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Comment by ano-ther

14 hours ago

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

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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.

    • that may become clear from deeper reading, but from a cursory glance at the home page they claim

      > privacy-friendly online transactions

      so I believe any reasonable user, without digging more deeply, would not come to the conclusion that they are complying with KYC laws.

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