesn't make it a honeypot or any other way malicious.
That claim is meaningless without digging deeper. It's not the fault of any project that different people interpret terms like "privacy-friendly" differently. They don't say "anonymous".
I disagree. Plenty of privacy friendly things are not totally anonymous. The average reader has no such expectation, and if you think they do you really need to expand your social circle beyond a subset of tech workers.
I definitely read that the same way Apple means it with ApplePay - they are improving your privacy with respect to the merchant you are purchasing from, by them not learning anything unnecessary about you.
Any government-approved payment system is obviously going to be auditable under existing legal frameworks.
doesn't Apple require a name and a zip code? I would call that unnecessary, even if they wouldn't.
> Any government-approved payment system is ... auditable
Sure, I don't dispute that. Which is also why I wouldn't really call a government-approved system private (unless there are some shenanigans going on).
the anonymity of payment is between customer and merchant,
and much much less so wrt. (customer,merchent)-> auditor aspect.
It's also more German laws you have to worry about then EU regulators, as the German laws based on the regulation are noticeable more strict then what the EU requires.
And while this laws do apply to all transactions, they don't require the customer to be identified in every transaction. Instead it's a risk based model. E.g. you local grocery store doesn't check you identity when you buy some groceries with cash. Even if you buy with card no one checks if that is your card and the information the card transaction shared does not fulfill the data collection requirements for the highest risk transaction.
This is why Taler can work, _it_ has enough information to do risk and fraud detection for many "daily" low risk transaction. And for very high risk transactions the merchant anyway has to identify you out of band and can't rely on the card transaction information. Through I guess somewhere in between is still a gray area not sure how Taler handles that.
Putin tried his best not to get involved in Ukraine at all. Certain groups in Ukraine however were determined to ethnically cleanse Ukraine of all ethnic Russians, and to bring down any government that refused to do it. Since a large number of Ukrainian citizens were Russian speakers, and at least a large minority of Ukranian speakers don't think that they should be killed or expelled, there was no possibility of a democratic government that would have been acceptable to those groups.
If you held an election now among exclusively among all of the people who were citizens of Ukraine before 2014 and their children who have reached majority, you'd end up with another Russian-friendly government. Admit it, you're an ethno-nationalist who thinks of democracy as weakness.
Right, expecting that any government would approve a channel for continental scale money laundering and tax evasion is not realistic, neither would any sane person prefer it.
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.
I would expect that, just like other cryptocurrency, "cloud wallets" will manage the tokens themselves for most people, who will gladly give up decentralization for the tiniest bit of convenience
Which is still better than the status quo where only licensed banks can hold digital money for you. I'm fine with everyone having the choice of custodian as long as I can implement a wallet from the open specifications myself.
Licensed banks aren't getting pillaged by cyber criminals though, I'm tech literate and mindful of my security and yet my 3 bitcoins were stolen from Mt Gox. People buy hardware ledgers to create a higher sense of security then those get hacked. The money in my bank so far has never been touched without me having to think about it at all.
Presumably you would keep most of your money in a licensed bank and only a small fraction as cash: either in a digital wallet on your phone or a leather wallet in your pocket.
Being able to complete small purchases P2P offline without needing the whole MC/Visa/Square/Stripe stack would be fantastic.
Fantastic, yes. Unfortunately the 3 needed/wanted properties offline, anonymous, and secure cannot be achieved simultaneously.
MC/Visa work offline and secure, but not anonymous.
Taler is anonymous (payer) and secure, but not offline. At least the payer needs to be online to prevent double-spending.
> 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.
Don’t all state currencies ultimately come from banks? This feels much closer to cash in practice, which also comes from banks, yet I’d say it’s compatible with privacy.
So this is trying to compete against Wero, which is being backed by most major western European banks? I wish them luck, but I somewhat doubt they can compete against that.
The other half of the usual story is that: the user gets confused by all the possibilities and non-cohesive implementations of the FLOSS version and just pays some US startup which offers a single straightforward package.
It might be an advantage actually. Wero is a clusterfuck in Germany because it is backed by banks. In Germany there is not a single Wero App, but every bank wanted to implement it in their own app. Now you have the situation that a) some people cannot use it, because their bank decided to not implement at all b) each bank decides what features they implement as well as the timeframe. Some can pay online others cannot, yet, some won't at all. Some can pay in stores, others cannot, yet, some won't at all.
It's essentially dead before it has started. This is something Taler could do better. The real danger for Taker is the digital Euro, which I hope they really implement.
It literally just launched in 2-3 markets only, and it has the baking of banks, EU, regulatory bodies. Which is a big hurdle to clear and Taler is not even at the first hurdle yet, they got rejected in fact.
Having it integrated in every banks app is actually better, so people don’t have to set up another app and register for something. Why should they, if it’s build for being interoperable…just like using your banks Visa or Mastercard like right now.
Just give it some years, it also took a while to get instant transactions.
Wero also looks like the wrong solution tbh, because it doesn’t seem to have card infra. Fintech is one of the few bastions of European excellence, I’m annoyed the EU haven’t mandated an alternative card network into existence.
tldr of my understanding (do correct me if I'm wrong):
Neither buyer nor seller are anonymous. Your bank knows your ID-verified identity and that you have deposited X talers. However, nobody knows when, where, or even if you spend those talers. You are free to spend talers on eg. a e-book about Tiananmen Square and the bank/state will never know that you did. The seller, on the other hand, has no protections, and will be destroyed for selling an e-book about Tiananmen Square. Also, you can't realistically buy a physical book about Tiananmen Square because you will give up your address to the shipper and by extension to the state.
If my understanding is correct... it's not good enough. In a free society we should be able to both purchase and publish e-books about Tiananmen Square, and this does not permit that.
Of course in Germany you can purchase and publish e-books about Tiananmen Square, but I think that Tiananmen Square was just a placeholder to be replaced by something your government really doesn't like.
I think I have your understanding of it, and if that's correct then what's happening is that Taler isn't helping somebody sell books about US support of Nazi militias in overthrowing the elected government and ethnically cleansing ethnic Russians from Ukraine, it's just enabling them not to necessarily reveal the buyers. If they want to make money from this publishing without the government seeing, they'd have to come up with another reason to have been receiving Taler that wouldn't make the government suspicious.
That's pretty hard unless Taler is very widespread. I could see a world in which that would work - if people generally made all small purchases in Taler and it replaced cash. But there's no reason for governments to buy into that (except as maybe an intermediate pretense after ending legal cash payments entirely), and no reason for large corporate chains to buy into it unless (and maybe even if) government has bought into it (too much legal exposure for too little benefit.)
So any merchant who dealt in Taler would be maximally scrutinized, and whatever exception they were riding in order to be allowed to deal in Taler would be too valuable to give up through selling forbidden books. Like maybe your doctor could deal in Taler fairly freely, and he's not risking his medical license to screw around in politics.
> Also, you can't realistically buy a physical book about Tiananmen Square because you will give up your address to the shipper and by extension to the state
Nope. In many european countries, incl. Germany you can let the sender ship to an automatic station, and pick up the parcel by entering a PIN code. Just use a fake name.
And the payment trail is solved by paying anonymously with Taler.
I'm a happy GLS Bank customer, and I've just learned about its involvement in Taler. Pretty awesome.
Europe desperately needs its own digital payment solutions to reduce its dependence on US companies and its exposure to sanctions that could target EU citizens if the president has a bad day.
GLS is also on board with Wero, which, unfortunately, hasn't seen big adoption yet.
That's why it's built on SEPA instant that is written into EU law, requiring 10 second transfer times, and the banks have incentives to support these things (they often own it, but also because it creates lock-in effects of focusing business in one bank).
Do you pay your groceries with SEPA instant transfers?
Merchants can't just slap a QR code with their banking details on their website or cash registers. Wero offers a convenient layer on top of SEPA transfers, and you can argue EPC QR codes are already enough (though most people would disagree).
Additionally, Wero provides a full payment solution that's integrated with many third party processors, and is basically an evolution of Payconiq and iDEAL. Sure, it does use SEPA rails, but there's a lot more to it. And that's the part that will need to interoperate with more than a dozen mobile wallets in Europe, inside and outside the Eurozone.
In Poland everyone uses Blik, recently even Revolut (a popular pan-EU neobank) started supporting it for transactions in Poland. It’s trusted, available for 10+y and generally a successful project.
I don’t think it ever tried expanding outside of Poland though.
When it comes to Wero—I’m not sure. My bank recently replaced “payconiq” with it, and I don’t see any benefits or new features and the app seems amateurish.
I guess the single market is not really “single” in the US sense.
Most banks integrate Wero into their online banking app, but some (e.g. mine) use the dedicated app for Wero (It's just called wero on google play and iOS). You still sign up with your bank account though.
The critical feature that Wero needs is adding money to your account balance via SEPA instant or credit card. That way users without participating bank accounts can join.
banks have two ways to offer non-iDeal Wero: Either in their own app, or via the Wero app.
I think it's super interesting to see how Wero connects all the separate instant payment schemes. It launched in Germany and France, replacing giropay in Germany. Now it first rebrands iDeal as iDeal|Wero, and plans to replace it with regular Wero. And in Poland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Italy, they don't push the Wero brand or technology, but instead they build interoperability with the local systems.
Like someone else who made the "SEPA in trenchcoat" comment, it's all built on tying phonenumbers (universally available and easily connectible) to bank accounts and relying on SEPA instant for the money.
The only thing to make sure is that QR-codes,etc that are often tied to apps will be supported for routing/connecting between different apps.
Like the Swedish Swish app when asking for money produces a QR-code that says, A+(my-phone-number) , if that's universally recognized by the apps as an ask-request then an Italian app scanning my QR code will be prompted send money and the Italian system will query the Swedish counterparts what account is registered to that phone and then just send the money over SEPA when the request finishes.
The real benefit is "one to rule them all". It's so much more useful to have one single network that everybody uses even if the service doesn't have all the bells and whistles, than it is to have to use a patchwork of 1000 different networks even if they're stuffed with fancy features.
> I guess the single market is not really “single” in the US sense.
AFAIK due to SEPA we are already much better integrated. And with SEPA URLs (QR or NFC) plus instant transactions we already have all we need deployed EU wide. IMO the European banks are just over engineering everything.
Which is 99.9% of the users and probably not a blocker for main stream adoption especially if it’s not the only way to pay (Bank transfer, cash etc all still works).
Edge case or not, I do consider a dependency on user-hostile proprietary software owned and controlled by foreign companies a serious problem by nature. Most people not caring doesn’t make it any better.
True, but at least with GLS, you can run their app even on rooted Android phones (with Magisks DenyList configured) and use the app's built-in NFC payment functionality. This is super nice, as Google Wallets NFC payments don't work on rooted phones.
I don't know what the situation is like on GrapheneOS, though, as I run LineageOS.
which one of these lets me choose the hardware and promises to let me do so indefinitely? I run sailfish os, for example, and hsbc decided to cut off my internet banking for it
The sooner Europeans decouple themselves - including security,
including a nuclear arsenal - from crazy Trump the better. In
all aspects. Without exceptions.
Canadians understand this problem much better than many european
politicians. In particular Merz is like a lame obedient duck here.
And Macron too now, after failing the french population again and
again. He had many years time to fix France and did not do so. That
is deliberate failure.
Sadly Trump is not the only person who has to be decoupled from. Germany has its own locally grown problems too - I'm not sure it's better to trust Germany than to trust America.
You don't have to trust anyone with GNU Taler as it is only a free software technology and your country of choice can choose to deploy it.
I guess it doesn't make a lot of sense to become a customer of the German GNU Taler association if you don't live in Germany or at least the EU. And if you already live in Germany you implicitly have to trust German governance somewhat because that is how being part of a society works.
That's the point of the new payment technologies, if you pay with a Visa card you have to trust an American company to provide the service continuously and as the US sanctions against the ICJ justices showed, this is not a theoretical threat scenario anymore.
Wishing Taler lots of success and hoping for the best. Adopting something like this should be a given, but unfortunately freedom and privacy aren’t seen as essentials, not even in the EU.
GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying. You cannot create an open system in line with FOSS principles and be compliant with laws that mandate centralized control. That's why this project is now becoming an entirely centralized bank. This is the only way it can remain compliant with the laws in question.
There is no backdoor. There may be bugs (point those out, we'll fix!), and there is the very clear and documented statement that the receiver of funds is subject to legitimization based on the legal requirements under which the exchange operates. That is not a backdoor. Backdoor implies secrecy, we have no secrets other than our private keys. ;-)
If you don't like the word backdoor, use a different one. It doesn't change the point in making. In any case, backdoor does not necessarily mean it's secret. There are known backdoors and there are secret backdoors. This is a known backdoor.
My understanding is that you (the buyer) connect to the exchange to get tokens, and the seller later connects to the exchange to get money for your tokens. The exchange doesn’t know where, how and when you spend your tokens. Where’s the backdoor?
"3. Auditability - enable the state to tax income and crack down on illegal business activities
As a payment system must comply with local laws in order to operate legally, GNU Taler must be designed to comply with these requirements. GNU Taler must provide an audit trail for investigators operating under the law. Furthermore, we consider levying of taxes as beneficial to society, and fair taxation requires income transparency. Thus, GNU Taler must enable authorities to track income."
There is a third party — the exchange — that records everything that the merchant receives. It's explicitly designed not to be peer-to-peer. This exchange acts as a gatekeeper and the state's delegate, for the purposes of gathering financial information on private citizens.
Yes, but that is by design. Taler promises to protect the buyer’s privacy, not the merchant’s. That is very explicitly stated.
When you say ‘GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying’, that implies to me that it provides secret means of accessing private information to a third party. That is not true, since the party in question is directly involved in the system and there is no expectation of privacy guaranteed via technological means. Calling that ‘a backdoor’ is very misleading.
There is such an expectation for the customer, where it would make sense to speak of a backdoor if there was one, but there isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, and since it’s all libre software, anyone can verify this.
Perhaps the word "spying" implied the wrong thing. I did not intend to imply that this is in secret. This is an overt surveillance system that uses a known backdoor, not a covert one that uses a secret one.
The important detail being that this surveillance only concerns merchant income, not customer payments. Omitting that is bound to give people the wrong idea whenever you call it a ‘surveillance system’. :-)
(And I still doubt whether the term ‘backdoor’ really makes sense in this context.)
It's "money" but it has to be permanently connected to the Internet and it *expires* if disconnected for too long?? This is infinitely worse than Bitcoin.
> Taler e-money is issued with a validity period. One month before the expiration date, your wallet should automatically exchange any digital cash that is about to expire for new digital cash with an extended validity period. However, if your wallet is offline for an extended period of time, it may be unable to do so. Ensure your wallet is regularly online to avoid losing money due to expiration!
> It's "money" but it has to be permanently connected to the Internet and it *expires* if disconnected for too long??
Staying disconnected is not what makes them expire, but you need connection to ‘renew’ them before they do expire, if you plan on keeping your tokens for a very long time (say, years). At least that’s my reading of it.
> This is infinitely worse than Bitcoin.
If we only consider this single aspect and ignore all the other ways in which it’s arguably better than Bitcoin, then yes.
I agree. I can hold my paper cash in my wallet for as long as I like. Having digital money that expires (even if i can "refresh" the validity period) is a no go. It would have to be used like this: need to buy something? load some money on GNU Taler wallet, buy thing, keep wallet empty.
So it would be just cumbersome to use in real life.
> GNU Taler is a privacy-preserving payment system. Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering.
> The primary use case of GNU Taler is payments; it is not meant as a store of value. Payments are always backed by an existing currency.
I suspect that it will lose out against the Digital Euro.
I do think that GNU Taler is the better technical solution as the blind signatures and online model require less trust in the platform, while the Digital Euro requires untamperable hardware enclaves. So in an ideal world we would all standardize on GNU Taler and be happy.
Unfortunately, anything related to money is probably the place where trust paranoia is the least useful. In fact, widespread use of the Digital Euro will probably be the best proof for the security of the available hardware enclaves, similar to how Bitcoin is proof that SHA-2 is currently secure. Otherwise, somebody would make bank from counterfeiting in the few moments before the system crashes down.
The digital Euro has the real benefit to allow offline transactions.
Both Digital Euro and GNU Taler have the psychological burden that you have to exchange "real money" for some kind of digital "monopoly money" which can get lost with no way to re-imburse you. (Which is the same as would happen with literal cash, but nobody will care about that.)
(Which is why I actually think both "digital cash" solutions will die out, with GNU Taler fading into obscurity, and Digital Euro being kept on life support as it is literally legal tender. And we will eventually all just be using Wero, which is just SEPA wire transfers in a trench coat)
The Digital Euro is intentionally designed to be as close to cash as possible.
This is also why GNU Taler was not a viable candidate from the start (lacks offline transactions). You can also acquire and have Digital Euros without having a bank account.
Wero is explicitly a system backed by the private banking system, if you do not have a bank account, you cannot participate.
I was laughing about the "Wero, which is just SEPA wire transfers in a trench coat", but then I checked the technicalities of Bizum (the similar system in Spain that's also integrating with Wero) and Wero...
Bizum says on their site "...so our tech is based on SEPA transfers, linking a phone number with a Spanish IBAN so we're ready for Europe wide deployment", and Wero says "It runs on the SEPA Instant standard..."
So yes, it really is SEPA on a phone number trench coat.
Not wrong, just funny! I don't like the dependency on the bank (that could have, or not, Wero/Bizum support integrated) but I never though it was "just" a SEPA process.
> Both Digital Euro and GNU Taler have the psychological burden that you have to exchange "real money" for some kind of digital "monopoly money" which can get lost with no way to re-imburse you.
With my short chat a while ago with GNU Taler's project maintainer was that for a rollout of Taler one would need an EMI (Electronic Money Issuance (?)) license. Besides the capital requirements to hold such a license there are rules to prevent/punish lack of deposit safety.
In short, it's not comparable to cryptocurrency "trust me bro" attitude, but it also makes it hard for new startups to get seed funded to start their own Taler exchange and payments integration.
I would strongly assume that the EMI license is about something different and does not enforce that your digital cash needs to be re-imbursable if you lost it.
There is already precedent of cash cards like GeldKarte which also were non-reimbursable if you lost the physical card, so at least BaFin would allow something like that, but I don't know if that predated the EMI rules.
Are you sure they didn't just mean the requirement that they have to keep the capital around (at least in significant parts) to cash out any tokens they emit?
If only I'd have 350k euros lying around to pursue this route, and have clear answers :)
But from what I gather (and my memory might be a bit fuzzy) on one hand you have to safe-keep the deposits from your operating capital in full to allow redeeming them back, while at the same time you have to hold those funds in "classical" banks. In which case, I would assume, they would fall within the same guaranteed 100k deposit safety which is across the EU. However the devil is in the details, if for example you can open a bank account for each individual user, or you're holding all deposits in a single grouped account.
As an end-user if you lose the funds that would be no different to losing your wallet, and a mechanism like this shouldn't be seen as a separate "bank account". With SEPA instant payments you would top it up as an additional wallet when you need to make payments and you don't have enough funds in your account.
I was only talking about the case that your funds can get lots if you lose your device. Because the tokens work like cash and cannot be revoked and reimbursed. Not about redemption from token back to euros.
> Both Digital Euro and GNU Taler have the psychological burden that you have to exchange "real money" for some kind of digital "monopoly money"
Isn't the idea behind the digital euro the exact opposite? That the money you see on your conventional bank account is famously not real (as the bank goes bankrupt if everyone tries to withdraw), while the money you have in the form of digital euro is real money, the way cash is?
I am just offering personal opinion and looking into my crystal ball.
You are correct on the facts. The idea is precisely to have a digital cash equivalent, in fact it will even be tracked as part of M1.
I just don't think that people will treat it like tangible cash, and instead assume it to have the same standards of loss prevention that they have with other digital payment methods. You don't lose your bank account if you lose your phone or your debit card, and people will act surprised when they find out that for the D€ this does not apply.
I predict there will be some sentimental news stories about those "victims" of the D€ quickly after the introduction, and it will take quite some time until there is some trust in the public, if ever.
I don't understand how this can succeed. From customer POV there are benefits, but they are not immediately practical. It seems that huge amount (if not majority) happily uses membership/discount cards/apps which reduces anonymity anyway. For merchants it's rather a nuisance, I guess? From political authorities POV it's a solution in search of a problem, I think. Because why would they even care about buyer's anonymity?
Taler looks like a cool idea, but it feels wrong that the wallet supports only smartphones, or a Chrome/Firefox extension. Browser extensions can't be relied on to store important data, and smartphone centralization is the enemy. Maybe you can back up your money, but seriously, what the fuck?
Call it a demo of our micro-payment service? Try paying with the Taler wallet, the gratis demo currency "KUDOS" will work. Plus, we had a real problem with DDoS from bots given that generating the cgit is expensive. Now, https://git.taler.net/ (static version) has no paywall, and git:// is also completely gratis.
Thing most miss about Taler when comparing to Were or Blik:
You can download Taler app, open it, withdraw money from ATM or a friend, without logging in, without even having a bank account or app provided by a bank. Tokens in the Taler wallet are decoupled from current system and cannot be taken away without shutting whole system down. It is the closest to digital cash we have that does not depend on blockchains.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadIt'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.
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...
It will be choked out at key junctions with KYC in the same way crypto has.
The claim that is is privacy preserving are deceptive, and in my option constitute an act of intentional fraud on the part of its creators.
Its existence is justified under a fairytale model of how the world works-- a false believe 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.
Moreover, I don’t know in which part of the world you live where private on-line payments are commonplace, but the only cashless payment options I tend to see are with bank transfers, credit or debit cards and payment processors like PayPal. My understanding is that compared to those, Taler gives payers privacy and doesn’t make things any worse for payees than they already are, which makes it an enormous step forward for privacy. Perhaps I’ve missed something, because saying it helps bring about dystopia when it only strives to make things much better than they are right now seems terribly out of touch.
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.
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?
I have no idea how that's supposed to work.
It's never the primary battlefront that is really important, it's always the flanks my friend.
What worries me is the SNB whitepaper on "how to issue a digital currency" they worked on with Taler: https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r...
> > In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.
And also I don't think they have a privacy-preserving solution for money transfers between consumers. So if I wanted to give you 20€ I think that has to be represented as a burning of tokens and a reissue, so the central issuer learns all those transactions even though purchases at merchants are private.
Adding the relevant context: Jacques Baud, someone who is actively supporting Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Europe. Taking active part in attempting to destabilize European democracies.
Somehow that never fails. Anytime a comment complains about a tyrannical EU it’s always coming from Russian apologists…
If words scare you so much you are a mere animal. But you know that.
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.
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.
> The NGI TALER project is funded under Horizon Europe (Pilots for the Next Generation Internet) with the aim of bringing GNU Taler to market across Europe. https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
Unlike crypto, it is designed from the beginning with KYC/AML in mind. https://www.taler.net/en/principles.html
The issue seems to have been that GLS Bank was not able to support this beyond Germany. KYC/AML is a pretty complex topic. And since GLS is a tiny local bank (1,100 employees) it would have been a very large project for them. https://ich.taler.net/t/taler-en-belgique-en-france-ou-au-lu... https://www.gls.de/taler
More on the implemtation here: https://www.taler.net/en/kyc.html https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/023-taler-kyc.html https://docs.taler.net/taler-kyc-manual.html
Taler is _not_ a fully anonymous payment system nor does it claims so.
It solves two specific problems:
- merchants get way more personal information about you then they actually need (merchants as e.g. your grocery store)
- alternative payments system implementations not owned by visa
non of this points include, or pretend to include, that your transactions are anonymous to auditors. Taler is in it's documentation pretty clear about that. It's a improvement to existing payment systems in the framework and limitations of existing payment transactions.
For being a honeypot you normally discrepancy between disclosed information and actual situation or other way to try to trick people to disclose things they don't want to disclose.
Just because some improvement to existing payment systems isn't hitting some legally impossible ideal doesn't make it a honeypot or any other way malicious.
> privacy-friendly online transactions
so I believe any reasonable user, without digging more deeply, would not come to the conclusion that they are complying with KYC laws.
projects cannot control what people think, but they can control what they say, and attempt to word things in the best way possible
Even I, as a non "general reader" consider this service to be non-private.
Any government-approved payment system is obviously going to be auditable under existing legal frameworks.
> Any government-approved payment system is ... auditable
Sure, I don't dispute that. Which is also why I wouldn't really call a government-approved system private (unless there are some shenanigans going on).
Must have been quite a curveball for Taler. Good luck on new venture!
and much much less so wrt. (customer,merchent)-> auditor aspect.
It's also more German laws you have to worry about then EU regulators, as the German laws based on the regulation are noticeable more strict then what the EU requires.
And while this laws do apply to all transactions, they don't require the customer to be identified in every transaction. Instead it's a risk based model. E.g. you local grocery store doesn't check you identity when you buy some groceries with cash. Even if you buy with card no one checks if that is your card and the information the card transaction shared does not fulfill the data collection requirements for the highest risk transaction.
This is why Taler can work, _it_ has enough information to do risk and fraud detection for many "daily" low risk transaction. And for very high risk transactions the merchant anyway has to identify you out of band and can't rely on the card transaction information. Through I guess somewhere in between is still a gray area not sure how Taler handles that.
Putin is committing his genocide to Ukrainians; Trump is siding with him. It is time to call those who weaken Europeans as enemies.
If you held an election now among exclusively among all of the people who were citizens of Ukraine before 2014 and their children who have reached majority, you'd end up with another Russian-friendly government. Admit it, you're an ethno-nationalist who thinks of democracy as weakness.
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.
Being able to complete small purchases P2P offline without needing the whole MC/Visa/Square/Stripe stack would be fantastic.
Don’t all state currencies ultimately come from banks? This feels much closer to cash in practice, which also comes from banks, yet I’d say it’s compatible with privacy.
It's essentially dead before it has started. This is something Taler could do better. The real danger for Taker is the digital Euro, which I hope they really implement.
It literally just launched in 2-3 markets only, and it has the baking of banks, EU, regulatory bodies. Which is a big hurdle to clear and Taler is not even at the first hurdle yet, they got rejected in fact.
Having it integrated in every banks app is actually better, so people don’t have to set up another app and register for something. Why should they, if it’s build for being interoperable…just like using your banks Visa or Mastercard like right now.
Just give it some years, it also took a while to get instant transactions.
Neither buyer nor seller are anonymous. Your bank knows your ID-verified identity and that you have deposited X talers. However, nobody knows when, where, or even if you spend those talers. You are free to spend talers on eg. a e-book about Tiananmen Square and the bank/state will never know that you did. The seller, on the other hand, has no protections, and will be destroyed for selling an e-book about Tiananmen Square. Also, you can't realistically buy a physical book about Tiananmen Square because you will give up your address to the shipper and by extension to the state.
If my understanding is correct... it's not good enough. In a free society we should be able to both purchase and publish e-books about Tiananmen Square, and this does not permit that.
What? You can definitely publish about it in a free society, and cash anonymity has nothing to do with it.
That's pretty hard unless Taler is very widespread. I could see a world in which that would work - if people generally made all small purchases in Taler and it replaced cash. But there's no reason for governments to buy into that (except as maybe an intermediate pretense after ending legal cash payments entirely), and no reason for large corporate chains to buy into it unless (and maybe even if) government has bought into it (too much legal exposure for too little benefit.)
So any merchant who dealt in Taler would be maximally scrutinized, and whatever exception they were riding in order to be allowed to deal in Taler would be too valuable to give up through selling forbidden books. Like maybe your doctor could deal in Taler fairly freely, and he's not risking his medical license to screw around in politics.
Nope. In many european countries, incl. Germany you can let the sender ship to an automatic station, and pick up the parcel by entering a PIN code. Just use a fake name. And the payment trail is solved by paying anonymously with Taler.
Europe desperately needs its own digital payment solutions to reduce its dependence on US companies and its exposure to sanctions that could target EU citizens if the president has a bad day.
GLS is also on board with Wero, which, unfortunately, hasn't seen big adoption yet.
I really hope Taler takes off.
Wero has the right momentum, it'll get there. But federating mobile wallets in the Eurozone and eventually Europe at large is no small feat.
Do you pay your groceries with SEPA instant transfers?
Merchants can't just slap a QR code with their banking details on their website or cash registers. Wero offers a convenient layer on top of SEPA transfers, and you can argue EPC QR codes are already enough (though most people would disagree).
Additionally, Wero provides a full payment solution that's integrated with many third party processors, and is basically an evolution of Payconiq and iDEAL. Sure, it does use SEPA rails, but there's a lot more to it. And that's the part that will need to interoperate with more than a dozen mobile wallets in Europe, inside and outside the Eurozone.
I don’t think it ever tried expanding outside of Poland though.
When it comes to Wero—I’m not sure. My bank recently replaced “payconiq” with it, and I don’t see any benefits or new features and the app seems amateurish.
I guess the single market is not really “single” in the US sense.
https://www.blik.com/en (source: I’m Polish, but moved abroad ~4y ago)
What app? In the Netherlands, where wero originated as iDeal, I've always used it via my bank's app. Isn't it how it's supposed to work?
The critical feature that Wero needs is adding money to your account balance via SEPA instant or credit card. That way users without participating bank accounts can join.
I think it's super interesting to see how Wero connects all the separate instant payment schemes. It launched in Germany and France, replacing giropay in Germany. Now it first rebrands iDeal as iDeal|Wero, and plans to replace it with regular Wero. And in Poland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Italy, they don't push the Wero brand or technology, but instead they build interoperability with the local systems.
The only thing to make sure is that QR-codes,etc that are often tied to apps will be supported for routing/connecting between different apps.
Like the Swedish Swish app when asking for money produces a QR-code that says, A+(my-phone-number) , if that's universally recognized by the apps as an ask-request then an Italian app scanning my QR code will be prompted send money and the Italian system will query the Swedish counterparts what account is registered to that phone and then just send the money over SEPA when the request finishes.
The real benefit is "one to rule them all". It's so much more useful to have one single network that everybody uses even if the service doesn't have all the bells and whistles, than it is to have to use a patchwork of 1000 different networks even if they're stuffed with fancy features.
The same way AliPay+ has enabled interoperability among 50+ mobile wallets globally, mostly in Asian countries.
AFAIK due to SEPA we are already much better integrated. And with SEPA URLs (QR or NFC) plus instant transactions we already have all we need deployed EU wide. IMO the European banks are just over engineering everything.
I don't know what the situation is like on GrapheneOS, though, as I run LineageOS.
Canadians understand this problem much better than many european politicians. In particular Merz is like a lame obedient duck here. And Macron too now, after failing the french population again and again. He had many years time to fix France and did not do so. That is deliberate failure.
I guess it doesn't make a lot of sense to become a customer of the German GNU Taler association if you don't live in Germany or at least the EU. And if you already live in Germany you implicitly have to trust German governance somewhat because that is how being part of a society works.
That's the point of the new payment technologies, if you pay with a Visa card you have to trust an American company to provide the service continuously and as the US sanctions against the ICJ justices showed, this is not a theoretical threat scenario anymore.
And that backdoor for spying in this entirely free/libre software is…?
As a payment system must comply with local laws in order to operate legally, GNU Taler must be designed to comply with these requirements. GNU Taler must provide an audit trail for investigators operating under the law. Furthermore, we consider levying of taxes as beneficial to society, and fair taxation requires income transparency. Thus, GNU Taler must enable authorities to track income."
GNU Taler: Principles https://www.taler.net/en/principles.html
There is a third party — the exchange — that records everything that the merchant receives. It's explicitly designed not to be peer-to-peer. This exchange acts as a gatekeeper and the state's delegate, for the purposes of gathering financial information on private citizens.
When you say ‘GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying’, that implies to me that it provides secret means of accessing private information to a third party. That is not true, since the party in question is directly involved in the system and there is no expectation of privacy guaranteed via technological means. Calling that ‘a backdoor’ is very misleading.
There is such an expectation for the customer, where it would make sense to speak of a backdoor if there was one, but there isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, and since it’s all libre software, anyone can verify this.
(And I still doubt whether the term ‘backdoor’ really makes sense in this context.)
I’m all for fast-forwarding and you can pull this off I will donate towards a statue in your honour.
https://www.taler.net/en/faq.html
> Taler e-money is issued with a validity period. One month before the expiration date, your wallet should automatically exchange any digital cash that is about to expire for new digital cash with an extended validity period. However, if your wallet is offline for an extended period of time, it may be unable to do so. Ensure your wallet is regularly online to avoid losing money due to expiration!
Staying disconnected is not what makes them expire, but you need connection to ‘renew’ them before they do expire, if you plan on keeping your tokens for a very long time (say, years). At least that’s my reading of it.
> This is infinitely worse than Bitcoin.
If we only consider this single aspect and ignore all the other ways in which it’s arguably better than Bitcoin, then yes.
It's not meant to be like Bitcoin. If you want Bitcoin, use Bitcoin.
GNU Taler seems more like an expiring invoice that requires paying in a specific timeframe.
I agree. I can hold my paper cash in my wallet for as long as I like. Having digital money that expires (even if i can "refresh" the validity period) is a no go. It would have to be used like this: need to buy something? load some money on GNU Taler wallet, buy thing, keep wallet empty.
So it would be just cumbersome to use in real life.
> The primary use case of GNU Taler is payments; it is not meant as a store of value. Payments are always backed by an existing currency.
This looks like it could be useful anywhere.
I do think that GNU Taler is the better technical solution as the blind signatures and online model require less trust in the platform, while the Digital Euro requires untamperable hardware enclaves. So in an ideal world we would all standardize on GNU Taler and be happy.
Unfortunately, anything related to money is probably the place where trust paranoia is the least useful. In fact, widespread use of the Digital Euro will probably be the best proof for the security of the available hardware enclaves, similar to how Bitcoin is proof that SHA-2 is currently secure. Otherwise, somebody would make bank from counterfeiting in the few moments before the system crashes down.
The digital Euro has the real benefit to allow offline transactions. Both Digital Euro and GNU Taler have the psychological burden that you have to exchange "real money" for some kind of digital "monopoly money" which can get lost with no way to re-imburse you. (Which is the same as would happen with literal cash, but nobody will care about that.)
(Which is why I actually think both "digital cash" solutions will die out, with GNU Taler fading into obscurity, and Digital Euro being kept on life support as it is literally legal tender. And we will eventually all just be using Wero, which is just SEPA wire transfers in a trench coat)
The Digital Euro is intentionally designed to be as close to cash as possible. This is also why GNU Taler was not a viable candidate from the start (lacks offline transactions). You can also acquire and have Digital Euros without having a bank account.
Wero is explicitly a system backed by the private banking system, if you do not have a bank account, you cannot participate.
Bizum says on their site "...so our tech is based on SEPA transfers, linking a phone number with a Spanish IBAN so we're ready for Europe wide deployment", and Wero says "It runs on the SEPA Instant standard..."
So yes, it really is SEPA on a phone number trench coat.
With my short chat a while ago with GNU Taler's project maintainer was that for a rollout of Taler one would need an EMI (Electronic Money Issuance (?)) license. Besides the capital requirements to hold such a license there are rules to prevent/punish lack of deposit safety.
In short, it's not comparable to cryptocurrency "trust me bro" attitude, but it also makes it hard for new startups to get seed funded to start their own Taler exchange and payments integration.
There is already precedent of cash cards like GeldKarte which also were non-reimbursable if you lost the physical card, so at least BaFin would allow something like that, but I don't know if that predated the EMI rules.
Are you sure they didn't just mean the requirement that they have to keep the capital around (at least in significant parts) to cash out any tokens they emit?
But from what I gather (and my memory might be a bit fuzzy) on one hand you have to safe-keep the deposits from your operating capital in full to allow redeeming them back, while at the same time you have to hold those funds in "classical" banks. In which case, I would assume, they would fall within the same guaranteed 100k deposit safety which is across the EU. However the devil is in the details, if for example you can open a bank account for each individual user, or you're holding all deposits in a single grouped account.
As an end-user if you lose the funds that would be no different to losing your wallet, and a mechanism like this shouldn't be seen as a separate "bank account". With SEPA instant payments you would top it up as an additional wallet when you need to make payments and you don't have enough funds in your account.
The most concise page I could find right now, that talks about the EMI license is https://www.icon.partners/post/what-is-an-emi-license
I was only talking about the case that your funds can get lots if you lose your device. Because the tokens work like cash and cannot be revoked and reimbursed. Not about redemption from token back to euros.
Isn't the idea behind the digital euro the exact opposite? That the money you see on your conventional bank account is famously not real (as the bank goes bankrupt if everyone tries to withdraw), while the money you have in the form of digital euro is real money, the way cash is?
You are correct on the facts. The idea is precisely to have a digital cash equivalent, in fact it will even be tracked as part of M1.
I just don't think that people will treat it like tangible cash, and instead assume it to have the same standards of loss prevention that they have with other digital payment methods. You don't lose your bank account if you lose your phone or your debit card, and people will act surprised when they find out that for the D€ this does not apply.
I predict there will be some sentimental news stories about those "victims" of the D€ quickly after the introduction, and it will take quite some time until there is some trust in the public, if ever.
> - want a privacy-preserving, free-software payment system to become legally available in Germany and the Euro area;
> - understand that this is a regulated infrastructure business with a licensing phase before revenue; and
> - are able to invest at least €50,000.
It's a shame that people can't say things like this for their own startups in the U.S. without violating securities laws. It would be so much easier.
You can download Taler app, open it, withdraw money from ATM or a friend, without logging in, without even having a bank account or app provided by a bank. Tokens in the Taler wallet are decoupled from current system and cannot be taken away without shutting whole system down. It is the closest to digital cash we have that does not depend on blockchains.