GNU Taler 0.8

You're just doing the same thing again. "Boomers" invest into real estate and hope that the future generation buys their "bags". "Zoomers" invest into cryptocurrency and hope that the future generation buys their "bags".

The only meaningful difference is that shelter is a basic need and shelter is built on top of land. Thus it is very easy to extort people. Meanwhile with Bitcoin there is no way to extort people other than by a government mandating its exclusive use to pay incomes and taxes. (El Salvador doesn't count because it accepts two currencies as legal tender).

Ah, yes, it does mean that an exclusive legal tender has an extortionate quality attached to it. This is regardless of what you actually use as currency. Jellyfish would be just as bad as cryptocurrency or the USD (with or without gold standard). What exactly is the problem? When the economy "runs out" of the legal tender, it becomes impossible to pay existing salaries and debts. Salaries have to be cut or people fired, interest rates must become negative. That's what deflation does and that's why it is considered a death knell for an economy.

How would an economy run out of legal tender? In the case of gold a foreign country could attempt to obtain gold reserves by taking them out of your country. Alternatively your country decided that its currency be used for global trade. As the global economy grows it needs to run trade surpluses against your country meaning the currency is leaving the domestic economy and entering the global economy. Alternatively you are in a currency union whose level of development between nations is not compatible with each other. The country that had the strongest currency would end up having a much weaker shared currency which creates permanent trade surpluses in that nation and deficits in another, salaries drop in the deficit nation and its debt burden becomes unsustainable.

Adoption of Bitcoin as exclusive legal tender would pump those "bags" but it would benefit "investors" at the expense of stake holders (the real economy consisting of businesses and working people). The cycle of extortion is now complete.

Think about it this way. If the entire world adopted Bitcoin as exclusive legal tender then Satoshi Nakamoto would be the richest person on the planet, but why? What explanation other than extortion is there? I can create my own ledger, assign myself 100% of the supply and then I would own the world if my ledger was accepted as exclusive legal tender. The power clearly doesn't lie in the ledger, it's the power of the exclusive legal tender that did all the work.

Now imagine a world in which we adopt cryptocurrencies without exclusiveness. They would just pay with a random basket of cryptocurrencies. The economy ran out of Bitcoin? Okay, lets throw Ethereum into the mix. That's not enough? Okay, do Litecoin. This actually happened in the united states. There was a bimetal standard in the US which died because of the impossibility of fixed setting exchange rates between metals. What was the idea? Rich people had all the gold. Farmers wanted silver because it met their needs much better. The problem with a crypto-basket is that it wouldn't actually play into the extortion cycle. They'd simply work for a less expensive cryptocurrency. No "bags" would be pumped so to speak.

How did I come up with the idea of "exclusive legal tender"? Well, I didn't. I just read this PDF [0] which has some interesting ideas as a starting point. I do not agree with everything in the PDF but you can only gain insights by finding ideas that counter your preconceptions. e.g. you cannot know your own position if you don't know where others stand.

[0] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3...

For the demo it's unfeasible to use a preexisting currency, because they can't give out free money :-). So the obv. solution was taken to configure their server for a imaginary currency (KUDOS & TESTKUDOS) 100 if which are created out of thin air after you register.

To get started, I'd recommend downloading the wallet (extension or mobile[0]) and registering an account with their demo bank. With the creation of that account, you should receive 100KUDOS tokens of which you can withdraw to your mobile phone / extension. Do so and you'll get a QR code to scan with the amount of KUDOS selected on the web interface. With that "money" you can now go to their demo shop and "buy" excerpts from rms's Free Software, Free Society, or "donate" to a few projects (try donating 5 kudos to simulate a malicious merchant), by again, scanning a QR-Code.

If you want to know the details, I'd recommend the paper "How to issue a central bank digital currency[1]" which is very much like Taler.

    [0]: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.taler.wallet.fdroid

    [1]: https://www.snb.ch/en/mmr/papers/id/working_paper_2021_03

In summary, GNU/Taler is a standard for interoperating existing currencies and banks in a privacy-friendly manner: your bank can't know who you received money from or sent money to, but can know how much you received so that you can be taxed according to local regulations. It's a bit like electronic cash if you will.