[HN Gopher] GNU Taler - Payment system for privacy-friendly, fas...
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GNU Taler - Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online
transactions
Author : 2pEXgD0fZ5cF
Score : 287 points
Date : 2021-02-25 09:51 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (taler.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (taler.net)
| dbrgn wrote:
| Here are the core principles behind Taler:
| https://taler.net/en/principles.html
|
| Note: Taler is not a cryptocurrency. It's an electronic payment
| system.
| wrycoder wrote:
| And the IRS should treat transactions like they do gift cards
| or pre-funded debit cards.
|
| While the IRS treats bitcoin transactions like security
| transactions - they are taxed on gain/loss of the bitcoins
| involved.
| wheybags wrote:
| So are there any real world instances running? Can we actually
| use this today? If not, is there a roadmap for opening one?
| aarchi wrote:
| Great name. The word "Taler" derives from the "Joachimsthaler
| Guldengroschen" currency (Guilder groschen of St. Joachin's
| Valley), or "Thaler" for short. The coin was introduced in 1518
| in the Holy Roman Empire and many currencies in Europe became
| named after the Thaler. The Dutch brought their "leeuwendaler"
| (lit. lion daler) coin to New Netherlands (now New York), lending
| its name to the US Dollar. I presume Taler was used for this
| project to match modern German orthography and to avoid confusion
| with the English 'th' <th> sound.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar#History
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1chymov
| 1f60c wrote:
| > The Dutch brought their "leeuwendaler" (lit. lion daler) coin
| to New Netherlands (now New York), lending its name to the US
| Dollar.
|
| I had to say "daler" a couple times fast before the penny
| dropped (no pun intended). That's so cool.
| xvilka wrote:
| Such systems should be written using a safer language, like some
| of the modern cryptocurrencies do. Rust, Haskell, OCaml, F# would
| be a perfect fit.
| ognarb wrote:
| Do you volunteer to rewrite it in Rust?
| captn3m0 wrote:
| This I agree. Last time I tried setting up Taler, the whole
| stack felt archaic (it even uses GNUnet I think).
|
| The good thing is that all the protocols are documented and it
| should be possible to have alternate implementations
| rowland66 wrote:
| That seems completely irrelevant.
| adwn wrote:
| > _That seems completely irrelevant._
|
| Safety is irrelevant for a payment system?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Are there any real examples of exploits of unsafe payment
| systems that could have been fixed by programming language
| features?
| bokohut wrote:
| There are those of us with extensive experience in
| payments with plenty of stories that would touch exactly
| on this, so yes, but these stories are not public
| information.
| adwn wrote:
| That's the wrong question to ask. The right questions
| are:
|
| 1) Are there any real examples of software exploits that
| could have been fixed by programming language features?
|
| 2) Is there an incentive to exploit software bugs in a
| payment system?
|
| To which the answers are 1) almost too many to count, and
| 2) yes, definitely.
| dbrgn wrote:
| Here's a recent USENIX talk on the topic of memory
| unsafety and the choice of programming languages: https:/
| /www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2021/presentation/ga...
|
| Slides can be downloaded. I hope the talk recording will
| be available as well.
| throaway876627 wrote:
| Well, in practice buyers aren't going to be anonymous either: who
| has ever paid online without first being required to create an
| account on the seller's website before even having access to the
| payment page?
|
| And why would a business choose not to require account creation
| when it is in their best interest to require one to increase the
| lifetime value of the buyer (or even just simply to follow up
| with the order)?
|
| So this doesn't help with buyer privacy, and the exchanges will
| be banks in practice, and banks too are in the business of
| selling consumer spending data to data brokers...
|
| My point is, the only value proposition of GNU Taler therefore is
| standardizing online payments. But the W3C does a much better job
| at it with the Web Payments and Credit Transfers specifications.
| greatgib wrote:
| Very nice concept, but I guess that if you try to create an
| exchange or accept payments with that: governments, tax offices
| and FATF institutions will come after you.
|
| TLDR with my understanding of the concept:
|
| At the opposite of crypto, the concept is that anyone can create
| an "exchange" acting as a bank, and all transactions are public
| in an encrypted form.
|
| So you can check the transactions if you know the key of your
| transaction. But it is not crypto in the sense that you have to
| trust one authority (the exchange) as a bank. It is the one that
| will hold user credits in the end.
|
| The very fun thing is to create a "bank" like that for you and
| your friends. It is like an IOU bank.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Have you read the paper or website? Taler explicitly envisions
| exchanges as regulated and audited entities.
|
| The central bank should audit exchanges, and it even provides
| mechanisms to make this simpler. One leg of the exchange runs
| on traditional finance rails (ACH) as well.
|
| It isn't anyone can be a bank, it is "regulated audited
| entities should be able to exchange a ACH transfer for digital
| tokens".
| helen___keller wrote:
| I read about Taler a few years back, and I'm excited to see that
| it is still under development.
|
| In my opinion, for those of us who aren't anti-government, Taler
| represents an ethical future of digital spending:
|
| It is interoperable, so unlike our current Visa situation, the
| free market should be able to bid down payment fees to a fair
| rate. It's insane to me that Visa and Mastercard have basically
| positioned themselves as exclusive middlemen on the vast majority
| of digital transactions, in an age when so much commerce
| necessarily is digital.
|
| It offers privacy that Visa / PayPal / etc cannot.
|
| It makes income traceable in a way that bitcoin does not, to
| facilitate lawful taxation.
|
| It is inherently scalable in a way that bitcoin arguably is not
| (bitcoin has offchain scaling mechanisms, sure, but if you're
| being honest it's a stretch)
|
| It's not introducing a new currency or coin that will be
| endlessly speculated on, unlike most every crypto solution out
| there (even stablecoins rely on eth or others for transaction
| fees)
| als0 wrote:
| > It makes income traceable in a way that bitcoin does not, to
| facilitate lawful taxation.
|
| Can you explain this a bit more? I thought all Bitcoin
| transactions are completely traceable.
| olah_1 wrote:
| It sounds like Taler is not competing with Bitcoin.
|
| Bitcoin is just as much about improving money in general as it
| is about preserving and transferring wealth.
|
| Before WWI, a large part of the world was all on the gold
| standard. I think a Bitcoin standard would be similar to that
| but with improvements to consensus.
|
| Perhaps Taler is more competing with Lightning networks or
| decentralized exchanges?
| helen___keller wrote:
| Taler isn't competing with bitcoin per se, but it's competing
| with a particular vision of the bitcoin network (or any
| blockchain) as "the future of digital payments". Lots of
| people are into bitcoin as a digital asset, as some kind of
| inflation-protecting security, etc. For these purposes, Taler
| is completely orthogonal and not a competitor at all.
| runeks wrote:
| Comparing Taler to Bitcoin is not appropriate since Bitcoin
| could be the very monetary unit that is used as the
| denomination of payment amounts on the Taler network. In other
| words, Taler is a protocol that is deployed _on top of_
| Bitcoin, and does not compete with Bitcoin itself.
|
| Bitcoin is (intended to be) a form of money -- just like USD,
| EUR, gold, silver. The Taler network needs a unit of account
| (numeraire) to denominate amounts in, and this is what money is
| used for. Tail itself cannot function without a monetary unit
| since it's a payment system (a way to _move_ money).
| helen___keller wrote:
| You are correct - I should have been more explicit, but I was
| using comparing Taler as a system to move arbitrary money
| against the Bitcoin network[0], which is a system to move a
| specific money (Bitcoin the coins), or the various blockchain
| networks, which do similar for other tokens (including
| securitized fiat, as in stablecoins)
|
| [0] "the Bitcoin network", meaning the use of blockchain
| transactions to facilitate payments, or off-chain schemes to
| do the same with on-chain settlement (as in lightning
| network)
| nullc wrote:
| Taler proposes an extraordinarily unethical panopticon, where
| unaccountable entities (both commercial and governmental)
| without any due process can surveil every transaction you make.
|
| Engage in the "wrong" kind of commerce and after the political
| winds change-- maybe you get rounded up and executed.
| Regardless of your political alignment, one can't really look
| at the governance of many nations and say with confidence that
| you can trust that they won't change in a way which profoundly
| disrespects your human rights.
|
| Taler misleads people into thinking that its private by
| claiming that only merchants are surveilled. But every time you
| pay you both were previously a recipient and you are paying to
| someone else who relieves. Monitoring reception is equivalent
| to monitoring everyone, and taler's surveillance is realtime
| and always active.
|
| > It makes income traceable in a way that bitcoin does not, to
| facilitate lawful taxation.
|
| Taxation is based on self-reporting, whistle-blowing, and
| serious criminal penalties for evasion, not on invasive
| realtime state surveillance into the private transactions of
| individuals.
|
| Facilitating "lawful taxation" by pervasive surveillance of
| everyone who receives a payment is like preventing sexual
| assault by requiring a camera in every bedroom streaming in
| realtime back to government.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The claim "can surveil every transaction you make" does not
| seem justified.
|
| The way I see the process, the flow of Talers is strictly
| asymmetric and one way, with a clear distinction between
| users(consumers) and merchants:
|
| 1. From exchange to user (deposits).
|
| 2. From user to merchant (payments for orders).
|
| 3. From merchant to exchange (withdrawals).
|
| The monitorable steps are 1. and 3., which allow tracking the
| total amount that you can spend and the total amount that the
| merchant has received. The actual transactions (step #2) are
| not surveilable, the system does not track who paid what to
| whom.
|
| The statement "every time you pay you both were previously a
| recipient" is not correct, since as a non-merchant user you
| can't be a recipient of payments, you can't have any income
| in Taler, you can only spend what you yourself deposited in
| the system through an exchange. And vice versa, as a
| merchant, you can't make any payments, you can only withdraw
| your Taler income for real money at the exchange - it's
| exactly just as with a merchant account for receiving credit
| card payments, which is strictly separate from any credit
| card payments that the company might want to make themselves.
| kderbe wrote:
| This contradicts one of the claimed principles of Taler,
| "Protect the privacy of buyers". Can you please explain how
| the example you gave would be possible with Taler, in a way
| that wouldn't be with crypto currency?
|
| (off-topic: thank you for Opus.)
| igorkraw wrote:
| What do you think of Bitcoins/Ethereum etc. public ledgers?
| nullc wrote:
| In theory Bitcoin could provide a reasonable amount of
| privacy by leaving identities unlinked, in practice it
| doesn't. (Etherum's 'accounts' are extremely privacy toxic
| way beyond Bitcoin)
|
| Of course, if one wants to trust other entities one can
| already easily use chaumian cash w/ Bitcoin.
|
| https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5302025.0
|
| That works similar to Taler except no integrated spyware.
|
| This approach can even be implemented with multiparty
| security relatively easily, so that the funds are protected
| by a majority threshold rather than just requiring a single
| point of failure.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Taler proposes an extraordinarily unethical panopticon,
| where unaccountable entities (both commercial and
| governmental) without any due process can surveil every
| transaction you make.
|
| No, actually, you are describing the current state of affairs
| with mainstream online payment systems like PayPal and Venmo
|
| Taler uses blind signatures which means that your exchange
| has no knowledge of where you are spending your tokens. In
| essence, when you make a payment the merchant knows you have
| an IOU to the exchange, the exchange knows it's a valid IOU,
| but since it was issued with a blind signature the exchange
| is not aware that it's an IOU that was issued to you. This
| gives you privacy that parallels the use of real world cash.
| nullc wrote:
| Chaumian digital cash is fine, but that isn't what taler
| actually implements.
|
| Instead, it requires the recipient to identify themselves
| and the amounts for every payments. This is a continuous
| realtime surveillance which does not exist for cash.
|
| Used perfectly it might be potentially more private than
| paypal, but no one is under any illusion that paypal is
| particularly private.
|
| On a scale of ethical behavior providing strong privacy is
| superior to providing limited privacy but both are vastly
| superior to falsely claiming something has strong privacy
| when it is limited.
|
| Taler takes matters a step further a falsely claim that its
| continuous realtime mass surveillance is required to
| facilitate lawful taxation. This claim is false-- an
| outright lie in fact. Not only is it technically not
| required, it's not legally required either and taxation has
| existed for countless generations when this kind of
| electronic surveillance was unimaginable.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I would take this even a step further. To state the
| obvious, the hard part of building a private currency
| system is building the private currency system. Once
| you've done that, it's relatively easy to deliberately
| relax the privacy guarantees of the system in
| straightforward ways _if that is something you want to
| do._ (Whether this is advisable is totally orthogonal. I
| 'm speaking strictly at a technical level.) Think about
| this like having a perfect invisibility device. Once you
| have such a technology, it's relatively easy to make
| yourself deliberately more visible: e.g., throw a can of
| paint over your invisible body.*
|
| But Taler doesn't start out by building what I consider
| to be a very strong privacy base and then allowing for
| optional relaxations. Instead it makes a series of design
| decisions that _begin_ with the idea that privacy will be
| limited in certain ways, and then bakes those design
| choices all the way down to the foundations of the
| protocol. This means the designers have chosen the
| deployment parameters, rather than the people and
| democracies who might actually want to make the
| decisions. This rubs me the wrong way.
|
| * This has in the past been interpreted by people as me
| saying "I think backdoors are great", which is funny and
| also not true.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The main problem is that certain guarantees about
| behavior are fundamentally incompatible with certain
| attributes of transactions; you can have meaningful
| assertions that hold only if _all_ transactions meet some
| criteria and there is no optionality, because the
| intentional abuse will simply choose the set of options
| that circumvent whatever conditions you want to enforce.
|
| Using your own example, if your "world" supports a
| perfect invisibility device, then your world can't
| provide any guarantees that under certain conditions
| specific things will be seen - you can't have your cake
| and eat it too, if you want or need such guarantees, then
| you need to design a world where a perfect invisibility
| device is impossible.
|
| Stability of any financial system needs an ability to
| protect against malicious, resourceful actors. Just as a
| proof-of-work coin needs to protect against double-
| spending and miner collusion, a Taler-like system needs
| to protect against malicious exchanges (so, the
| requirements foor auditability) and against malicious
| fraudulent merchants (so, the requirements to ensure that
| there's no option that a malicious merchant might use to
| cash out anonymously after receiving a payment).
|
| Perhaps there is some way to satisfy all needs, but I
| personally doubt that, there are too many fundamentally
| opposite requirements (anonymity vs AML; circumventing
| gov't control vs ability to take legal action;
| irreversibility vs reversibility of fraud, etc) - and a
| system _has to choose!_ If 99% of your transactions use a
| reversible mode and 1% are irreversible and untraceable,
| well, you can 't have fraud protection for hacked wallets
| since those will use the irreversible and untraceable
| option; if you want feature A, you have to ensure that
| feature B is impossible.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| > and a system has to choose!
|
| A system does not have to choose. The society that
| deploys it has to choose which systems they will use, how
| those systems will be configured and so on. That society
| also needs to decide whether they will (or even _can_ )
| ban alternative systems.
|
| The technology itself should not force the designers'
| favored technical balance onto society. An ideal
| technology should allow the broadest possible range of
| configurations, and let users and society make the
| remaining decisions wherever it's technically possible.
|
| (Many real-world systems are not ideal, and cannot
| technically admit the broadest possible range of
| solutions. But we know that centralized e-cash systems
| can make different choices than Taler.)
| PeterisP wrote:
| My argument is that a broad range of constraints is
| inherently impossible to satisfy within a single
| fungible, fully interoperable money system - I agree that
| "ideal technology should allow the broadest possible
| range of configurations", however, even with such an
| ideal technology designed by $perfect_deity the
| "environments" with certain incompatible configurations
| need to be kept distinct and separate enough so they de
| facto form separate payment systems; and the users and
| society can choose to use system A for purpose X and
| system B (perhaps sharing all of the technology except a
| configuration flag) for purpose Y, but the society can't
| have a single system for both these purpuses, because if
| they are substantially different, then money can't be
| allowed to flow freely between the systems as that option
| would break one or the other use case.
|
| The society can freely choose between different systems
| and properties/configurations of systems; but certain
| emergent properties of a payment system that a society
| might want to choose require that some other options are
| closed off, that the configuration is set to ensure that
| no transactions in that system can use that option.
|
| For example, if some uses need an strictly anonymous
| system and others need an strictly unanonymous system,
| then these systems can interact only through some gateway
| that enforces breaking anonymity in the latter; if some
| uses need a reversible system and others need an
| irreversible system, then interaction needs to happen
| through some gateway that will reverse a transaction even
| if the other leg can't be reversed, taking on financial
| risk to cover the costs of such a scenario. And,
| crucially, it seems plausible that in many cases such
| gateways on the boundary between different configurations
| are socially impractical to operate as they would have to
| take on risks they can't protect from, and there would be
| financial motivation to target them to abuse that
| configuration difference.
|
| For example, we're seeing a bunch of barriers between
| physical cash USD and USD in bank accounts; and we're
| seeing a bunch of barriers between USD payments via
| cheques and USD Fedwire transfers. They are _almost_
| interchangeable, but the boundary between different
| "configurations" requires treating them as distinct and
| anyone offering a service for unrestricted exchange of
| one of those into the other is in for a world of hurt.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| We are having two different discussions here. I am having
| a technical discussion about how we should design
| privacy-preserving payment systems. I think we should
| design them to be as powerful as possible, since it is
| vastly harder to "strengthen" a weak system than it is to
| "selectively weaken" a powerful system if society decides
| to do that. Using this approach means that society gets
| the largest range of technology to choose from.
|
| You are having a discussion about what solutions society
| should adopt, and whether multiple systems should be
| allowed. I think that's interesting but a very different
| conversation.
|
| The only place where these two discussions interact is
| when technology developers proactively _decide to make
| some kind of specific privacy /security compromise that
| they think is the right one_. This means that societies
| who want privacy don't get it. It means that societies
| who want a different tradeoff don't get it. And the most
| likely outcome is nobody ever adopts the new system, and
| we get PayPal.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > falsely claiming something has strong privacy when it
| is limited
|
| Taler provides strong privacy _for buyers_ , not for
| merchants. It's important to note that Taler is not a
| peer-to-peer system for transferring money (there are
| claims for interest in implementing such a system in the
| future, but it does not exist), so the receiver is always
| a merchant
|
| Personally I don't mind that businesses are surveilled
| when I purchase at them, because businesses are not
| people and do not have the right to avoid surveillance. I
| would be very concerned if such surveillance could extend
| to me, but as discussed Taler provides buyers privacy and
| blindly signed tokens cannot be traced to me.
| hdevalence wrote:
| At the end of the day, balance sheets always balance,
| every transaction has two sides, and privacy for only one
| side of every transaction is impossible.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| So Zcash developers feel threatened enough about Taler to
| spread FUD about it. Sounds like a positive signal to me
| ;).
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Hahah, nice.
| igorkraw wrote:
| Yes it is. You just write down "got 5 bucks from
| customer" and submit it to the tax office. Now one side
| is anonymous (customers) and the other not (merchant)
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| And before that the customer writes down "received 5
| bucks". Then you match up the two and can track the
| customer's spending habits
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Well, If all you have is "A spent $5" and "B received $5"
| you are still missing a lot of info to identify that A
| and B are part of the same transaction (there are
| thousands of $5 trades every day)
|
| But that's not even how Taler works: you withdraw an
| arbitrary amount of Taler (say $50), this is what is
| recorded on the consumer side, but then you have
| anonymous tokens (exactly like coins and bills) that you
| can spend without connecting to anything: only the
| supplier need to have a connection to a certification
| entity (which ensure no double spending).
| runeks wrote:
| What is the denomination of these tokens? Do I hand over
| 500 one-cent tokens to pay $5?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| That's the coolest thing about Taler: there is a thing
| called "the refresh protocol"[1] which allows you to
| obtain change after a transaction: that is, for instance
| you pay with a $7 token for your $5 transaction, and you
| get a $2 change token!
|
| [1]: section "4.7.4. Refreshing and Linking" in this
| paper https://ged.univ-
| rennes1.fr/nuxeo/site/esupversions/41aac1ac...
| igorkraw wrote:
| If you go to your ATM and get 5 bucks, and then go to the
| cafe to pay a coffee with it and it's registered in their
| system, this is the exact same scenario, you realize
| that?
| helen___keller wrote:
| In that case, please enlighten me how to pierce the veil.
| For the sake of argument, you can play the role of an
| exchange arbiter - you have full visibility into every
| transaction.
|
| On a given day you're signing a few billion in IOUs into
| existence from users, while paying out a few billion in
| IOUs from merchants. Since you are providing blind
| signatures, you essentially have two ledgers: one is
| transactions of the form (user, token_value, signed_at)
| and a second is transactions of the form (merchant,
| token_value, redeemed_at).
|
| How do you suggest the exchange matches user to merchant
| from this data?
| deepstack wrote:
| Brave or maybe chrome keep on insisting that it is
|
| http://taleo.net and forward me to https://www.oracle.com/human-
| capital-management/taleo/
|
| Shame on your brave!
| coderdan wrote:
| The domain is set that way, it has nothing to do with the
| browser and doesn't seem to have anything to do with taler.net
| either.
| im3w1l wrote:
| So if I understand correctly Taler avoids double spending by
| having a trusted central authority? Foss version of
| Visa/Mastercard basically?
| the8472 wrote:
| > Foss version of Visa/Mastercard basically?
|
| Current payment providers aren't anonymized. Taler provides
| anonymity for the spender with blinded signatures.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| > Foss version of Visa/Mastercard basically?
|
| Yes, but it's better. On one hand it's centralized and vendors
| are regulated, BUT it implements anonymous payment for buyers
| using a type of blind signature in cryptography (originally
| envisioned by David Chaum's digital cash), it allows you to pay
| for things without being tracked and analyzed. In my opinion
| it's the best compromise between PayPal and cryptocurrencies, I
| hope one day I can buy things via GNU/Taler.
| rebuilder wrote:
| It seems surprising to me if governments are willing to adopt
| a digital payment system that does not enable full tracking
| of who paid who what.
| dbrgn wrote:
| Taler supports full tracking of who received how much. That
| is sufficient for the government's job of taxing income.
|
| If - on the other hand - the government would also like to
| mass surveil all its citizens, then that is a use case that
| Taler explicitly and intentionally does not support.
| nullc wrote:
| This is so deceptive and dishonest.
|
| Realtime mass surveillance of every party who receives
| money is isomorphic to realtime mass surveillance of
| everyone.
|
| Every person who sends funds received them previously and
| is sending them to someone who is receiving them.
|
| Taler's surveilling is continuous, unaccountable, and
| operates without any due process what so ever: No court
| is required to authorize surveilling your records, nor
| can you even detect it to fight the intrusion.
|
| The claim that the mass surveillance is required to
| enable taxation is outright untrue and inconsistent with
| longstanding practice. Taxation, including sales taxes,
| existed for a long time before low privacy electronic
| payment networks existed.
| 9000 wrote:
| > Realtime mass surveillance of every party who receives
| money is isomorphic to realtime mass surveillance of
| everyone.
|
| I don't believe it is.
|
| For instance, imagine a closed system of three people:
| Alice, Bob, and Carol. Initially we start off with
| seeding both Alice and Bob $100 via Taler. We can see
| that because it is public. Then, we see that Carol
| receives $5. That is also public. Who gave Carol the $5?
|
| If surveillance of money received is isometric to full
| surveillance, you should be able to answer this question,
| but clearly there is insufficient information, so clearly
| they are not isometric. There may be special cases where
| sufficiently large transactions can only have come from a
| small pool of wealthy transactors, but I bet this would
| be essentially meaningless in practice, and is absolutely
| not the same as equating the system to full surveillance
| of every participant.
| igorkraw wrote:
| That's just wrong. If me and 10 other people buy things
| for 5 bucks from a vendor with taler, there is no way to
| trace it to us as I understand, and no way to distinguish
| which of us paid which 5 bucks. How is that isomorphic to
| full surveillance? It's more privacy than both
| traditional payment Systems _and_ most cryptocurrencies
| [deleted]
| rowland66 wrote:
| So it looks like Taler is designed as a consumer to
| merchant payment system, and not person to person. I
| suppose that person to person could work with banks
| serving as intermediaries.
|
| With anonymity for consumer how would transactions like
| exchanges and returns work?
| captn3m0 wrote:
| There's the possibility of creating a new wallet with
| your money and handing over the keys.
| sofixa wrote:
| > That is sufficient for the government's job of taxing
| income.
|
| But not of fighting money laundering. If all income is
| anonymous, it'd be relatively easy to set up a fake
| digital-only product and buy yourself lots of it.
| bdauvergne wrote:
| To spend coins on yourself you must have received them
| first under some identity, so it does not ease money
| laundering.
|
| It could eventually ease money laundering between
| countries where laws are different. For example, sell
| drugs from Netherland, receive Taller coins, buy virtual
| things from your company in France to move it there. But
| in fact you can already do that, buy a coffee shop in
| Amsterdam, and transfer your income after taxes to your
| bank account in France. Great your are a drug baron
| living from France now.
|
| What it will prevent is for a country to block their
| citizen from buying something illegal from another where
| it is legal, as it is done with card payment and drugs
| bought online.
| rebuilder wrote:
| Isn't the point of money laundering to obfuscate the
| identity of the original recipient of funds? Don't get me
| wrong, I'm not sure Taler would make things harder for
| regulators and law enforcement. KYC requirements apply
| even if the payment method itself is anonymous. But I'd
| think that given the opportunity, governments would like
| to have better oversight of financial transactions.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Depositing money in the system is not anonymous - it
| can't track whether you bought your own fake product or
| something else, but you would already have to have
| "clean" money to convert it to Taler at an exchange.
| merdadicapra wrote:
| from the Taler website
|
| https://taler.net/en/principles.html
|
| _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_
|
| Which makes a lot of sense.
|
| Privacy of buyers is protected from the merchant, that
| doesn't imply that the payment is untraceable (or that
| complete secrecy is necessary).
| dbrgn wrote:
| As far as I understand it, this is meant as an open and
| standardized payment protocol that provides payment
| interoperability between different banks, but that protects the
| privacy of the sender (but not the recipient, due to tax
| reasons).
|
| It doesn't have anything to do with crypto currencies like
| Bitcoin.
| XorNot wrote:
| This feels like it wouldn't square with Know-Your-Customer
| requirements. Although: those only kick in legally above
| certain transaction and spend levels, so simply rejecting
| anonymous payments at those levels (or structured payments
| below those) would make it legally viable.
|
| It does make me feel good to see a GNU project like this out
| there - at the core of the free world IMO, the bits of glue
| which get our society running, it should really be _all_
| open-source and open licenses.
| im3w1l wrote:
| How can you tell whether the payments are structured if
| senders are anonymous?
| XorNot wrote:
| Because the recipients can't be anonymous, basically by
| definition. So money moving in an apparently ordered way
| to a receiver would draw attention to the recipient, who
| would then have to explain why they were accepting the
| payments.
|
| If they're converting to physical goods, they also have
| to be sending them somewhere - which is much harder to
| anonymize.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > This feels like it wouldn't square with Know-Your-
| Customer requirements
|
| My understanding is that exchanges would do their due
| diligence before exchanging your fiat for tokens, and
| separately shops may do due diligance if necessary before
| accepting your tokens; the exchange does not know that you
| performed a transaction at this shop, and the shop does not
| know with whom you exchange[0], but both those
| relationships have separately done due diligence.
|
| In particular I don't believe there could be a such thing
| as a "darknet shop" or "darknet exchange" using Taler. If
| any one entity is not following regulations, it should be
| possible to track them down and subject them to the law. If
| a merchant isn't following regulations, then they can't
| redeem their tokens to fiat at the exchange. If the
| exchange isn't following regulations, then the
| auditor/government shuts them down.
|
| [0] not sure about this one
| captn3m0 wrote:
| [0] is not correct, since the shop validates your money
| against that specific exchange. But since there are going
| to be a few regulated exchanges, it doesn't let the shops
| track you meaningfully.
|
| Plus shops will usually have more information:
| email/address etc.
| bokohut wrote:
| At this very moment the U.S. Financial Service Committee is
| holding a hearing on 'terrorism' and one would not be surprised
| to learn that 'cryptocurrency' is the main discussion. What is
| sacrificed when one is _no_ longer able to "Follow the money."?
|
| _edit_
| seany wrote:
| Nothing
| bokohut wrote:
| I no AML/KYC expert but I have written software systems for
| fraud purposes before and with that in mind such systems,
| founded in data collection, are used every hour of every day
| to link people to activities, legal or not. Given the
| prolific prosecutorial proof available online as it relates
| to the value of "who took the money", "who was paid", "who
| has the money" in such legal cases clearly the institutions
| tasked with 'security' see a great threat in not being able
| to follow it.
| seany wrote:
| I was assuming the question was open to "moral"
| interpretations, rather than strictly legal ones. In turn I
| keep my position even with your concerns, because the
| utilitarian calculus of comparing "being able to pay for
| things anonymously" vs "this is helpful for fraud
| prevention" is basically a non question in my mind.
| carapace wrote:
| "Dollars Against Democracy: Domestic Terrorist Financing in the
| Aftermath of Insurrection"
|
| https://financialservices.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.asp...
|
| It's a virtual hearing and you can apparently watch it live on
| the Youtube:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srCtXCY9GNg&feature=emb_imp_...
| tom_mellior wrote:
| This looks exciting. Did anyone manage to work through the demo,
| though? I first installed the Taler Wallet for Android via
| F-Droid, and it can scan the QR code for withdrawing from the
| demo bank, but the actual withdrawal fails with some generic
| message that "withdrawals are currently not possible". Then I
| tried the browser extension in Firefox 84. It detects that it
| should be doing something, but never actually completes a
| withdrawal either.
| sneak wrote:
| In a rare case of where judging a book by its cover is actually
| valid, I am going to call it right now: the fact that this
| project can't even display their logo on their webpage correctly
| is an indicator of the general level of competence/seriousness
| brought to the table wrt competing with an existing global
| financial system that, to put it plainly, _is_ competent and
| serious.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| > this project can't even display their logo on their webpage
|
| Could you expand on what you mean? I can see a logo.
| sneak wrote:
| Loading the linked webpage on the most popular web browsing
| device in the world displays their logo with an incorrect
| aspect ratio. It's pretty obvious that none of these free
| software zealots tested their software with an iPhone, a
| device that their target market actually uses.
|
| A refusal to use or promote nonfree software comes into
| slight conflict at times when developing consumer products,
| as the markets are captured by nonfree software distribution
| channels, a tragic fact. You have to be willing to bend your
| own rules slightly while remaining true to your principles,
| such as testing your website on an iPhone to make sure it
| works right when nonfree software users visit it to learn
| about why free software is better.
| elric wrote:
| What are the intended use cases here? Not many business are in
| the business of using custom currencies?
| FloDo wrote:
| Related, a working paper published by the Swiss National Bank on
| using this technology for a central bank digital currency:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260524
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Thanks for this - although I think that working paper referred
| to a centralised payment system - whereas this one seems to be
| community driven.
| grothoff wrote:
| I am the GNU Taler co-maintainer and working paper co-author.
| The development is community-driven. But as you see from the
| paper, the community is talking with central banks about
| deploying it. There is no contradiction.
| [deleted]
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Thanks for weighing in - I stand corrected.
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