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Comment by grothoff | Hacker News Reader

There is no public roadmap on the business side as the commercial banks we are talking to are not yet willing to have their names disclosed to the public. They're rather conservative institutions (by nature), so they want things to be checked and double-checked and ready to go before going public. Plus it is not trivial (for them) to check all of the regulatory, technical and business checkboxes. I remain hopeful that we'll get through this mess "soon", but I've been too optimistic in the past.

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. :-)

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It's good to know that side of things hasn't been abandoned.

> 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?

At this point, different things look plausible in different countries. Consider the possibility of a major banking technology provider offering it as a feature, in which case basically on day 1 you have 1000 banks that can choose to offer it if they believe their customers want to use Taler. Or you may have a smaller bank offer Taler as a limited experiment just to see if there is a business case, with very limited publicity. Or you may have a big bank offer it as a strategic product. Or you may have even a central bank beat everyone else and launch it as the official central bank digital currency. Personally, I'll probably sleep better if it starts small.

Makes sense. Thanks a ton for the info.

Would you mind chatting about this? I'd like to help if possible - tech like this shows a beautiful version of 'the state' that I would happily support.

We have a mailinglist (taler@gnu.org), and my personal e-mail is also not difficult to find out. We can always use help. Still looking for an iOS developer, for example.

Could Taler be used in a smaller scope already? For example, could it be used as an "account system" inside an association (like a hackerspace), where members can charge their accounts with Talers and then use these to pay drinks from the fridge, etc?

Setups like this could be used to test the system in practice.

Yes, but we still need to make it easier to setup/deploy this.

Once that goal is reached, I'd be happy to try it!

Even though I read the GNU Taler FAQ please excuse any lack of deeper knowledge about it.

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?

Given that for many larger banks, medieval things like overdraft fees and "re-ordering" same-day transactions so that deposits appear later in order to create additional overdraft fees are a huge part of their bottom-line, it doesn't surprise me that they would avoid relinquishing control to an open and fair standard they can't override.

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.

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