GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions

Maybe you are lucky to live in a country where you agree with your government's definition of what a crime, but in certain parts of the world they call "crime" what you would call "democracy".

To add to this, I think it might be better if the protocol was private by default but allow the sender to choose the level of disclosure and the recipient to publish (as part of the address?) what levels are required (so a sender can’t submit a payment whose disclosure level doesn’t match the policy set by the recipient - the transaction just wouldn’t happen as the miners would enforce this and reject the TX).

That would allow the protocol to be flexible to accommodate different use-cases depending on the jurisdiction the payment falls under and allow recipients to be compliant (as the protocol implicitly rejects transactions that don’t match the recipient’s chosen policy). The same protocol can thus be used across many different jurisdictions and anti-money-laundering regulations.

Privacy doesn't imply tax evasion or crime.

Privacy does strongly imply the potential to effectively evade taxation (if one chooses), however, although it does not of course imply freedom from tax obligations under a defined legal code.

It's sort of how the right to keep and bear arms does imply freedom from government overreach. Privacy rights are similar. They can be used to do things contrary to the desires of the state, if the end user wishes, but having transactional privacy no more means one will be evading taxes than having a rifle means one will be murdering government employees as a revolutionary, though in both cases the option is there.

It avoids the “money laundering” problem to the extent that it gets introduced by privacy-preserving transactions.

It doesn’t publish it anywhere. Taler just ensures that money ends up in your bank account. What happens after that, is entirely up to the law.

Yes, thanks. I know it is not cryptocurrency. I know it was just a currency to be used inside the taler system. But my thinking was about the exchange. I, as a buyer, will upload some EUR to my wallet, the exchange then converts it into KUDOS, and I use that to pay the merchant. Now if the merchant has set up the product prices in USD and accepts USD, somehow the KUDOS will need to match the USD. right? So my question was related to that. If that is the case, I see some ways of abusing the system. Maybe set up both merchant and buyer accounts and convert EUR to USD at rates better than the market..

I would look at how they basically maintain minimal tables of payments which can be used to pay for service. Taler is more complex to handle being a 3rd party doing this, but Mullvad seems to do a similar idea of separating payment from the account itself to allow for anonymous payment.

I don't know if they're open to that, since they didn't dual license it or use something like https://polyformproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PolyF... , or if still realistically possible.

I hope it works out in the end anyways ...

It exists as a demo (and on a student campus for food), but it's not like you can get Taler from your bank and pay at the supermarket or a random shop in the internet