Comment by Eueudhsbsj32
18 hours ago
I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.
It will be choked out at key junctions with KYC in the same way crypto has.
18 hours ago
I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.
It will be choked out at key junctions with KYC in the same way crypto has.
It is a project supported by the EU.
> 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
GLS is also part of a larger banking group that decided to back https://wero-wallet.eu/ ...
Ah yes. Network effects of course.
Must have been quite a curveball for Taler. Good luck on new venture!
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wrong assumption
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.
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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.
Can you buy crypto with this?
It even technically works for Bitcoin (https://git-www.taler.net/depolymerization.git/) - just nobody there who wants to try to do this legally so far.
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.
> 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.
Regulation should not be a problem, there are several past precedents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipknip
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.
I don't get your point. The current proposal for a digital euro supports private peer-to-peer transactions
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?
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.
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.
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"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.
Private and anonymous are different but the digital euro proposal is for both things, it is supposed to be equivalent to cash but only for small sums.
I have no idea how that's supposed to work.
Your whole argument is looney. Do you live in the EU?
Then these "regulators" must be put in jail for treason.
Putin is committing his genocide to Ukrainians; Trump is siding with him. It is time to call those who weaken Europeans as enemies.
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>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.
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Same, this sentence when I stopped reading and started rolling my eyes.
This is a surveillance oriented alternative to cryptocurrencies which uses the distraction of complicated cryptography to obfscuate the fact that by design it intentionally undermines the privacy of its users: it attaches the receivers identity to every payment they receive, along with the amount and makes it non-private-- potentially opening the door to abuse by kidnappers, extortionists, marketers responding to income signals, plaintiffs attorneys, and other such scoundrel.
The claims that is is privacy preserving are deceptive, and in my option constitute an act of intentional fraud on the part of its creators -- the fact that people are deceived by the privacy claims is clear in your comment: You ask why would the banks adopt something private. The answer is: it isn't.
Its existence is justified under a fairytale model of how the world works-- a false belief 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 in much the same manner that doing business with companies that refuse to accept cash does.
It would be fair to say that its an upgrade to privacyless systems-- because it doesn't attach the sender's identity to the transactions themselves--, but to characterize it as a private or privacy preserving system is a lie.
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.
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!
The "fraud" claim is kind of bizarre to me, but it's clear (and not hidden) that Taler intentionally provided less privacy for payees than other designs and systems because of a conscious decision that payees should have less privacy.
I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.
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