On P2P payments from their FAQ: “While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete.”
How about, no? How about me paying €50 to my friend for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated, KYCed, and blocked if they don’t approve of it or know who the recipient is? How about it’s none of the government’s business how I split the bill at dinner with friends? This level of surveillance is madness, especially coming from an app that touts “privacy” as a feature.
GNU Taler is a trojan horse to enable CBDC adoption. They are the friendly face to an absolutely terrifying level of government control in our lives funded by the same government that tries every year to implement chat control. Imagine your least favourite political party gaining power. Now imagine they can see and control every transaction you make. No thanks.
GNU Taler is not your enemy. It may not solve every problem you’d like it to, but its adoption by the masses would be a vast improvement in privacy compared to the current state of commerce in every country where it has the slightest chance of happening any time soon.
I have a feeling its adoption would bring the end of cash a big step closer.
The suggestions like this also scare me in that it might require you to carry a smartphone all the time for things as basic as payment.
This is totally unrelated to GNU Taler though, and if it comes to that you will be happy to have GNU Taler as an privacy preserving option.
When it comes to in-person payment, would Taler be usable without a mobile device? Say, with just a card like normal banking? I would have it much rather coexist with cash anyway.
But yea, sounds like an improvement when it comes to online payments.
The person accepting the money needs online access, or at least some sort of way to receive a validation code. As for the buyer, I think currently there is no implementation of it, but according to my understanding of it it would be technically possible to load Taler tokens on a card chip and use them from that.
Ah, that does make it better but still concerning - that would stop ME from also being paid in cash)
Not any closer than already existing commercial cashless payment solutions (which are much, much worse for privacy).
You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.
Sure, a crypto wallet might not have your name on it when created, but good luck buying or selling any without giving away your identity.
Monero fixes this
Monero completely removes any kind of accountability.
So does literally any good privacy tool
So does encryption, and peer to peer conversations, and talking to your neighbor, and trading things at the swap meet.
Requiring absolute central control removes freedom from people and removes accountability from governments.
For one Taler doesn’t enforce central control. Also it protects the identity of the person paying but not the seller. This means it is easy to hold a business accountable but hard to try and track customers. Overall this is a much healthier system that protects the consumer.
You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.
There’s some truth to this but it’s also not really the case.
- Each address is pseudononymous even in original Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin lightning transactions are completely opaque to the network, they are never on-chain. At this point, there are vastly more transactions on lightning than on-chain. They confirm instantly and are known only to your node, the receiver’s wallet, and intermediary nodes (if any). Lightning inherits security from the main chain while giving you sub-second transaction confirmation times.
- Monero exists, coinjoin (Bitcoin) exist, changing addresses and having multiple wallets exists, liquidity swaps exist. The chain analysis game is getting harder and more complex every year.
Yes. But the draw is that it is still leagues easier use privately than the traditional banking system. With cryptocurrency, you “only” need proper understanding of OPSEC. With banking system - you also need to break the law somewhere in the KYC process.
Yes, most crypto are totally useless, for privacy or anything else other than lottery and heating the home. But why are those discussed any further than just telling not to use them?
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/
Because everything in life has a trade-off, and talking about the utility, and the costs, is a reasonable thing to do. And yes there are ways to enable greater levels of privacy online using cryptocurrency then any other method available to us. So it is worth a discussion sometimes
Oh, I just realized that OP is the crypto-guy.
CBDCs are coming whether you like it or not and a GNU Taler based payment system is currently our best mitigation strategy against them.
It’s pointless to compare GNU Taler to crypto-currencies as it is a payment system and not a pseudo-currency.
CBDCs are coming whether you like it or not and a GNU Taler based payment system is currently our best mitigation strategy against them.
The best mitigation strategy is to refuse to use them and to point out when systems, like Taler, are actively working to further their introduction of use. Using your national currency is mandatory to pay taxes, it’s not mandatory for anything else in most countries. We have the option to opt out, just like we do with every other privacy-attacking technology. Assuming it’s inevitable is how they win.
I didn’t say the use will be inevitable, and great if you try to opt out. But the majority are already using cashless payment systems, and will happily switch to a CBDC if it becomes available and promises lower fees than credit cards etc.
Yes, Taler by design allows identifiction of the receiver.
It does not reveal the sender.
It allows you to create and arbitrate your own tokens and to create your own “bank”.
Yeah, the fact that out payment system is so centralised is definitely a bad thing. But GNU Taler, from what I understand, is just trying to work within that system. It didn’t create the system, and it doesn’t have the power to replace it.
It didn’t create the system, and it doesn’t have the power to replace it.
But it does support the system by being a part of it
If only there was some other technology that came along that could :(
But then someone might misuse the privacy it would provide, potentially doing something that some people would consider wrong!
Can you imagine, if we gave people rights?! Like free speech? Or the right to not have their house raided by the government without cause? My god they’d probably abuse those too! We should take them all away just to be safe :p
Please show me the crypto that just has the stability needed to be used as day-to-day currency. Not even accounting for ease of use, wide adoption etc., which none of them have, they’re all volatile shit shows only suitable for gambling, more resembling stocks than currency.
Please show me the crypto that just has the stability needed to be used as day-to-day currency
Bitcoin is already more stable than most national currencies and gets past the issue where you have to trust a central bank to correctly regulate the production of currency. Ask anybody in Argentina, Turkey, or Zimbabwe how much they trust their national currency. You can use Bitcoin as an everyday currency without holding onto it, plenty of people do this, particularly since it’s simply better for international transactions than many alternatives. Bitcoin gets more stable with time as more people use it.
All currencies experience volatility. People in some countries are very lucky to have a “stable” currency to use. But due to its inflationary nature, currencies like the EUR and USD are designed to lose value over time. 2-3% per year in good years. How had the purchasing power of that currency held up in recent years? Because Bitcoin has held up pretty well. Volatility has many sources, not all of which can be controlled. Bitcoin fixes the total supply in circulation which helps control at least one of those variables. If I have to pick between a currency that is guaranteed to lose value and a currency which may gain or lose value, the choice is pretty clear to me.
Not even accounting for ease of use, wide adoption etc., which none of them have,
Bitcoin’s user base, transaction volume, total market cap, number of full nodes etc, on average trend have increased or improved year after year for 15 years. You can send money to anybody on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees. And it’s as easy to use as Venmo. The dollar can’t do that, it needs a crazy complex series of international agreements and banks to make happen and it’s expensive and slow. Nobody’s making people use Bitcoin, in fact, there are often some hurdles to doing so, but they choose to because they see some value in doing so. But who knows, maybe on year 16 you’ll finally be right and people will finally realize it’s useless and stop using it!
I frankly wouldn’t recommend Bitcoin either for stability or privacy, IMO it’s fallen by the wayside in terms of the technological development of cryptocurrency. Chains like Monero or Ethereum have privacy-enforcing cryptography built right into them.
Bitcoin’s protocol has not meaningfully changed in 15 years. In terms of stability, in the crypto space, you literally cannot beat that. It will continue doing its thing so long as a few computers in the world still run the protocol. Those In those 15 years it has never been hacked, never had an hour of down time, took no bank holidays, and has fought off competition from other cryptocurrencies and attempted bans from nation states and world powers. And the supply has remained capped at 21 million coins as promised.
Ethereum is centralized AF. The majority of the supply was sold during the pre-mine, and now that “proof of ownership” runs the network, the risk of a 51% attack is significant. And in PoS systems, you get centralization of wealth over time since you are printing new currency and handing it over to people simply for already owning some, the “work” they have to do to stake is minimal. Unlike in PoW systems, once a 51% attack happens, it can happen indefinitely there there is no imposed cost after the start of the attack. Bitcoin has no pre-mine and has been issued fairly and transparently. The majority of Eth’s nodes are hosted in one of like three corporate datacenters because the hardware required to run a full node has gotten ridiculous. You can say it’s “secure enough” or “decentralized enough”, but not that it’s “more secure” or “more decentralized” than Bitcoin, because it simply isn’t. Their L2s are an absolute mess, some of them are incredibly centralized, Polygon last I checked had 15 nodes controlling the entire network. Meanwhile, you can run a full Bitcoin node on a laptop from 10 years ago and a lightning node on an Android phone. All while still being able to settle a transaction in under a second for a penny in fees with lightning.
Once you start to look at all these coins aside from Bitcoin, all of them, of the ones that aren’t outright scams, have traded decentralization (and therefore security) for transaction speed. Now that Bitcoin lightning is out and mature, transaction speed and chain capacity is no longer the limiting factor. Those other coins have no reason to exist.
Monero is cool, its main pitch is privacy. Bitcoin’s privacy continues to get better, I expect that trend to continue. Bitcoin has a conference like every month, there is a massive pool of dev talent and funding. Lightning was released 5+ years ago, Monero doesn’t even have an L2 and without an L2 it cannot scale, and there’s not even an L2 in the developer roadmap. You can’t put everything on chain forever, and the bigger the chain gets, the more centralized it becomes, period. With no L2, transactions are slow and fees will increase as blockspace competition increases. Lightning can make transactions in under a second for pennies in fees since fees are not tied directly to blockspace.
Bitcoin’s protocol has not meaningfully changed in 15 years.
Well, yes, exactly. That’s the problem. There have been innumerable innovations and improvements in the field over those 15 years, but Bitcoin ossified early and so it’s got none of them.
Ethereum is centralized AF. The majority of the supply was sold during the pre-mine, and now that “proof of ownership” runs the network, the risk of a 51% attack is significant.
You’ve got a very inaccurate and skewed view of this. Most significantly, it’s not “proof of ownership,” it’s “proof of stake.” Proof of ownership and proof of stake are distinct technologies that operate in different manners. Ethereum is not proof of ownership.
You’re clearly not very familiar with how Ethereum’s proof of stake system operates because “51% attack” is not meaningful. There’s nothing magical about the 51% threshold in Ethereum’s system of staking. There is a magical threshold at 66%, if you’ve got more than that you can prevent “finality” from happening which will in turn cause some disruption to the chain. But most significantly, it doesn’t prevent blocks from continuing to be processed and doesn’t allow stakers to forge blocks. It’s a highly theoretical attack since no stakers or staking pools are anywhere remotely close to that sort of dominance, and even if they did do that there’d still be mechanisms by which they could be slashed.
Now that Bitcoin lightning is out and mature, transaction speed and chain capacity is no longer the limiting factor.
Lightning has been an entirely predictable disappointment. The problem is that Bitcoin was not designed to support something like Lightning, and that very feature you touted above - Bitcoin’s complete ossification of protocol upgrades 15 years ago - means it can’t be made to support it. Lightning’s total capacity is $300 million. Ironically there’s thirty times more Bitcoin being transacted on the Ethereum network in the form of WBTC than there is Bitcoin being transacted in Lightning.
If you’re interested in layer-2 solutions then Ethereum’s recent updates have been all about providing better support for that kind of thing, using many cryptographic advances that came along in those 15 years. Some of them incorporate Monero-like privacy systems, even, such as Arbitrum.
Well, yes, exactly. That’s the problem. There have been innumerable innovations and improvements in the field over those 15 years, but Bitcoin ossified early and so it’s got none of them.
Except it’s got L2s, it’s got more smart contract abilties, it’s adding zk rollups, etc. It’s not like it hasn’t improved over that timespan. The stability of the core protocol and widespread consensus required to upgrade it (and the slow speed at which this occurs) is a benefit for something that is meant to be money. It’s maybe less beneficial for the world’s most cutting edge smart contract platform, for example.
You’ve got a very inaccurate and skewed view of this. Most significantly, it’s not “proof of ownership,” it’s “proof of stake.” Proof of ownership and proof of stake are distinct technologies that operate in different manners. Ethereum is not proof of ownership.
They call it proof of stake, but it’s proof of ownership. It’s proving you own coins. That’s it. Edit: I think you thought I was talking about proof of authority?
There is a magical threshold at 66%, if you’ve got more than that you can prevent “finality” from happening which will in turn cause some disruption to the chain. But most significantly, it doesn’t prevent blocks from continuing to be processed and doesn’t allow stakers to forge blocks. It’s a highly theoretical attack since no stakers or staking pools are anywhere remotely close to that sort of dominance, and even if they did do that there’d still be mechanisms by which they could be slashed.
I will need to look into this more so thank you for bringing this to my attention. Centralization of nodes renders much of this inconsequential imo but still worth looking into for my own knowledge.
Lightning has been an entirely predictable disappointment. The problem is that Bitcoin was not designed to support something like Lightning
You’re right, it was not designed to support an idea that didn’t exist when it was designed. But upgrades to improve lightning have been proposed and made it into protocol and more updates (convenants) are coming down the pipe. Lightning works, it works really well, I use it on a daily basis, the network continues to grow. It works for small transactions and large ones. It takes under a second. Cash app supports it, Coinbase added support for it this year. It’s as decentralized as base chain is, unlike many of Eth’s L2s. The only caveat to lightning for self-custody wallets is solving the “inbound liquidity” problem for onboarding new issues, which is an annoying UX thing but not actually a huge problem imo. Nonetheless, convenants will help solve this and there are other proposals (Ark and Fedimint) which solve this problem in different ways with different trade-offs. It has come a long ways in the past 5 years, I tried it when it first came out and it was a major pain to use, almost all of those pain points have been solved.
Ironically there’s thirty times more Bitcoin being transacted on the Ethereum network in the form of WBTC than there is Bitcoin being transacted in Lightning.
This is a good point. This WBTC is being used for DeFi etc, it’s not being used as a currency for transactions. And that’s fine, maybe that’s Eth’s place, certainly there isn’t much interest in using BTCs main chain for more complex smart contracts due to concern about bloat. There are proposals (BitVM etc) and some working implementations with “shared security” from main chain with the smart contracts being hosted in some sidechain/L2/etc. But it’s a dizzying array, we’ll see how that shakes out. I don’t know about Eth’s long-term future as a decentralized platform when centralization continues to increase and a conspiracy, hack, or government pressure on Hetzner and Amazon could impact over half the nodes on the network.
Most “western” countries, like the US or western European countries, have very stabile currencies. You cherry picked three countries known for ridiculous instability in their currencies, that doesn’t show much TBH. For my day-to-day living, I’ll definitely pick the currency I know with very high certainty I can pay rent with in a year.
They have to be stabile enough to enable me to receive them from my employer as payment, and not risking my ability to pay rent because the value suddenly reduced significantly.
Nobody’s gonna make you, unlike a CBDC.
There’s an entire category of cryptocurrency designed specifically for the use case you’re asking for, the stablecoins. They are pegged to reference values using a variety of techniques. US Dollars are a common denomination, since it’s already frequently seen as a global reserve currency, but if you really want there are stablecoins pegged to other things as well.
If you want a more specific example, I typically use DAI as a go-to example since it doesn’t depend on third party trust like some of the more commonly-used ones (such as Tether).
Yes, and stable coins are all long known to be scams that are backed by nothing but empty promises.
Some, maybe. And some fiat currencies are more stable than others too. There are stabletokens that are run using smart contracts where you can see the backing assets on-chain, those ones couldn’t scam you if they tried.
You are completely delusional if you think the these smart contracts are backed by anything but other smoke and mirror coins. Those are literally automated scams; it’s all a bezzle.
All you’re saying here is “nuh-uh! I don’t believe you!” Which isn’t particularly useful.
I could dig up the addresses of MakerDAO or Liquity vaults, you could examine them directly using Etherscan and see which tokens back them. But I somehow get the impression that that would be a waste of my time. Is there literally anything that could convince you, before I go running around doing any further work trying?
Your first example is tax fraud if you hide it
Edit: it looks like you edited your post to state the guy repairing your bike is “your friend”.
Noone is going to go after him if he just fixes your bike. But if he fixes the bike of his 1000 friends each month, they will go after him if he didn’t declare it.
not if they’re only covering the cost of parts
Which jurisdiction are you referring to? GNU Taler isn’t specific to any particular country or currency.
I think you are misinterpreting things.
Funny how we’re big into privacy here, and then money comes up and lots of people are “wait no, not that kind of privacy.”
I do not like drugs and human trafficking.
Ah yes, must keep that war on drugs going, it’s totally worth sacrificing everyones’ privacy to make sure the Devil’s Cabbage is kept off the streets. Reefer Madness is epidemic.
And human trafficking, yes, we can’t have people sending remittances to their families in destitute foreign countries so that they might be able to afford to immigrate too. So many poor foreigners trying to get in!
Or maybe this is actually too complicated an issue to dismiss with a simple “if people have done nothing wrong they have nothing to hide?”
Let’s please not confuse human trafficking (you know, stuff akin to slave trade including sexual exploitation) to sending remittances.
Indeed, let’s not make that confusion. Like possiblylinux127 did.
They are either arguing in bad faith or so focused on ending all crime that they would remove free will and human autonomy in their pursuit.
Not to mention even in the most restrictive frame of existence like prison, where everything is controlled and observed, the very problems they are willing to sell our freedom to fix… Flourish!
Also … That implies you don’t like freedom, democracy, feeding refugees, medical care for the exploited, and over throwing dictatorships.
Everything has a trade-off, to only enable systems that have absolute central control, you invite central control of everything
No it doesn’t
I just have only seen Monero used for ransomware and dark web crime.
Oh,let me illustrate some of the uses cases your missing:
Pay for a VPN Mullvad
Support a operating system GrapheneOS
Support a desktop operating system Qubes
Support VLC
Support libremapping Organicmaps
Etc etc
Recently read an ELI5 of the digital euro and was pleasantly surprised. If it works as designed, you can perform offline payments from one device to another, which sounds like your use case. No central servers, no blockchain.
If you can do a P2P transaction like that, you need either a central server or a blockchain or equivalent to prevent double-spends. There is no other way. Satoshi’s innovation for Bitcoin was developing a system (blockchain) that can do this without a central server.
I don’t know how the technical implementation will work, but here is a post I found.
The idea is that you transfer money from the bank to your device, just like withdrawing cash from an ATM. Transferring money from one wallet to another should be able to be offline.
It seems like privacy is a priority, if only to satisfy privacy groups and improve acceptance.
You still need to be able to defend against double spends, meaning I digitally copy my wallet and give two people the same 5€.
I disagree. Taler also individuals to stay private while preventing crime. I personally could never use crypto as it empowers criminals and is very unpredictable. Taler uses flat currency so you don’t need to worry about it losing value overnight.
It isn’t done yet and it may get abandoned but it is a start. For now it is a interesting project to watch. Also cash is king
Criminality is unfortunately a very subjective term. Data brokers are not criminals, neither corrupt politicians, but you can easily become one by not doing any harm, but going on a protest, or standing up to bad things imposed on you or other people.
True but in this case I’m talking about dark web illegal activity
Taler can be used for custom currencies too. Anyone can run a mint for their own currency, and anyone can participate in handing out coins of a given currency,
problemprobably in exchange for things outside of the system. The reporting capability of Taler is tied to the currency.We will probably see it if it can really be done, but I think “traditional” cryptocurrencies could be implemented on top of taler.
You could use Crypto with Taler but it wouldn’t make a lot of sense as crypto is digital anyway. It also would have all the draw backs of crypto.
I was responding to this:
Taler also individuals to stay private while preventing crime. I personally could never use crypto as it empowers criminals and is very unpredictable.
I personally could never use crypto as it empowers criminals and is very unpredictable.
Do you also avoid cash?
Linux is used by criminals and fascists as well, outlaw Linux?
I like cash as it is a physical and reasonably traceable while preventing mass surveillance
Do you also avoid cash?
Yes, they’re a nuisance to carry around anyway.
I stick to cash because I don’t think my bank should know things as sensitive as the full history of my transactions, which may or may not also be sold to others. Also in times like these I would not be surprised if you’d get in trouble for transferring some funds to a dissident’s card, while in reality it was just splitting the bar bill.
Taler uses flat currency so you don’t need to worry about it losing value overnight.
There are a number of stabletokens that you also wouldn’t need to worry about losing value overnight.
Stablecoins are the worst of crypto and central banking combined.
- They are centralized, even more centralized than central banks since they are run by a single company not an board appointed by an elected government
- They can rug you at any time
- They only have value because they are “pegged” to a certain currency and the “backing” must exist to maintain that peg.
- Their source of the backing is often “trust me bro”
- Even if the backing was solid, market shocks and other problems can reduce the value of that backing, leading to them being insolvent and the stablecoin losing its value. And guess what, it wasn’t insured!
- They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely, so you have no reason to trust their claims and probably can’t seek any real remedy if they are lies
- They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation
Several of them have already collapsed spectacularly. More will in time. Avoid stablecoins.
Some stablecoins are centralized, but it’s not a fundamental requirement of how they operate. Stabletokens such as DAI or Liquity are run without a central company. They cannot “rug” you because they’re based on smart contracts.
They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely
Isn’t that kind of the point?
so you have no reason to trust their claims
Smart contract code can be audited by anyone and trusted to run exactly as it’s written.
They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation
Stablecoins aren’t required to peg to any specific measure of value (I assume you’re referring to US dollars?). There are stabletokens pegged to gold, for example, if you really want something like that.
Since US dollars work just fine for commerce, though, using a stabletoken that’s pegged to US dollars works fine for commerce too.
That’s just smoke and mirrors. If there was a “bank run” on a stable coin all of them would immediately collapse as there is nothing of real value backing them.
Anything of value is capable of losing its value under some circumstances, since value is assigned by humans. Obviously you pick and choose based on your use cases.
That’s a cop-out to avoid discussing that none of the stable coins have anywhere close to the assets they claim to have and which would be necessary to peg the value.
You can examine the MakerDAO contract, for example, and see all of the assets they claim to have sitting right there under its control on the blockchain. You can see the contract logic behind how those assets enter and exit its control.