GNU Taler begins operating in Switzerland, distributed by the Taler Operations AG. Gnu Taler aims to be a “digital wallet” and has been used by the swiss national bank as well as the european national bank as a example for how a digital currency handed out by the state could work. It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.
Currently the Taler is brought out by a special organisation, the “Taler Operations AG”, and not the national bank, although both the national bank as well as the Taler Team have shown interest in a official digial currency by the national bank based on the Taler. But we need to relativate as the national council has stated that the introduction of a digital currency would probably take relatively major legislative changes and therefore take a bit of time.
I rarely wish for an opensource project to fail, but Taler is an exception. Offering a digital currency system for the government to use is like sending an efficiency improvement proposal to Auschwitz.
most tactful .world user
I don’t even know what you’re saying. Is this anti-money, anti-government, anti-technology…
You say that as if the majority of currency transactions worldwide weren’t already digital.
Physical or digital does not really matter. Gving such a powerful tool to a central bank seems too dangerous. If implemented, it’s not really a question of IF it’s going to be abused, but WHEN it’s going to be abused.
The digital currencies were supposed to give more power to the people, but the Taler is working in the oposite direction.
You might actually like Taler, it’s fundamentally different from blockchain based systems, to the point of being a cryptocurrency only in the technical sense, but not having any of the properties people associate with that word culturally.
Taler doesn’t use any kind of proof of work, and so doesn’t consume excess power or other resources, at least not more than, like, visiting any normal webpage. It’s also not decentralized, and only partially anonymous, so I can acquire money anonymously and no one can trace the money I got to a particular spend, but the only place I can reasonably spend it has to be registered to the centralized issuer and is firmly not anonymous. And the only things they can do with the tokens they receive is redeem them, which means there’s no place for tax evasion because the issuing authority can track every dollar the registered vendors redeem with them. And you can’t really transfer money from random person to person, so there’s no black market opportunity, etc.
So basically the only thing Taler “protects” is that the buyer’s identity can be anonymous, but any vendor accepting Taler must not be and are highly trackable.
These are things I actually don’t like about Taler, but we may be on opposite sides of a few issues, which is fair.
You’ve pretty accurately described everything that’s wrong with it.