Taler Systems SA is looking for investors for development of GNU Taler
taler.net
taler.net
Perhaps the only credible, open, democratising, taxable, pseudonymous electronic approximation to actual "digital cash"?
You're simply eager to trade one set of problems for the other as nobody can stop you from writing software but you are not authorized to write laws.
Say you were god-emperor of the world with the power to redesign, and enforce, how physical cash and existing monetary/payments systems work in real life - it becomes a distinction without a difference.
Somehow - despite all the good intentions - we always end up with an eclectic mix of nerds reinventing wheels, self righteous power mad Che Guevara's, opportunistic grifters, and lottery players.
I mean think about for a second. Positive rates mean more want to borrow than others want to save.
Negative rates mean less people want to borrow than others want to save.
If you don't think borrowers have a right to repay their debts then what exactly did people expect to happen? Are we supposed to blame debtors for their systematic inability to pay even though we decided they don't have the right to repay?
I'm not sure what you mean. The European Central Bank has dabbled with negative interest rates. So have others.
Anything you can express in a system like Taler you could conceivably replicate in existing financial systems, it always just comes down to political will.
nah thanks
I've never seen a warning like that, but it's at least an interesting coincidence given Brave is vaguely crypto-scam focused. I don't know enough about either Brave or Taler to know of there is any overlap in their interests, it's more likely just a coincidence, but still odd
I wonder what /g/ and /biz/ feel about GNU Taler. I feel like /g/ ought to like it. I don’t know if the opinion of /g/ and /biz/ on this matters anyway though :p The “Anonymous” graphics just got me to think of them.
Also it’s interesting to hear in the video that GNU Taler can work in conjunction with cryptocurrencies, while GNU Taler itself is not a cryptocurrency, and that GNU Taler does not add any additional volatility on top of the volatility of the underlaying payment currency itself. Makes me wonder if they have any resources on accepting payments in BTC or ETH using GNU Taler.
You comment about cryptocurrency backed chaumian cash, there is already a project for this aimed at increasing the efficiency and privacy of bitcoin spends: https://fedimint.org/
Ha, yes, the GNU operating system. I appreciate GNU's commitment to this idea notion that they are developing an operating system (for which Linux is just the kernel)! And, I mean, I understand their thinking (I think). But it stills makes me chuckle for some reason.
It requires a central authority.
It seems distinctly less useful than bitcoin. And I despise bitcoin.
The technical differences are too many for me to enumerate here. They are completely different technologies that make different efficiency-privacy-decentralization tradeoffs.
Functionally, Taler (and other forms of chaumian cash) are payment systems and not currencies. It requires a bank to implement it, in this sense it is less de-centralized, but likely much more efficient as there is no need for network consensus (because it depends on a central entity's blind signatures, etc. anyway). It has different (possibly better) privacy charichteristics than monero. They are both free and open source projects.
I stopped supporting FSF over their backing of this.
GNU Taler is an unprecedented mass surveillance system.
> pervasive always-on surveillance
What is surveilled, except for the amount an anonymous entity has paid you?
> I stopped supporting FSF over their backing of this.
So this was six years ago?
The system is a simple chauvinism digital cash with integrated surveillance. All transactions in the system must be cleared by a centralized server that checks against double spends and validates that each transaction contains the required key-escrowed surveillance data.
> All the descriptions of GNU Taler calls it decentralized.
Unethical actors like the creators of GNU Taler are willing to lie. Surprise.
> So this was six years ago?
In 2016, I believe, yes.
I appreciate your concern that income transparency enables (some) surveillance. However, are you willing to acknowledge that without it, you will have significantly more criminal activity in the system and will never be legal in most jurisdictions? And that this would force most people to effectively use account-based systems without any privacy? (Or staying with physical cash, which we also advocate for, btw.).
That is a false comparison. A compulsory integrated surveillance system is not equivalent to "allowing the government to see your income". I file taxes, if my activity gives the government reason to suspect I'm engaged in fraud it can seek access to my records through due process. My computer reporting on me in real time wouldn't be a necessary or even useful part of that process, since its data will necessarily lack the context needed to correctly establish levels of taxation.
Not having my computers spy on me and report back is already completely legal, and in fact for the moment it would be unlawful for my government to require me to use spyware like Taler, though I don't think it would be too objectionable for me to argue that it is the objective of the creators of taler that laws are changed to deny me that freedom (since opt-in surveillance systems will never be particular successful).
And sure there is likely some more of some kinds of crime in a world where we don't have government cameras in our bedrooms, government microphones in our pockets, and government reporting integrated into our computer software. At the same time, it's reasonable to expect a world with pervasive state surveillance also have a multitude of other more heinous crimes: after all authoritarian governments like Maoist china have been responsible for mass murder on scales unimaginable by any set of conventional criminals.
It's one thing to argue that inviting invasive state surveillance into our lives would be a good thing, that we should give up more essential liberty to obtain some more temporary safety-- I wouldn't agree, but it's something people could debate. The extraordinary unethical behavior of Taler is that it pretends that it's doing anything but: that it's preserving the status quo instead of introducing new survailance. That it's promoters maliciously and dishonestly characterizes its critics as being pro-crime or anti-taxation (e.g. as we see kube-system doing in this very thread!), that it pretends that its massive increase in surveillance isn't something new, or even that it's something legally required. It's not.
We have taxation today. It doesn't require mass surveillance. Systems that don't embed mass surveillance aren't inherently anti-taxation for not doing so, though surely opponents of taxation also prefer less government surveillance.