GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
taler.net
taler.net
People can still become a black market escrow, keep creating new merchants and facilitate user to user transactions unless there is some kind of cost or identification required to accept Taler payments, or exchange Taler for bitcoin. US law makers will likely try to prohibit Taler though if any online gambling accepts it as payment, for example Paysafecard had to design a special UIGEA compliant card in order for it not to be able to be plugged into a gambling site to get into the US payments market.
Speaking of bitcoin pretty much every online exchange will start accepting Taler, then they aren't so exposed to banks shutting them down and can trade in any currency.
It takes some courage to make a crypto-payment protocol explicitly taxation-friendly, but they claim the tax man only gets to see the amounts, not the identities. What a pity the design doc isn't yet on their website.
And I hope the eCash patents have expired...
Governments likely will insist on a mechanism to track electronic currencies, for tax, regulatory and other reasons. Governments seem to have very little concern for privacy. So the mechanism they choose could very well ignore privacy.
By building a mechanism that meets government needs and by being an early mover, Taler could be the de facto solution by the time governments get around to dealing with this issue, and could make privacy the policy.
Taler can also compete with Ukash, since it's free/open any merchant can implement their own Taler for cash business without signing large exclusive contracts with Ukash or waiting a month to be settled by them, as you can freely choose which Mint to do business with.
Merchants of physical goods must know the identity and delivery address of their customers in order to deliver them. Given how easy many companies find it to embed 3rd party trackers or adverts on their site, it seems reasonable to believe that they will also find it easy to sell this data ("to help detect and prevent fraud") to the payment processing companies.
Here are a couple of solutions I've seen but haven't tried:
* Masked Cards by Abine (a privacy service): Abine gives you a card to use and you pay Abine. Obviously, you'll need to trust Abine.
https://dnt.abine.com/#feature/payments
* PaySafeCard: A prepaid card; "You don't have to enter any personal information or bank account or credit card details. Your privacy remains completely protected at all times with paysafecard!"
I do like the idea of complete transactional privacy between end users and/or merchants. But we already have this today with CryptoNote based cryptocurrencies like Monero - with optional transparency through "view keys".
Bitcoin and others will never succeed because they are too friendly towards illicit behaviour. Taler seems to strike a genuinely interesting and ethical balance here.
The idea that this sort of activity is able to be decoupled from surveillance is one of the more unfortunate delusions in politics.
That said, I do agree that governments care about the contents of the purchase; around here, all sales must be invoiced with certified software, and a copy of all invoices issued must be delivered monthly to the IRS by businesses. As the buyer, you can opt to remain anonymous, but they're trying to push people into not doing so.
Is cash also unethical because the government doesn't have absolute surveillance on cash spending?
What the project claims is a "liberal" tool can very easily become a very unethical tool of oppression.
I doubt various governments can do a whole lot about it, which means it's likely to succeed eventually.
Bitcoin will never (fully) succeed because it's too complex for the general public.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/01/blockchain-scalability.html
Empowering governments with additional taxation tools is about the only thing this brings to the table over existing technologies.
I'm of the complete opposite opinion, and am also completely against government due to my ideology.
Basically, while we have a government, I expect them to do their job and to employ any means necessary to do so. We currently task them with keeping us safe, to solving crimes when they do happen, and to enforce the laws we have supposedly all agreed on.
Obviously we have to keep government from doing bad things while in the service of the tasks assigned to it. E.g. unjustified violence of any form.
Edit: Uses this API http://api.taler.net/ plus seems to have future GNUnet compatibility built into it's system for payments over it.
As to the carder-friendlyness: credit card companies are known to treat payment aggregators with lots of suspicion, so I suppose there just won't be many credit-card-to-Taler "banks".
So exactly why would I want to use this?
Technologies like this would be a boon to many developing countries like mine where tax evasion and corruption is rampant. It would enable the government to collect funds for infrastructure, education, environmental protection and healthcare (and yes, I am a progressive liberal who would rather have the government provide these at subsidized cost rather than private entities; even at the cost of "efficiency" if need be).
That's simply not true. When I do my taxes I have to report my yearly income. The kind of system where a government can monitor all of my transactions in real time is without any court involvement is insane.
You might as well use your bank card as at least those require a warrant or subpoena to acquire.
> When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money.
Or something. The details aren't there yet.
Sounds like a strictly proportional system only, then?
I don't think Taler is meant to help you do your taxes at the end of the year.
And the reason you report your income correctly, and trust that your neighbors do too is...
Bitcoin is more valid money then paper currency. we can directly verify the creation of the transaction.
Many may think or assert that, especially based on the trendy anti-government dogma, but I disagree. They have a vested interest in a fair and enforced taxation system. Otherwise they lose effective government and its services, both of which are absolutely essential to their safety and prosperity.
You may be taxed to pay for them, but you don't have to use them all.
The IRS, or their equivalent, are the price of entry into whatever society you wish to be part of (or whichever will take you.
It's like a social club, if you don't want to pay your dues you don't get to use the facilities.
You realize the IRS != US? We got along financially just fine (some would say better) before it.
I just get riled up by the "It's wrong! They have no right to tax me! I have property rights!" stance, because it's inconsistent.
You have a choice of many countries in the world, with all sorts of different rules decided on by the people there.
If a currency system was available that made taxation appear entirely optional to the public the trust in the tax system would erode in a hurry (Why should I pay when my neighbor or Acme inc. isn't paying?). Tax morale is alreay too low in many countries. Making more loopholes available would just not be good.
This is a great example of an argument from ignorance. We can't conceive of a high-functioning society without taxes, therefore, let it be known that one cannot exist.
- Humphrey, this paper says that if we cancel Trident and bring in conscription, we
shall have £1.5 billion for tax cuts, and what do I find?
- What do you find, Prime Minister?
- The Chancellor opposes me. A great chance to be popular with the voters and he
says no. Doesn't that surprise you?
- No.
- Why doesn't it surprise you?
- He's advised by the Treasury and they don't believe in giving money back.
- It's not theirs. It's the taxpayers'.
- That's not the view the Treasury takes. Not once they've got it.
- But if they don't need it?
- Sorry?
- If they don't need it.
- Taxation isn't about what you need.
- What is it about?
- The Treasury doesn't work out what they need to spend and then think how to raise
the money.
- What DOES it do?
- They pitch for as much as they think they can get away with, then think what to
spend it on. If you start giving money back because you don't need it, you're
breaking with centuries of tradition!I'm not sure what exactly this kind of tracking helps with; it would be nice if they had more examples or case studies.
That said, I agree, we're surveilled enough thanks.
To me it seems quite desirable: a decentralized protocol for sending government-backed money in a way that is legal (strong crypto isn't protection from being arrested for money laundering), and yet offers better privacy and is more open to competition than existing networks of banks/credit cards/PayPal.
The name itself screams "money": a taler is a thaler is a dollar and they all come from from the valley of Saint Joachim (Joachimsthal) where they had a silver mine. You may thank the Holy Roman Empire for making good coinage.
Right now it's vaporware, but I'm very interested in its release. I'd love to help give it a friendly face and integrate it with existing open source social platforms, to make it easier to send and receive money regardless of your technical ability.
> Thus, Taler will enable competition and avoid the monopolization of payment systems that threatens global political and financial stability today.
The irony.
If they want to centralize a currency, perhaps that would be better done by a government or other experienced institution.
This is really an iteration on PayPal (and similar businesses): the new feature is that it is a system for letting multiple PayPals compete. Instead of being forced to make an account with a specific company, you can pick from a hopefully-large number of mints, who will be competing on things like fees and the customer experience. That will hopefully make things suck less.
BitCoin solves a lot of problems most people don't care about. Most people don't care about Byzentine Generals or trustless transactions or very limited forms of anonymity. What most people care about are low-cost transactions which don't suck. We'll have to wait and see if Taler can actually deliver.
Existing cryptocurrencies already perform this function well. If that's the sole claimed advantage of Taler, it's a step backwards.
For a payment system, being a currency is a negative -- fluctuations between the value of the digital currency and the value of the currency goods are priced in is a headache few people enjoy.
A payment system that is set up as a payment system -- instead of a decentralized trustless network -- can also better optimize things like transaction time (transactions can happen ~instantly if you're willing to trust central agencies) or having a known transaction cost. Right now Bitcoin's transaction cost is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- some combination of inflation from printing money to pay the miners and direct payments to the miners per transaction and payments to the exchanges to put cash in or take cash out and the risk of currency fluctuations mid-transaction. Regardless of whether it costs a little more or a little less, just knowing the transaction cost is a huge benefit to consumers and merchants.
Because this system ensures fair play of all participants, therefore making cooperative behaviour the rational choice, therefore enabling more efficient solutions on a societal level.
Proper game theory (which I assume you were referring to) is bit more complex than the prisoner's dilemma.
P.S. Stallman is a FS advocate, not an OSS advocate.
Sorry, FS, that was indeed my mistake.
If you can't mail order LSD with it, in privacy, then it's too submissive to the state.
Sounds pretty useless to me then. I would think, as technologists, we would adhere to a mindset of "we can do better". That is, we can do better than basing our society on a State apparatus that is rooted in the use of violence (or threat, implied or otherwise) of violence, to coerce people into following its dictates. Taxation is damage that we should be creating ways to route around, not something we should be building tools to support.
I am not saying taxes are theft, but if one does believe so, I don't think it's hypocrisy to try to at least get some of it back.
If the government takes your bike and gives it to me after taking my car, I'd be hypocritical to condemn theft and retain your bike. I have no claim to your property under my anti-theft ethics, therefore I should return it to you.
So following your logic of returning the bike, what one should do is to take as much money as they can from the government services and give it away to other taxation-is-theft people :)
Some roads have been built by government... not all where, and not all are even now. I'll posit that a significant number of Americans drive on at least one private road every single day. Chances are, if you live in any kind of suburban housing subdivision, the road right in front of your house actually wasn't created, and isn't maintained, by the State.
There are, of course, other privately built roads:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United...
Basically, the old (trite) saw that "I want roads, therefore we need government" is pretty much bullshit. Never mind the fact that one person's desire for a road hardly justifies their putting a gun in the face of everyone else around and demanding that they pay for said road.
Again.. we're hackers, we can do better. And I'm not saying I have all the answers, sitting here today. I'm saying that if we put our minds to it, we can come up with a way to achieve positive ends without resorting to violence. Why anybody on this thread would argue against that is hard to imagine? Are you people saying you like violence?
Yeah, maybe you could say "If you don't want to pay for a private road, don't drive on it. Simple as that." And exactly how do you plan to enforce the "don't drive on it" part?
And mind you, in an alternative universe where every road is private, a poor Joe who has to drive ten miles to work to feed his family will take the road, whether he can pay the toll or not. And if he finds using a gun is cheaper than paying tolls he will absolutely do so, because (in a society where the government can't point guns at employers' head and demand to pay minimum wage) if he doesn't he will be priced out by his neighbors who are willing to use the gun and drive cheaply.
It wouod surprise me mightily to find that the citizens of LA were funding public-access through-roads from the goodness of their hearts.
It's not a very plausible scenario.
Isn't that true, though? I mean, the IRS doesn't send around a tax-person who carries a pistol or rifle or whatever, but the whole system is founded on the idea that "if you don't do what 'society' has agreed is the law, bad things (tm) can and probably will happen to you".
Paying taxes isn't optional in the same way that getting a driver's license is optional. So it's literally true that taxes are collected through the subtle but ultimately real threat of violence. Maybe you won't be executed, maybe you won't be beaten, but you will be made to do things against your will like go to jail.
Sure it's the extreme logical conclusion, but it's also the accurate one if you try not to pay.
Technology has come a long way in the last 1000 or so years. I suspect that there are new solutions to the problem that you describe. But they don't get explored because the State has a monopoly on violence and is very resistant to change.
Most of the time that's a good thing as it means that things get screwed up only very slowly. But it also tends to prevent things from getting better, too. Only the most egregious problems get solved.
No, wrong. Alternatives get explored all the time, and radical changes in the dominant role of social organization have happened over the 1000 year time period you discuss. You've anthropomorphized the abstract concept of the State improperly: the state is whatever entity or collection of entities taken together have a monopoly on legitimate violence, but the entities or collections which do that over time have changed quite rapidly -- the modern nation-state system is only a few hundred years old -- it is a fairly new model -- and there has been considerable evolution within that model (and its one that has been widely perceived as weakening in the face of evolving, powerful, non-nation-state actors of various types.)
When there's a technological revolution every 20 years or so, but a political revolution only every 200 years or so, I think it's fair to argue that the state is very resistant to change. I might see several technological revolutions in my lifetime, and no political ones.
Then give a concrete example of such a solution. The current system (having a state actor) works more or less well in preventing power abuse by private entities. But shouldn't we wait with abolishing it until we have actually found a better solution?
Also, because most people consider the State and its monopoly on violence to be a perfectly adequate solution to the problem.
And what he's saying is "The thing underlying the veneer is pretty savage, which taints the idea that everything is so civilized"
That's a point you seem to completely miss.
If the counter-point is that you can escalate the situation by attempting to resist the state's monopoly on violence, then sure. I concede that. I don't believe the thing underlying the veneer is savage. Quite the contrary.
So if you think you shouldn't have to pay taxes, because the state isn't a legitimate authority, it's quite likely that you'll end up dying.
Finally while taxes aren't collected directly by a person with a gun, failure to be sufficiently subservient while dealing with the state can result in your death. It's unfortunate that the state grants itself (in all its forms) much, much more privilege or leeway than any non-state actor would enjoy in a similar dispute.
In other words, if you fail to pay a debt to another citizen or non-governmental entity, it's usually handled much, much differently than failing to pay a debt to the government. That double standard definitely doesn't feel right to many folks, and I think that's a very reasonable point to make.
Any entity worthy of the name government has a very simple way of visualizing the flow of cash in the economy: door to door searches. If the organized manpower for this does not exist, the government will have a hard time collecting taxes no matter how many technological shortcuts to the physical searching (like, say, property records on stone tablets) they use.
How did people get around? Hot-air balloons?
Obviously people managed to move themselves from place to place prior to the 19th century... roads are far, far older than that.
Your conclusion has no relation to your premise at all. I would think, as technologists, we can do logical reasoning better ;)
Deleted comment
Also, RMS is listed on the About page [1], though it doesn't say in what capacity (unless "Ethics enthusiast" is a job title).
Edit: fixed reference to footnote
> With Taler, the receiver of any form of payment is known, and the payment information comes attached with some details about what the payment was made for (but not the identity of the customer). Thus, governments can use this data to tax buisnesses and individuals based on their income
HAH, I love it, they lump both BitCoin and cash! as currencies fit for the black market! I wonder how cash-only convenience stores will feel about that, those outlaw troublemakers! ;p
This simultaneously implies that both Bitcoin and cash are not suitable for the mainstream economy. I think the opinion that cash should be given up would be fairly controversial, even today. Furthermore, a law abiding citizen will still pay taxes on their Bitcoin income - the same way they would for cash. Just because Bitcoin makes it harder to prove tax evasion doesn't mean we should eschew Bitcoin and cash. The technology exists regardless, governments will have to adapt.
> When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money. However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary.
This feature is offering nothing not already available, although it seems to imply that one could not prove payment with Bitcoin, which is false, as it is trivial.
No, it implies that Bitcoin and cash are both alike in not simultaneously being:
(a) suitable for the mainstream economy, and (b) not suitable for the black market.
It neither states nor strongly implies which of those two things bitcoin or cash fail on (nor does it state or strongly apply that they each fail on the same one of those two things), though there's a fairly weak implication that Bitcoin and cash both fail on the second (that, whether or not they are suitable for the mainstream economy, they are quite suitable for the black market.)
That said, taxes are not inherently bad. Governments on the other hand... Have an awfully bad track-record of power abuse.
http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=27870
http://in.rbth.com/economics/finance/2015/09/21/rusias-bitru...
http://cointelegraph.com/news/115312/azerbaijan-mulls-its-ow...
Seriously. You have an aging population causing consumption to decline, a global recession along the horizon, ever-increasing productivity replacing the need for labor, and you think your interest rates are going to a damn bit of good? We'll need to keep interest rates at 0 just to keep the whole thing going, forget about negative interest rates (which is going to cause a run on the bank and asset bubbles in commodities, real estate, anything else that can be a value store).
Well ... yes, but isn't that just an unnecessarily specific version of the true statement "Humans have an awfully bad track record of power abuse"?
From this premise (and lots of other reading of the political "sciences"), I also find it easy to conclude that the internet and open source are preferable to government as methods of diffusing power.
I'm guessing this means that you have either "free" trust (help from the thaler system to ensure fair transactions), or "no" trust -- essentially you hand over cash, and hope the other party gives you goods in return?
I have a hard time seeing how you could prevent "anonymous transfer of coins" from one device from the other -- across the Internet (provided the parties are prepared to risk fraud)?
Interesting claim.
For example, Facebook has partnered with the university and it's also the birthplace of the OCAML language. They have some sharp people doing research work there, if this was a VC-backed company or a kickstarter, I would be much more skeptical and think it's shady. However, the bar at a university is much higher so we'll see what they do deliver and how it works whenever they deliver it in the next year.
I'm not sure how/if thaler would change that -- but it's worth keeping in mind that "new" assets will be taxed according to how the government thinks it should be taxed, not according to how you might feel it should be taxed.
Taler uses an electronic mint holding financial reserves in existing currencies. This means that Taler is not a new currency with the inherent currency fluctuation risks, but instead the cryptographic coins correspond to existing currencies, such as US Dollars, Euros or even BitCoins.
So, yes, inflation is possible, since the digital coins are tied to existing currencies.
Also, Taler seems to be very much a Free Software project. internetpeso seems to be proprietary, and also self-contradictory:
> Other cyber-currencies require that you trust complete strangers to verify transactions. This is a patently unsafe way of handling your life savings.
> We leverage best-of-breed closed-source software
Is that a acceptable definition for you?
Having said that, this is a GNU project so I would have preferred "free" to "liberal". A payment system consisting entirely of free software, perhaps.
There are a few issues with this if using the "wallet-bookeeping option" where proofs-of-purchase are bound to the wallet. One, it doesn't protect against dishonest sellers. Say a customer comes in with a wallet that originally held $200 but they've spent $80. The seller can still bill the mint for $150, and there is no way for the mint to confirm that the customer didn't have that much still left over from their transfer to the mint. Secondly, presumably the proof-of-purchase is cryptographically bound to the wallet, else the buyer will simply discard it. With it bound, discarding the proof-of-purchase discards the remaining money on it. However, for this to work, there must be no recourse for the buyer to recoup the money in a lost wallet. But the user can do this by backing up (which the discussion of Taler notes can be done), which would allow the user to simply discard the version of the wallet with a payment and simply return to the one without it.
Because of this, it seems likely that Taler would make any transfers one-use only, to prevent against this issues. In such a case, the user would then transfer the exact amount of funds needed (or something close, hoping to get change in cash, which wouldn't be sustainable for the sellers if all their buyers are using Taler) as needed right before making their purchase. In that case, it is fully reasonable for the mint to be able to link purchases to bank transfers, since there will only be so many $273.67 transfers (remember, the mint knows who the transfers are from) followed within the next five minutes by $273.67 purchases (and the mint will know the name of the seller).
Fundementally, the issue with all these schemes is that for the mint to not be able to track the purchase, it needs to be able to decouple the processes of taking deposits and paying out purchases among the folks who have money in the mint. It can do this either by making the money holder responsible for the bookkeeping, opening the door to fraud, or to make (as Chaum's Digicash did) each certification a one-time use only, which incentivizes buyers to transfer funds as needed, which allows for at least partial linkability, probably not something which would standup in court in and of itself, but would probably be sufficent circumstantial evidence in a number of cases.
I'm wondering if I'm misunderstanding something, since these issues have all been pointed out with previous anonymized e-cash attempts, and it seems unlikely GNU would go to build a scheme that has these well-known weaknesses. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there is some additional information here that I'm misunderstanding or has yet to be presented. Also, for a useful read on this type of thing see Brands' criticism of Chaum's pseudonym approach in "Building in Privacy: Rethinking Public Key Infrastructrures and Digital Certificates" (pgs. 25-32, although the whole intro is very useful).
EDIT: Making my points more clear, got pretty jumbled in my original post...
But I like how this is not a giant project to waste electricity breaking useless hashes.