GNU Taler: An anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography
docs.taler.net
docs.taler.net
What is the overall state of Taler today? How close is this to being something tangible that I can hand to my parents where they can actually make real payments with it for an online product? Are there any businesses supporting it as a payment method yet?
I vaguely remember last time I checked that it was still trying to get buy-in from banks? But I could be remembering wrong.
Decentralized payment systems have changed the equation and now we're seeing a great deal of progress in the area of privacy-preserving payments, some for better and some for worse. I wish Taler could find some applications over there, but the developers don't seem interested. Which is only fair.
(Disclosure: I've worked on decentralized private payment systems.)
What I can say is that we have presented GNU Taler to over a dozen central banks already. We're trying to convince them that they must give citizens privacy and that an account-based system would give them too much power.
So while the business side is not exactly transparent, what we do technically is all out there. And it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra time to reduce the list of known bugs before we go live. :-)
Setups like this could be used to test the system in practice.
When dealing with those commercial banks what is currently the biggest challenge? Is it more the political arguments or the technical arguments of such a payment system that you need to stress? And, I couldn't find no definite answer to that: Could GNU Taler ultimately replace Bitcoin?
Also, I'm sure anti-money-laundering legislation complicates things in terms of the anonymity feature, despite the fact that merchants are fully auditable, though I assume users aren't able to transfer funds to non-merchants? Still, I'm sure the laws as written complicate this in some jurisdictions.
For example, you could have a completely legitimate business registered as a merchant function as a money-laundering front that could then take in illicit funds from anonymous users working for the illicit org which actually secretly owns the merchant. I'm fine with that happening in the wild because the benefits of privacy for consumers are obvious to me and outweigh the negatives, but I bet regulators aren't so forgiving.
In the wild this often happens -- there are plenty of "DDoS protection" services that by day offer legitimate services in the open and by night actually attack potential customers who they then offer their protection services to, so it is not at all unheard of for an illegitimate org to have a legitimate front. This sort of thing is rampant in the world of high-end minecraft servers, I'm told.
> I remain hopeful that we'll get through this mess "soon"
I know you can't give more definitive timetable or details about actual negotiations, but at a high level what does "get though this mess" here mean, what's the short-to-medium term goal that Taler is trying to achieve for how it initially enters the market? Is it possible I wake up one day X months/years from now and just see an announcement that a bank has now decided to use Taler and it'll go live next week, or is this something that's expected to be much more gradual in its rollout?
I don't feel like I have a great understanding of what the process for adoption for Taler looks like beyond the long-term goal that banks would start supporting it and then merchants would follow. I'm not sure if the plan is:
- a bunch of private negotiations happen, and then there's a breakthrough and suddenly within a year half of the banks are using it, or
- a bunch of smaller organizations take it up, and it starts out more niche and starts to grow, or
- somebody someday starts a Paypal equivalent that isn't even technically a bank, just a payment app.
I guess given that Taler is in talks with banks, the hope is that it gets adopted first with those banks; so is the goal that if talks are successful the rollout starts out at an almost national scale?
GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850143 - Jan 2022 (48 comments)
GNU Taler 0.8 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301172 - Aug 2021 (9 comments)
GNU Taler – A free software, privacy-friendly payment system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302634 - May 2021 (1 comment)
GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261314 - Feb 2021 (110 comments)
GNU Taler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274110 - Sept 2017 (147 comments)
GNU Taler 0.0.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11840453 - June 2016 (187 comments)
GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258312 - Sept 2015 (183 comments)
Pulling this off in the United States sounds somewhere between very challenging and impossible.
Sales tax is not uniform. Rates vary not only by state but also at a local level. In some states, sales taxes can be imposed by the state, by counties, by cities, by school districts, by transit authorities, and by other entities like special purpose districts[1].
Which ones (plural) of these sales taxes (plural) apply to a transaction depends on the buyer's location.
In many cases, knowing the buyer's city, state, and zip code is not granular enough. For example, the boundaries of a school district may not correspond to zip code or city.
The typical approach today is to collect the buyer's full address. From that, there are databases that will tell you the list of jurisdictions and taxes that apply. Obviously, that's not very anonymous.
Maybe you could have the buyer determine all of the jurisdictions/taxes that apply to them and send only that info instead. That's less granular, but in some cases it might give away a lot of information. (Sort of like browser fingerprinting.)
But if you do that, I'm not sure what the implications would be for sellers. Sellers are required to collect the sales tax and remit it to the state. They can get in trouble for not doing it right. Governments don't like it when their taxes don't get collected, so they sometimes create laws that put the burden of compliance on the seller.
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[1] Special purpose districts could allow a county or local government to, for example, pick an arbitrary area and impose a sales tax within it just to support libraries that serve that area. Or crime prevention, road improvement, emergency services, hospitals, parks, economic development, etc.
Providing anonymity for customers AND collecting sales tax (in the US) are two goals that conflict with each other. Maybe there are ways to resolve the conflict, but that's far from obvious.
I'm not talking about whether it's automatic or whether GNU Taler makes it easier. I'm talking about whether making the seller info public is enough to comply with tax laws.
Incidentally, I support taxes in general and think we need more taxes on a lot of things. But taxes add cost to specific activities, and so they should be used to reduce those activities. Now, we don't want the perverse incentive of government relying on tax revenue and thus otherwise wanting to promote the activity. So, we need to find a balance in all these things. But like taxes on stock-trading would be good. And we should probably increase property taxes and just do the simple thing where property tax rates go up the more properties an entity holds (that makes it harder for investment companies to buy up all the properties and gouge everyone with high rents).
But for all the justified complexity of tax policy decisions, sales taxes are the worst and should just be eliminated.
There's less of a US case to be made for taxes on wages, but just because the US shits on labor and spends almost no resources in defending it or the health and security of the people who provide it. Other countries that do more have a better case.
Property taxes are worse than all other taxes. Why do I have to pay rent to the government for property that I already bought and paid for? Why does the amount of property tax I owe have no relationship to how much gain I actually realize, like income and capital gains taxes? Even sales tax has some sort of relationship to your realized gain (if you have less cash you probably buy less, so you pay less taxes).
* It is hard, nearly impossible to avoid.
* In case of nonpayment the property serves as collateral.
* Land value depends mostly on public infrastructure paid with public funds - roads, subways, schools etc are all public goods that the property owner profits from via price appreciation but the general taxpayer pays for. So a linkage needs to be established. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
In the words of a famous conservative:
"Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived ... the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done."
Spot on. You could think of a city as a "service" that you consume by taking space. The more space you use the more you should pay every month.
Even more so if you own a house and leave it unoccupied, because it's wasting public money invested in infrastructure.
This is a strange conceit. Martha's Vineyard and Maui do not have orders of magnitude better "public infrastructure" than Kansas.
If anything, recent US real estate growth is a function of people leaving high-tax areas for inferior asphalt.
It ignores that zoning is contentious precisely when "public goods" are perceived to harm land value.
There's a circular reasoning in "land monopoly." Cover a grocery store in solar panels: who is "contributing to the general welfare," and who collects free rent?
UPDATE: also, read up on the differences between property tax and land use tax. They are different.
‘Nother Update: also, the government should stop encouraging property ownership as an investment for your future and retirement (tax breaks for mortgages, low interest rates, planned inflation) and then charge taxes on the hugely inflated value of that property.
Also, most property taxes are local state-level taxes, and most state-level congresspeople have to have a side gig to stay afloat. Guess what that side gig is: Real estate. Many are realtors and developers. They have a vested interest in raising property taxes to get people selling houses.
There's something to be said for this, but it doesn't work to just flip to the opposite extreme. As long as there are wealth inequities, then free-market supply-and-demand turns into the idea that anyone poor shall have nothing, not even the capacity to travel on streets or drink water. If they don't want to just up and die, they can get a loan to do these things and go into a cycle of indentured servitude for life.
The free market has never had any solution to such issues. Supply-and-demand works best when all the players have the same overall capacity to pay for things, and that's not how reality works out.
Societies prosper when efforts are made to make sure everyone has the foundations from which to build a productive life. That means health care, shelter, basic food and water, safety, capacity to get around (transportation of some sort), and access to information (education, libraries etc). If everyone has that stuff, they have the chance to add productivity to society rather than be a drain in the form of disease, crime, and so on.
The same could be done for electricity and other things.
But the free-market dogmatists aren't interested in using markets and prices effectively, they are interested in their self-concept as people who really "get it" and understand all the complex dynamics of economics. Once you let messy ideas like externalities and market-interference/regulation like block pricing and on and on and on… this becomes very threatening to their identity as it pushes them toward having to say "gosh, it's so complex, and I don't understand it all".
> pushes prices down
Except in the cases where it doesn't, such as luxury brands that exist to show off how expensive something is or for people to believe something is better because of the higher price — and this phenomenon is widespread throughout tons of aspects of the economy. Brands exist that sell essentially commodities at inflated prices through the power of advertising.
> Wealth increases and abounds in a free market.
According to the model you believe in, but that model isn't reality. Reality includes the fact that the wealthiest places on the planet (I mean larger societies, not places like off-share tax havens that just cater to the ultra-wealthy) have markets (but not completely free ones) and a history full of grotesque exploitation. The U.S. built it's initial wealth on slavery, genocide, and theft, and the non-free aspects of U.S. corporate behavior is still today a major factor of life.
You might indeed be right about wealth in truly free markets. But you don't have any controlled experiment on a society-size scale to even use for evidence since no case like that exists. And applying the ideas from one model to other situations doesn't mean it just becomes the model somehow.
You do know that neither merchants nor folks writing tax or sales software can "get rid of sales taxes", right?
"Our software doesn't handle that case" isn't a defense against a tax evasion charge.
Neither is "I forgot" or "Excuse me", despite what Steve Martin said.
https://snltranscripts.jt.org/77/77imono.phtml
You.. can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You say.. “Steve.. how can I be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes?” First.. get a million dollars. Now.. you say, “Steve.. what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my door and says, ‘You.. have never paid taxes’?” Two simple words. Two simple words in the English language: “I forgot!” How many times do we let ourselves get into terrible situations because we don’t say “I forgot”? Let’s say you’re on trial for armed robbery. You say to the judge, “I forgot armed robbery was illegal.” Let’s suppose he says back to you, “You have committed a foul crime. you have stolen hundreds and thousands of dollars from people at random, and you say, ‘I forgot’?” Two simple words: Excuuuuuse me!!“
On the other hand, folks who write tax or sales software don't need to cater their software to US tax laws. Just don't use it there. At least from Wikipedia it seems, that the project leads are European.
I’m not saying you couldn’t use Taler in the US - after all, sales taxes work for cash transactions which also anonymous for the buyer. I’m saying if you want to get automatic correct taxation of merchants, perhaps it’s a good idea to run your experiment outside the US.
The merchants accepting Taler payments would still be responsible for computing and including the applicable sales taxes in the final price charged to the customer. The customer then pays that, anonymously.
The problem with all that GNUNet stuff its that its almost all research, no real active open source project built around them.
I really like re:claimID, basically OpenID Connect auth against your local device. But it would of course need much more work to be practical.
https://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/de/fields-of-expertise/proje...
Overall its all very cool and this is in no way criticism on anybody that works on it. I am just point out to people that if you want to get involved or build on top of it what it is.
I would them to work together with some of those Peer-to-peer chat systems or something like that.
PS:
New GnuNet release: https://www.gnunet.org/en/news/2022-02-0.16.0.html
Thank you for your work!
Seems like a lot of work to offer a less functional alternative to a VISA gift card purchased with cash.
The only real advantage I see is you don't need to stop by WalMart. Maybe the activation fees with Taler are less but I'm sure it's also less widely accepted.
VISA eGift cards are now available for purchase online with funds deposited to a digital wallet. These won't be totally anonymous but then as far as I can tell, neither is Taler --- to provide all the functionality they claim, they will need to maintain records of both purchaser and merchant.
Unless you buy your digital coins using cash, the exchanges have the identity of those who purchase and redeem coins/tokens.
From the documentation:
Taler is compatible with anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) regulation, as well as data protection regulation (such as GDPR).
"Forgetting Your Customer" is *not* how you comply with "Know Your Customer".
Do you have any reference to how your blinding/unblinding supposedly works? Is it even mathematically possible to *insure* your identity is forgotten --- while still maintaining verifiable coin/transaction validity?
Without some such insurance, you're operating on blind trust and assumption. And you know what happens when you *assume* too much?
And in addition might have recorded serial numbers of the banknotes...
Except in very specific, pre-arranged circumstances (such as a ransom demand) they don't bother recording serial numbers --- simply because the info is quickly rendered obsolete and useless from the way cash is freely exchanged and "mixed" in the marketplace.
Cash is typically considered untraceable and is the ultimate physical form of anonymity. It neither requires nor provides any identity info. Gift cards purchased with cash are the ultimate form of digital anonymity. Neither of these conform to KYC.
The base objective of AML and KYC is to eliminate anonymity from transactions. Compliance is generally not possible otherwise.
Is is possible to trace back a gift card to the store that sold it? Maybe even the date and time? Then get the surveillance tape... If you pay with the same gift card more than once, all those transactions can be linked.
Not sure about Taler. But with Chaum's DigiCash from the 90s you could do micropayments and other fun stuff.
The blind signatures gave Alice a way to pull out some amount of her "Cipherbucks" or whatever from her bank. Then she could PGP them to Bob, who could "uncryptography" them and redeem them at OverTheBorder Bank(tm).
If I read correctly, Alice nests a unique number in her sealed thingy, and the the banks would keep an append-only record of these unique numbers. So it's something like this:
1. Alice's bank knows she made a request for $X cipherbucks
2. Bob's bank knows he made a deposit of $Z cipherbucks
3. Bob's bank knows the deposit is good because the unique ID isn't already in the database
As for your question below-- doesn't that satisfy the "Know your customer" rules? It's functionally equivalent to cash so I don't see how it wouldn't
Edit: I'm not sure of the properties of the transactions, so maybe $X and $Z have to be equal? No clue. Still, you get the idea...
Cash is the ultimate form of anonymity. It neither requires nor provides any identification info. It does not conform to KYC.
In contrast to banking, where one has an account that works pretty much the same regardless of role of clients and nature of their transactions.
That's not to say the Taler model can't work or anything, just that having one number for inbound and one for outbound transfers isn't really necessary for basic account security. The "everyone who knows my account number can draw money from my account" problem seems weird to have (and trivially solvable) .... in which country is this the default?
That is unimaginable to me. Here (Czechia), banks require explicit confirmation of direct debit transfers (limit for value per period of time for each initiator of direct debit).
https://taler.net/en/news/2020-09.html
Last thing I've learnt they were in touch with some Spanish bank institution to work on an implementation.
I guess a lot goes on behind closed doors.
For example, deflationary gold-like digital currencies just don't work. Fundamentally. It's a futile exercise to debate. But debt-based digital currencies run into some really hard problems.
How do you know if someone is good for their IOUs? If someone takes out a large amount of debt, what prevents them from dropping their wallet/identity and moving on to a new one and wiping themselves clear of their debts? Are all of these social issues? Does a new credit system built into such a currency serve as the basis for preventing someone from not paying their debts back to the network? Even if a credit system was built into the digital currency, someone can always create a new identity if there is no requirement for verification, but how do you design a system that does not require it?
• a dependency on a central exchange whose failure, or compromise, harms users; &
• vigorous enforcement of taxes – & potentially other onerous regulatory limitations
That may make it less of interest to many early adopters of cryptocurrencies.
On the other hand, there's technologically lots of potential for proving compliance with tax & regulatory regimes in a strong, minimal, privay-preserving way – helping refactor cooperation with legitimate governance in ways that don't create extra, incidental vulnerabilities to other privacy or extra-legal coercive abuses. This could help advance those practices & highlight future design choices.
Whether intentional or not, there's a hint of the word 'Thaler' in the name – originally derived from a place name ('Joachimstal' in modern Czechia) near historically-iimportant silver mining, and also a precursor of the modern English word 'dollar'.
I see the same mechanic behind "free services" that start "gratis" and one took off start adding small fees, more small fees, not-so-small fees etc until they get classic commercial-only services and users now deeply tied with them can't escape.
Not counting the fact that without a network and relevant hw and sw we can't just exchange money, with cash we just need to have them and a third party with a hand.
It's a bit condensed but I think the point it's clear enough...
Is there something I'm missing here?
Cracking down on cash based tax evasion is often a major benefit touted when economies look to move to digital currencies, and most digital solutions to this problem "solve" it by throwing away anonymity. I most often see cashless solutions presented as a choice between do you want this system to be rampant with tax evasion and illicit activities but anonymous like bitcoin, or do you want someone keeping full plaintext records on every party in every transaction down to their street address and IP where the transaction was made like paypal.