Comment by nullc
16 hours ago
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.
It's absolutely deceptive as you're seeing demonstrated in this thread-- I comment on this intentional and-- you believe "not hidden" lack of privacy-- and I get a reply demanding a publish a paper to prove it ("Papers please"... fitting!). This has consistently been the case for Taler. Sure, you and I are aware of the limitations-- but we're domain experts.
People hear that it's private and -- unsurprisingly-- think it's private! :P In my view it's like to Apple's proposed content scanning in end to end encryption that applies a lot of additional cryptographic complexity with language that suggests that it's protecting the user's privacy, but in reality the complexity is entirely there to undermine their privacy (in a somewhat selective way) and a far simpler scheme would give much stronger privacy.
I think it's analogous to promoting a key-escrow cryptosystem as "communicate privately!"-- both in terms of people not getting the privacy from it they would expect and helping to bring about a world where actual privacy is unlawful. The privacy problems of Taler are essentially identical to those of key-escrow: even if you don't have any fear of 'lawful' access, any access that exists may be abused. The only reliable solution to the security/privacy problems is for the access to not exist unless that is literally impossible. But it's clearly not impossible, as many people use more private systems than taler every day including in Germany.
Taler is strictly less private and considerably more complicated than a basic chaum-cash token system-- which actually provides the privacy people expect it to have. So it's not like I'm suggesting blockchain mumbo-jumbo is the only alternative. :)
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