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this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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taler://pay-push/exchange.demo.taler.net/ZXHDJF9DHN97DBZCR8CABC838ZHR3C6M55JRCR9M00GZM5SEZ9EG
For whoever is testing taler
It must be about ten years that Taler has stood unopposed as a proposed system for digital payments that's pretty good and might actually happen. It's not perfect, but it's better than anything else that exists. It's been a lot of years of tests, audits, experiments, and demos that occasionally turn up in my news feed β it was beginning to look like vapourware. I guess it'll be another several years before it gets to my part of the world, but it's good to see it finally getting started.
There are couple multi-billion euro companies (all the Payment Service Processors, Visa, Mastercard, etc) that would necessarily become several million euro companies if Taler was successful though. That's a lot of concentrated power that doesn't want Taler to succeed.
Though Visa and Mastercard often let some third party company like Stripe deal with the payment processing, at least online. I don't know why they do that when they could have that share of the profit, too. It's not really related to Taler, but their business is set up a bit weird at times IMO.
Well, I suppose they have to permit third party payment processors on their network or they'd face regulatory trouble. Here in EUrope, card interchange fees are regulated.
But, in case you haven't heard about this, Visa has a subsidiary called βCybersourceβ which offers payment processing for all mayor credit cards. So it's not like Visa wasn't trying to get into payment processing as well.
@hendrik @vga
Thanks. I didn't know about that. I mean everytime I do online shopping or have a look at eCommerce solutions, I see other payment processing providers. Or like SumUp other other company's terminals with smaller shops. I always wondered why the banks disregard that. I mean they're in the loop anyway. They could just take that chunk of profit as well. And the processing fees add up, even here in Europe. And I don't think I've ever seen cybersecure for checkout anywhere I bought stuff.
I hope this takes off. MasterVisa censors pornographic stuff, denying payment services for people who don't normalize their creations. On top of that, MasterVisa will likely become collaborators of the Trump Regime, tracking payments of anti-trump folks, denying service to clinics that provide healthcare to women and minorities, ect.
Privacy is extremely important for the safety and liberty of people.
GNU Taler has been specifically designed to allow authorities to control (or at least monitor) the flow of money, though.
Provided enough members of the EU don't agree about the evils of sexual preference, that is less of a problem than MasterVisa.
Mind, I would prefer true privacy coin like Monero to become big, so that we can just have digital cash and be done with it. No gods nor kings, just us getting on with our business, whatever that may be.
If a true privacy coin ever has a bug like Bitcoin's "value overflow incident", then we won't be able to detect it.
Does it costs a lot to send somebody monero coins?
monero's transaction fees are very low. I don't know the exact numbers but for most transactions with normal priority it's fraction of a dollar (but it depends on the transaction size, as in data size, which basically depends on how many small "outputs" are you paying with). even if the transaction trafficgets higher because of increased usage, the system balances itself so that fees don't get enormous.
a major pain point though is that transactions are taken for granted only after ~10 minutes. this is a security measure, not actually defined by minutes but by number of confirmations
No idea, but I really ought to try out the ecosystem sometime.
I was waiting for speculation shit like the monkeys to die, and for genuine cryptographic currency to be used for real-world stuff. We will find out whether Monero and other privacy coins are worthwhile in the next couple of years, I suspect.
There's something I'm really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the "Digital euro" idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that's new?
Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it's just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what's actually new when we're talking about digital currency like this post?
There must be something I'm missing here.
Current Platforms are private businesses. Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, they're all private businesses that can do whatever they want. This means that 1 They all charge a lot of money (I think 1-5% of the purchase) 2.1 since they're all american the new FΓΌhrer can turn off digital payments for a Business or even an entire Country he doesn't like. And the way he uses every single leverage he can get to get others agree to his terms, this seems realistic. 2.2 since they're private businesses with a quasi-monopoly on digital payments, they can threaten our economies if we try to do something they don't like, say raising taxes on them or limiting how much they can charge. A Taler by the national bank would be completely sovereign and make us independent from the US and its companies.
The Taler also has the advantage that the buyer is anonymous. So if you want to buy a Dildo without the seller, the bank, the government or even your family knowing, you can. If you delete the payment from your history then there is no proof at all that that payment came from you (well, your shipping address is on the package, but that's not something the Taler can solve lol). However, different from other crypto currencies, the seller is NOT anonymous, which prevents tax evasion.
Hope that cleared it up?
an additional note: part of why is it not perfect is that you can't send money privately to another person, like you would do with cash. in transactions like that there is a 3rd party involved that overses the transaction
Solving tax evasion while keeping both parties anonymous would be incredibly hard if not outright impossible though. Cash is king for privacy but also for tax evasion.
I donβt think any digital solution could or should replace cash. They can and should exist and function together.
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Two of the things that I think are new vs the current system are:
Wallet: anonymous holding of currency without a custodian. You can't hold fiat currency digitally today without a bank or other entity providing that service.
Transfer: moving fiat currency anonymously and under your own direction without intermediaries. You can't make a digital payment or transfer in pure fiat currency today without that custodian providing the service (often through fee-based payment network). As a result, your identity is known when that transaction happens.
This.
A legit offline digital currency transfer akin to how one uses cash.
And ofc a giant body regulating it with proper audits, directives, delegated acts, etc.
Additionally this opens up the possibility of a modern personal existence without banks (ie private companies). We are now basically forced to use banks + (USA) monies transfer systems.
Disclaimer: Not an expert on this.
It was previously not really possible to send money digitally directly, except in the form of cyptocurrency. It always goes through banks or intermediaries. If you transfer money between bank accounts, the banks have to talk to each other to do so, and the "real" transfer happens between their central bank accounts at a later point in time. There is indeed only spreadsheets with numbers going up and down. Effectively the banks are in control of all of it. In most cases we don't want a slow bank transfer but some sort of user-friendly payment portal like PayPal or wero, which the banks also need to have contracts with (or, operate themselves).
My vague understanding here is that this process is completely detached from banks, and that you are thus transferring actual money. It's not just numbers in a spreadsheet going up and down.
If anybody understands it better please correct anything I got wrong.
@PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
You get this right I would say.
You need to install an electronic wallet on your device and add the fiat money amount to the wallet's balance (so Taler itself s not a currency).
There's a demo on the website for those interested (you need to download a wallet): https://www.taler.net/en
Taler provides digital cash as in anonymous transactions for the buyer. Neither the bank nor the state knows who you pay or for what.
However, the merchant can't hide that they are making money, thus enabling taxation and prevention of money laundering. That way it's even better than cash.
It's not based on blockchains and proof of work and thus doesn't have the ridiculous energy waste problems.
It's really quite good.
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That's kinda cool news. Hope it grows to be an alternative to these american systems.
Not sure what this means but European alternatives to us American megacorps are usually good.
Did you mean the European central bank in Frankfurt? Because I don't think Europe has a national bank, not yet being a nation and all that.
Did you mean the European central bank in Frankfurt
ups, my mistake ;P
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It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.
So I could buy a VPN with it and then order some Swedish porn (edit: life streams), and no authority would be able to track me down?
afaik you don't even need a VPN because communication happens through gnunet, which is somewhat like I2P and Tor
Basically yes, but the seller needs to register a business account with a Swedish Taler bank exchange, and if that bank figures out that the seller is breaking Swedish law they can terminate that account.
Why would anyone want to track you down for watching porn?
In Sweden you can buy porn but you are not allowed to buy life streams and tell actors what to do to prevent abuse of power imbalances.
Stupid law. The performer can simply not do what they don't wish, in the safety and comfort of their own home. Nothing anyone can do about it. It doesn't get much safer than this.
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Cool to see a project like this not just being a github page or theory, but actually used in practice!
The ECB also wants to introduce a digital Euro. I wonder how exchanging my digital Euros to digital Swiss Francs and vise versa would work. Currently with physical cash you need to exchange your money at an intermediary. But with digital coins itβs surely possible for the national bank to handle this.
If you ever paid with your card in a non-Euro country, you already did something like that.
Revolut will on the fly convert between your currencies.
Cyberpunk is now, old man.
That is still a corporate intermediary who does the conversion young man. And they are converting your digital money that is stored at the corporate private bank.
Digital currency is going to be the equivalent of cash. Digital money that is stored on your phone and is minted by the national bank like cash. Not the same as your money at the bank.
It is very easy lol but it's likely Mastercard/Visa doing the conversion (taking ~ 0.5% each time), exactly what we want to avoid :P
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