[HN Gopher] GNU Taler: An anonymous, taxable payment system usin...
___________________________________________________________________
GNU Taler: An anonymous, taxable payment system using modern
cryptography
Author : harporoeder
Score : 254 points
Date : 2022-03-01 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.taler.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.taler.net)
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Sorry, I just don't get it.
|
| Seems like a lot of work to offer a less functional alternative
| to a VISA gift card purchased with cash.
|
| The only real advantage I see is you don't need to stop by
| WalMart. Maybe the activation fees with Taler are less but I'm
| sure it's also less widely accepted.
|
| VISA eGift cards are now available for purchase online with funds
| deposited to a digital wallet. These won't be totally anonymous
| but then as far as I can tell, neither is Taler --- to provide
| all the functionality they claim, they will need to maintain
| records of both purchaser and merchant.
| summm wrote:
| In addition to the huge advantage of not needing to get cash
| from an ATM and physically carry it to the card vendor:
| Transactions made on the same eGift card wallet are tied
| together. With Taler you have a wallet with coins you can spend
| separately, and which cannot be correlated, neither by your
| bank nor the merchant. What makes you believe anyone (except
| maybe the purchaser themselves) needs to maintain records about
| the purchaser? As far as I understood it, their claim is that
| exactly this is not necessary.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _What makes you believe anyone (except maybe the purchaser
| themselves) needs to maintain records about the purchaser?_
|
| Unless you buy your digital coins using cash, the exchanges
| have the identity of those who purchase and redeem
| coins/tokens.
|
| From the documentation: Taler is compatible
| with anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC)
| regulation, as well as data protection regulation (such as
| GDPR).
|
| AML and KYC are all about removing anonymity. Merchants may
| not have the ability to correlate a purchase to you but the
| exchanges do; otherwise, they wouldn't be able to comply.
| danShumway wrote:
| This comes up every so often on HN, it's been in development for
| a while. I do see at least some technical work happening in Taler
| (https://taler.net/en/news/index.html) so it doesn't look like
| the project is dead, but I'm having a hard time finding a
| roadmap.
|
| What is the overall state of Taler today? How close is this to
| being something tangible that I can hand to my parents where they
| can actually make real payments with it for an online product?
| Are there any businesses supporting it as a payment method yet?
|
| I vaguely remember last time I checked that it was still trying
| to get buy-in from banks? But I could be remembering wrong.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| GNU Taler is a nice software project. The problem with privacy-
| preserving centralized payment systems is that "writing
| software" remains the relatively _easy_ part of the deployment
| puzzle: in practice you need to convince centralized banks and
| payment systems to deploy it for some application.
| Unfortunately, cryptographers have been trying to do this since
| the 1980s and DigiCash... with extremely limited success.
|
| Decentralized payment systems have changed the equation and now
| we're seeing a great deal of progress in the area of privacy-
| preserving payments, some for better and some for worse. I wish
| Taler could find some applications over there, but the
| developers don't seem interested. Which is only fair.
|
| (Disclosure: I've worked on decentralized private payment
| systems.)
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Completely agree on where the difficulties lie in getting
| something like this used. Eventually it will happen though.
| To me it is a question of timing.
| grothoff wrote:
| There is no public roadmap on the business side as the
| commercial banks we are talking to are not yet willing to have
| their names disclosed to the public. They're rather
| conservative institutions (by nature), so they want things to
| be checked and double-checked and ready to go before going
| public. Plus it is not trivial (for them) to check all of the
| regulatory, technical and business checkboxes. I remain hopeful
| that we'll get through this mess "soon", but I've been too
| optimistic in the past.
|
| What I can say is that we have presented GNU Taler to over a
| dozen central banks already. We're trying to convince them that
| they must give citizens privacy and that an account-based
| system would give them too much power.
|
| So while the business side is not exactly transparent, what we
| do technically is all out there. And it's not necessarily a bad
| thing to have some extra time to reduce the list of known bugs
| before we go live. :-)
| jdfedgon wrote:
| Even though I read the GNU Taler FAQ please excuse any lack
| of deeper knowledge about it.
|
| When dealing with those commercial banks what is currently
| the biggest challenge? Is it more the political arguments or
| the technical arguments of such a payment system that you
| need to stress? And, I couldn't find no definite answer to
| that: Could GNU Taler ultimately replace Bitcoin?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Given that for many larger banks, medieval things like
| overdraft fees and "re-ordering" same-day transactions so
| that deposits appear later in order to create additional
| overdraft fees are a huge part of their bottom-line, it
| doesn't surprise me that they would avoid relinquishing
| control to an open and fair standard they can't override.
|
| Also, I'm sure anti-money-laundering legislation
| complicates things in terms of the anonymity feature,
| despite the fact that merchants are fully auditable, though
| I assume users aren't able to transfer funds to non-
| merchants? Still, I'm sure the laws as written complicate
| this in some jurisdictions.
|
| For example, you could have a completely legitimate
| business registered as a merchant function as a money-
| laundering front that could then take in illicit funds from
| anonymous users working for the illicit org which actually
| secretly owns the merchant. I'm fine with that happening in
| the wild because the benefits of privacy for consumers are
| obvious to me and outweigh the negatives, but I bet
| regulators aren't so forgiving.
|
| In the wild this often happens -- there are plenty of "DDoS
| protection" services that by day offer legitimate services
| in the open and by night actually attack potential
| customers who they then offer their protection services to,
| so it is not at all unheard of for an illegitimate org to
| have a legitimate front. This sort of thing is rampant in
| the world of high-end minecraft servers, I'm told.
| danShumway wrote:
| It's good to know that side of things hasn't been abandoned.
|
| > I remain hopeful that we'll get through this mess "soon"
|
| I know you can't give more definitive timetable or details
| about actual negotiations, but at a high level what does "get
| though this mess" here mean, what's the short-to-medium term
| goal that Taler is trying to achieve for how it initially
| enters the market? Is it possible I wake up one day X
| months/years from now and just see an announcement that a
| bank has now decided to use Taler and it'll go live next
| week, or is this something that's expected to be much more
| gradual in its rollout?
|
| I don't feel like I have a great understanding of what the
| process for adoption for Taler looks like beyond the long-
| term goal that banks would start supporting it and then
| merchants would follow. I'm not sure if the plan is:
|
| - a bunch of private negotiations happen, and then there's a
| breakthrough and suddenly within a year half of the banks are
| using it, or
|
| - a bunch of smaller organizations take it up, and it starts
| out more niche and starts to grow, or
|
| - somebody someday starts a Paypal equivalent that isn't even
| technically a bank, just a payment app.
|
| I guess given that Taler is in talks with banks, the hope is
| that it gets adopted first with those banks; so is the goal
| that if talks are successful the rollout _starts out_ at an
| almost national scale?
| grothoff wrote:
| At this point, different things look plausible in different
| countries. Consider the possibility of a major banking
| technology provider offering it as a feature, in which case
| basically on day 1 you have 1000 banks that can choose to
| offer it if they believe their customers want to use Taler.
| Or you may have a smaller bank offer Taler as a limited
| experiment just to see if there is a business case, with
| very limited publicity. Or you may have a big bank offer it
| as a strategic product. Or you may have even a central bank
| beat everyone else and launch it as the official central
| bank digital currency. Personally, I'll probably sleep
| better if it starts small.
| danShumway wrote:
| Makes sense. Thanks a ton for the info.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Would you mind chatting about this? I'd like to help if
| possible - tech like this shows a beautiful version of
| 'the state' that I would happily support.
| grothoff wrote:
| We have a mailinglist (taler@gnu.org), and my personal
| e-mail is also not difficult to find out. We can always
| use help. Still looking for an iOS developer, for
| example.
| dbrgn wrote:
| Could Taler be used in a smaller scope already? For example,
| could it be used as an "account system" inside an association
| (like a hackerspace), where members can charge their accounts
| with Talers and then use these to pay drinks from the fridge,
| etc?
|
| Setups like this could be used to test the system in
| practice.
| grothoff wrote:
| Yes, but we still need to make it easier to setup/deploy
| this.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| This is a really cool idea. I am interested in seeing other types
| of cryptographically secure payment or monetary systems come
| about, but decidedly not ones you'd call "crypto," much like
| Taler very carefully explains it is not.
|
| For example, deflationary gold-like digital currencies just don't
| work. Fundamentally. It's a futile exercise to debate. But debt-
| based digital currencies run into some really hard problems.
|
| How do you know if someone is good for their IOUs? If someone
| takes out a large amount of debt, what prevents them from
| dropping their wallet/identity and moving on to a new one and
| wiping themselves clear of their debts? Are all of these social
| issues? Does a new credit system built into such a currency serve
| as the basis for preventing someone from not paying their debts
| back to the network? Even if a credit system was built into the
| digital currency, someone can always create a new identity if
| there is no requirement for verification, but how do you design a
| system that does not require it?
| zajio1am wrote:
| One thing i really do not like on GNU Taler is separate customer
| and merchant accounts with restriction of receiving money for
| merchant account only.
|
| In contrast to banking, where one has an account that works
| pretty much the same regardless of role of clients and nature of
| their transactions.
| lisper wrote:
| I dunno, one of the problems with modern banking is that the
| same account number is used for both incoming and outgoing
| transfers. That combined with the general lack of security
| makes it impossible for me to enable someone to put money into
| my account without also granting them the ability to take money
| out. Having separate accounts for incoming and outgoing would
| fix that. Of course, authorizing transactions with digital
| signatures fixes that too, but having separate accounts makes
| me feel kinda warm and fuzzy.
| grothoff wrote:
| This will change in the future once we have implemented P2P
| payments. So consider it a feature on our roadmap. See
| https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/013-peer-to-peer-pay...
| gyulai wrote:
| taxable? bug or feature?
| can16358p wrote:
| Feature for developed countries, bug for corrupt ones.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I think GNUNet GNS system is really nice. I wish they would find
| an application that actually uses it.
|
| The problem with all that GNUNet stuff its that its almost all
| research, no real active open source project built around them.
|
| I really like re:claimID, basically OpenID Connect auth against
| your local device. But it would of course need much more work to
| be practical.
|
| https://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/de/fields-of-expertise/proje...
|
| Overall its all very cool and this is in no way criticism on
| anybody that works on it. I am just point out to people that if
| you want to get involved or build on top of it what it is.
|
| I would them to work together with some of those Peer-to-peer
| chat systems or something like that.
|
| PS:
|
| New GnuNet release:
| https://www.gnunet.org/en/news/2022-02-0.16.0.html
| lxgr wrote:
| Is GnuNet related to Taler (other than also being developed
| under the GNU umbrella)?
| grothoff wrote:
| GNU Taler uses some libraries from GNUnet (and there is some
| overlap in core developers), but GNU Taler does not use the
| P2P (or GNS) functionality of GNUnet.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm always confused why taxability is a concern when it comes to
| cryptocurrencies. It is often brought up, including in the
| congressional hearings. How would it be any different than when
| we worked with cash? We were working with cash or checks until
| very recently. It seems rather simple to me. Employers still have
| to declare pay, stores still charge sales tax, and you can even
| build in a consumption tax (state level or federal) that applies
| to every transaction. A fully anonymous cryptocurrency doesn't
| seem to interfere with taxation in any way (in fact, if you built
| in a consumption tax to the gas fees you could essentially
| collect taxes from other countries).
|
| Is there something I'm missing here?
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think it would be a major selling point for state adoption.
|
| Cracking down on cash based tax evasion is often a major
| benefit touted when economies look to move to digital
| currencies, and most digital solutions to this problem "solve"
| it by throwing away anonymity. I most often see cashless
| solutions presented as a choice between do you want this system
| to be rampant with tax evasion and illicit activities but
| anonymous like bitcoin, or do you want someone keeping full
| plaintext records on every party in every transaction down to
| their street address and IP where the transaction was made like
| paypal.
| godelski wrote:
| How much tax is being avoid by cash payments? I can't imagine
| very much. If you're a business then there's too high of a
| risk unless you're a small fry. Maybe I'm missing something.
| But I imagine 90% of taxes aren't coming from those small
| enough to slip by. I also see an easy solution: 0.5%
| transaction fee built into the cryptocurrency.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling
| income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing
| anonymity for Customers._
|
| Pulling this off in the United States sounds somewhere between
| very challenging and impossible.
|
| Sales tax is not uniform. Rates vary not only by state but also
| at a local level. In some states, sales taxes can be imposed by
| the state, by counties, by cities, by school districts, by
| transit authorities, and by other entities like special purpose
| districts[1].
|
| Which ones (plural) of these sales taxes (plural) apply to a
| transaction depends on the _buyer 's location_.
|
| In many cases, knowing the buyer's city, state, and zip code is
| _not granular enough_. For example, the boundaries of a school
| district may not correspond to zip code or city.
|
| The typical approach today is to collect the buyer's full
| address. From that, there are databases that will tell you the
| list of jurisdictions and taxes that apply. Obviously, that's not
| very anonymous.
|
| Maybe you could have the buyer determine all of the
| jurisdictions/taxes that apply to them and send only that info
| instead. That's less granular, but in some cases it might give
| away a lot of information. (Sort of like browser fingerprinting.)
|
| But if you do that, I'm not sure what the implications would be
| for sellers. Sellers are required to collect the sales tax and
| remit it to the state. They can get in trouble for not doing it
| right. Governments don't like it when their taxes don't get
| collected, so they sometimes create laws that put the burden of
| compliance on the seller.
|
| ---
|
| [1] Special purpose districts could allow a county or local
| government to, for example, pick an arbitrary area and impose a
| sales tax within it just to support libraries that serve that
| area. Or crime prevention, road improvement, emergency services,
| hospitals, parks, economic development, etc.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I don't see why this would be an issue. Merchants deal with all
| of this today while accepting cash, which is an anonymous
| payment. None of this relies on tracking the individual
| customer.
|
| The merchants accepting Taler payments would still be
| responsible for computing and including the applicable sales
| taxes in the final price charged to the customer. The customer
| then pays that, anonymously.
| Jolter wrote:
| I don't know if this is obvious to you or not, but this does
| not sound like a problem for merchants in most parts of the
| world. US sales tax is insane and not representative of most
| jurisdictions, globally speaking.
|
| I'm not saying you couldn't use Taler in the US - after all,
| sales taxes work for cash transactions which also anonymous for
| the buyer. I'm saying if you want to get automatic correct
| taxation of merchants, perhaps it's a good idea to run your
| experiment outside the US.
| croes wrote:
| GNU Taler doesn't calculate or automatically pays the tax, it's
| just to prevent tax fraud so that authorities can check if the
| paid taxes correlate with the income.
| anamax wrote:
| The point is that SALES tax in the US doesn't correspond with
| "income" or even revenue. Sales tax isn't determined by the
| seller's characteristics - it depends on the buyer.
| syrrim wrote:
| This aspect of the buyer can be - and usually is permitted
| by law to be - determined from the buyer's IP address.
| pdnell wrote:
| There would be a lot of people with VPNs nodes in
| Delaware (no sales tax).
| pavon wrote:
| Is that any different from having a credit card with the
| billing address in Delaware?
| croes wrote:
| There are more taxes for Merchants than only sales taxes.
| The point the income stream via GNU Taler can be easily
| verified put the buyer still keeps his anonymity.
| Jolter wrote:
| You have the same problem with a cash transaction, I'm
| sure.
| quadrangle wrote:
| The answer is obvious: get rid of sales taxes. They are the
| stupidest most regressive taxes we have. They are
| cumbersome, and they screw with price transparency, and
| they shouldn't exist.
|
| Incidentally, I _support_ taxes in general and think we
| need more taxes on a lot of things. But taxes add cost to
| specific activities, and so they should be used to reduce
| those activities. Now, we don 't want the perverse
| incentive of government relying on tax revenue and thus
| otherwise wanting to promote the activity. So, we need to
| find a balance in all these things. But like taxes on
| stock-trading would be good. And we should probably
| increase property taxes and just do the simple thing where
| property tax rates go up the more properties an entity
| holds (that makes it harder for investment companies to buy
| up all the properties and gouge everyone with high rents).
|
| But for all the justified complexity of tax policy
| decisions, sales taxes are the worst and should just be
| eliminated.
| krupan wrote:
| Digression into taxes:
|
| Property taxes are worse than all other taxes. Why do I
| have to pay rent to the government for property that I
| already bought and paid for? Why does the amount of
| property tax I owe have no relationship to how much gain
| I actually realize, like income and capital gains taxes?
| Even sales tax has some sort of relationship to your
| realized gain (if you have less cash you probably buy
| less, so you pay less taxes).
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| Property or land taxes are better than all other taxes,
| for a number of reasons.
|
| * It is hard, nearly impossible to avoid.
|
| * In case of nonpayment the property serves as
| collateral.
|
| * Land value depends mostly on public infrastructure paid
| with public funds - roads, subways, schools etc are all
| public goods that the property owner profits from via
| price appreciation but the general taxpayer pays for. So
| a linkage needs to be established. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
|
| In the words of a famous conservative:
|
| "Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved,
| electric light turns night into day, water is brought
| from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -
| and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of
| those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of
| other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those
| improvements does the land monopolist, as a land
| monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the
| value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to
| the community, he contributes nothing to the general
| welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which
| his own enrichment is derived ... the unearned increment
| on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact
| proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice
| done."
| krupan wrote:
| Then charge fees for those services based on actual free
| market supply and demand! Don't assess everyone a tax
| based on the perceived unrealized value of the property.
|
| UPDATE: also, read up on the differences between property
| tax and land use tax. They are different.
|
| 'Nother Update: also, the government should stop
| encouraging property ownership as an investment for your
| future and retirement (tax breaks for mortgages, low
| interest rates, planned inflation) and then charge taxes
| on the hugely inflated value of that property.
|
| Also, most property taxes are local state-level taxes,
| and most state-level congresspeople have to have a side
| gig to stay afloat. Guess what that side gig is: Real
| estate. Many are realtors and developers. They have a
| vested interest in raising property taxes to get people
| selling houses.
| 6figurelenins wrote:
| > Land value depends mostly on public infrastructure paid
| with public funds - roads, subways, schools etc
|
| This is a strange conceit. Martha's Vineyard and Maui do
| not have orders of magnitude better "public
| infrastructure" than Kansas.
|
| If anything, recent US real estate growth is a function
| of people leaving high-tax areas for inferior asphalt.
|
| It ignores that zoning is contentious precisely when
| "public goods" are perceived to harm land value.
|
| There's a circular reasoning in "land monopoly." Cover a
| grocery store in solar panels: who is "contributing to
| the general welfare," and who collects free rent?
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Land value depends mostly on public infrastructure paid
| with public funds - roads, subways, schools etc are all
| public goods that the property owner profits from via
| price appreciation but the general taxpayer pays for
|
| Spot on. You could think of a city as a "service" that
| you consume by taking space. The more space you use the
| more you should pay every month.
|
| Even more so if you own a house and leave it unoccupied,
| because it's wasting public money invested in
| infrastructure.
| anamax wrote:
| > The answer is obvious: get rid of sales taxes.
|
| You do know that neither merchants nor folks writing tax
| or sales software can "get rid of sales taxes", right?
|
| "Our software doesn't handle that case" isn't a defense
| against a tax evasion charge.
|
| Neither is "I forgot" or "Excuse me", despite what Steve
| Martin said.
|
| https://snltranscripts.jt.org/77/77imono.phtml
|
| You.. can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You can
| be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You say..
| "Steve.. how can I be a millionaire.. and never pay
| taxes?" First.. get a million dollars. Now.. you say,
| "Steve.. what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my
| door and says, 'You.. have never paid taxes'?" Two simple
| words. Two simple words in the English language: "I
| forgot!" How many times do we let ourselves get into
| terrible situations because we don't say "I forgot"?
| Let's say you're on trial for armed robbery. You say to
| the judge, "I forgot armed robbery was illegal." Let's
| suppose he says back to you, "You have committed a foul
| crime. you have stolen hundreds and thousands of dollars
| from people at random, and you say, 'I forgot'?" Two
| simple words: Excuuuuuse me!!"
| smoe wrote:
| > You do know that neither merchants nor folks writing
| tax or sales software can "get rid of sales taxes",
| right?
|
| On the other hand, folks who write tax or sales software
| don't need to cater their software to US tax laws. Just
| don't use it there. At least from Wikipedia it seems,
| that the project leads are European.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Consumption taxes are regressive and punish the poor, but
| there's a case to be made for taxing transactions,
| primarily because government is expected to intervene if
| transactions go wrong. Same for property and wealth
| taxes, because the government creates property by
| deciding who owns things, deciding what that means, and
| intervening in any dispute.
|
| There's less of a US case to be made for taxes on wages,
| but just because the US shits on labor and spends almost
| no resources in defending it or the health and security
| of the people who provide it. Other countries that do
| more have a better case.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Another difficulty of the taxable feature is that for some
| retailers their sales tax changes all the time. A simple
| example is a food truck, sales tax rates can change daily
| depending on where the truck happens to be parked.
| 7steps2much wrote:
| True, but to be fair, if you want to pay anonymously at a
| food truck the easy answer to that problem is cash.
| MoSattler wrote:
| Maybe they merely point out that merchants cannot hide their
| identity and hence be identified and taxed. Not that it would
| be deducted automatically.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I'm talking about the "while providing anonymity for
| Customers" part.
|
| Providing anonymity for customers AND collecting sales tax
| (in the US) are two goals that conflict with each other.
| Maybe there are ways to resolve the conflict, but that's far
| from obvious.
|
| I'm not talking about whether it's automatic or whether GNU
| Taler makes it easier. I'm talking about whether making the
| seller info public is enough to comply with tax laws.
| grothoff wrote:
| Correct. The income is merely made visible. Paying taxes is
| still something each merchant has to do (and calculate
| correctly).
| Comevius wrote:
| It's a great project, but there is nothing in it for grifters.
| There is not much hype or fervor for innovation these days that
| doesn't involve potential bagholders.
| rvz wrote:
| You mean the Signal Messenger, and MobileCoin pump and dump
| hype scheme?
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _GNU Taler - Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy
| online transactions_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850143 - Jan 2022 (48
| comments)
|
| _GNU Taler 0.8_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301172
| - Aug 2021 (9 comments)
|
| _GNU Taler - A free software, privacy-friendly payment system_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302634 - May 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _GNU Taler - Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy
| online transactions_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261314 - Feb 2021 (110
| comments)
|
| _GNU Taler_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274110 -
| Sept 2017 (147 comments)
|
| _GNU Taler 0.0.0 released_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11840453 - June 2016 (187
| comments)
|
| _GNU Taler - Electronic payments for a liberal society_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258312 - Sept 2015 (183
| comments)
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| black_puppydog wrote:
| If you're talking about the "taxibility" aspect of it, that's
| not a back door because it's right there in the front of the
| house, with a big banner and a red arrow pointing at it painted
| on the driveway.
|
| Whether you'd like that particular house to have a door is a
| different matter entirely, but the design of Taler seems to be
| aiming for "let's make digital cash that a central bank might
| actually want to issue" and VAT is absolutely a part of that.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Encryption backdoors are not exclusively covert:
|
| https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/all-about-encryption-
| backdo...
|
| This is a backdoor, and puts to a lie the idea that this is
| in any way "anonymous". It's a tool of the state, to further
| centralize power around it.
| samhw wrote:
| Backdoors are covert by definition. You're talking about an
| avowed feature you don't like. There's a difference (and
| finding some random blog post that makes the same mistake
| is not a proof of anything).
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| That is not how the term is defined. Note from the
| article:
|
| >>An encryption backdoor is any method that allows a user
| (whether authorized or not) to bypass encryption and gain
| access to a system.
|
| Nothing in there about the method having to be covert.
|
| When the Clipper Chip was proposed in the early 1990s, or
| when governments publicly propose encryption bypasses
| today, the mainstream news coverage refers to these
| mechanisms as "backdoors", despite no covert element in
| it.
| croes wrote:
| Where does it say that the encryption is bypassed?
| danShumway wrote:
| > Note from the article
|
| The "SSLStore" is not the definitive source on the
| definition of a backdoor. It's just an EV certificate
| merchant.
|
| Authorization plays a role in whether or not something is
| a backdoor. It's not a rigid definition because language
| isn't actually rigid, backdoors are defined in part by
| whether or not they're expected and wanted by the end-
| user, which is inherently a fuzzy category. But it's
| silly to say that any access method authorized or not is
| a backdoor, by that logic my own encrypted computer hard
| drive has a glaring backdoor in the form of me knowing
| the passphrase for it.
| dbrgn wrote:
| As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-to-
| person payments, but for person-to-service-provider payments.
| The idea of taxability is that the person sending the money
| (the customer) is anonymous, while the recipient of the money
| (the webshop, for example) is not anonymous. This allows
| taxing the companies, while giving more privacy to the
| customers than with the current system.
|
| While this is a very different idea than decentralized
| cryptocurrencies, what it would give us as consumers is a
| much more privacy-preserving alternative to credit cards,
| Apple Pay and PayPal when buying things online (or in a
| store). At the same time, it is controllable enough for
| governments and banks that they could consider introducing
| such a system.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-
| to-person payments, but for person-to-service-provider
| payments.
|
| As far as I'm concerned, this is an arbitrary distinction
| to rationalize depriving some class of interactions between
| individuals of the right to privacy.
|
| >>At the same time, it is controllable enough for
| governments and banks that they could consider introducing
| such a system.
|
| I find this very defeatist, and this attitude becoming
| pervasive would guarantee that the trend toward mass-
| surveillance of all private interactions would continue
| unabated.
|
| Perhaps it's true that this is the type of system that
| governments and banks might be willing to introduce today.
| Afterall, privacy in financial interaction is not
| acceptable to the mainstream institutions. Over the last
| century, and especially since the early 1990s, the Overton
| window has shifted toward greater state control and less
| privacy. The proof of this is in the fact if cash were
| introduced today, it would be made illegal. And instead of
| pushing back against this trend toward mass-surveillance,
| Taler cows to it, with ideological rationalizations to
| boot.
|
| Cryptocurrency has a real potential to reverse the trend
| towards a dystopian surveillance state controlled by a
| handful of governments and payment processors, and the
| people behind Taler are too enamoured with their left-wing
| political ideology, and visions of taxing every one, to
| support it.
| usrusr wrote:
| I've been imagining a taxation system where any bank
| account is actually two bank accounts, one pre-tax and one
| post, with an obvious identification difference (like
| odd/even ID numbers). Then you could pay e.g. your plumber
| knowing that your payment will be properly taxed, and all
| deductibility games your tax system might like to have
| would simply be dealt with by paying from the pre-tax
| account. IRS equivalents would have access to the pre-tax
| transactions, done. That would be all the tax bureaucracy
| you could ever need. Perhaps pre-tax purchases could even
| be public? Not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad
| thing, I'd like to hope that it might shift public
| perception of tax loopholes from "something clever" to
| "something to be ashamed of". Taler sounds like it could
| eventually lead to a setup like that.
| [deleted]
| grammers wrote:
| Sounds rather awesome, but does it have the potential to go
| mainstream?
| joshuajill wrote:
| GNU Taler is already operational at Bern University of Applied
| Sciences
|
| https://taler.net/en/news/2020-09.html
|
| Last thing I've learnt they were in touch with some Spanish bank
| institution to work on an implementation.
|
| I guess a lot goes on behind closed doors.
| gojomo wrote:
| On the one hand, this seems to prioritize...
|
| * a dependency on a central exchange whose failure, or
| compromise, harms users; &
|
| * vigorous enforcement of taxes - & potentially other onerous
| regulatory limitations
|
| That may make it less of interest to many early adopters of
| cryptocurrencies.
|
| On the other hand, there's technologically lots of potential for
| proving compliance with tax & regulatory regimes in a strong,
| minimal, privay-preserving way - helping refactor cooperation
| with legitimate governance in ways that don't create extra,
| incidental vulnerabilities to other privacy or extra-legal
| coercive abuses. This could help advance those practices &
| highlight future design choices.
|
| Whether intentional or not, there's a hint of the word 'Thaler'
| in the name - originally derived from a place name ('Joachimstal'
| in modern Czechia) near historically-iimportant silver mining,
| and also a precursor of the modern English word 'dollar'.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler#Joachimsthaler
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