EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone
taler.net
taler.net
Your wallet stores digital coins and thus ultimately your computer holds your balance. The exchange keeps funds matching all unspent coins in a settlement account.
What if my wallet is lost?
Since the digital coins of value in your wallet are anonymized, the exchange can not assist you in recovering a lost or stolen wallet. Just like with a physical wallet for cash, you are responsible for keeping it safe.
The risk of losing a wallet can be mitigated by making backups or keeping the balance reasonably low.[1]
Ah. This is Chaum's DigiCash, from 1990.[2] A good idea, too early.
It's a system where coins are protected against double-spending by a database back-end. Which is how some centrally issued cryptocurrencies actually work.
The half-anonymity is interesting. The recipient is not anonymous, but the sender is. That may make it a politically acceptable substitute for cash.
It has the nice property that, unlike debit cards, etc., the recipient can't take more of your money than you give them.
I think you misspelled unacceptable. Anonymous donations are a massive source of corruption, which is why they tend to be capped by law (and even then, I'm sure a lot of bad people manage to get around it).
Political money needs total transparency.
(Unless you meant "more acceptable to the general public for average transactions"; in which case I agree, but I suspect it will be the opposite for governments and law enforcement agencies...)
As for donations, it's still good. Instead of having vast amount of cash flow unnoticed as bribes/corruption, now you atleast know that the politician received that amount of money. I don't see how it is worse that normal cash.if one can cap amount of anonymous donations with banks and cash, why not do the same here?
Blockchain payments are tracked, so are bank movements; that's not the problem. The problem with blockchain solutions (well, one of many) is that they're pseudonymous, so authorities have to work to demonstrate that account X is linked to person A. Compare with the regular banking system, where every account must have a real identity attached: from the government's perspective, banks are so much better, and they already work (through Visa/MasterCard/Amex). Governments have absolutely no incentive to accept or push an anonymous digital currency. None whatsoever. The more anonymous a currency is (and this one is a bit more anonymous than blockchains), the worse it looks from the perspective of the state.
"Actual transaction costs are estimated around 0.001 cent/tx (at high transaction rates, amortized over billions of transactions, excluding migration costs). Note that this is an early estimate -- and could thus easily be 10x higher." [1]
Transactions costing singular cents [2], and very soon fractions of a cent [3], are already doable on public rollups providing actual control of your own funds, with escape hatches in case the system sequencer falls over [4]. These are, of course, still under heavy development. If privacy is a requirement, there's a zk-rollup for that (or, just use Monero). Not to mention support for social recovery.
This is a very PoS-Ethereum-centric (and L2-scaling-centric) view. There are even cheaper chains that trade L1 decentralization for faster blocktimes, instant finality, and/or much cheaper fees.
1. it's not based on any kind of blockchain,
2. it's not a currency, it's a payment system which you could use to transfer other currencies (euro, dollar, ...) and
3. unlike most blockchain-based currencies it offers anonymity (only for buyers, not for sellers, though)
On the contrary, GNU Taler is only a transaction system as you said, and uses advanced cryptography (double blind signatures) and infrastructure that allow it to be bearer-based, i.e., actually decentralized transactions between two offline parties can take place. Taler can actually do digital cash, with buyers privacy, and auditability and taxability of sellers.
So in that sense it is quite different from the account or UTXO logic that most cryptocurrencies use, where balances can be transferred between accounts indefinitely. I think it's interesting to think about what problems it solves - it semi-solves anonymity in a way that might be acceptable for lawmakers and that doesn't require a backdoor (the more typical approach for 'compliant privacy'). The question is whether that is enough utility gain for regular users to justify the overhead - it seems like a simple transaction requires quite a lot of steps, key management is a non-trivial burden (for users who might not even be used to password managers eg),...
The schema they use to explain the system's mechanisms clearly shows an exchange that needs to be audited:
> Payments are made after exchanging existing money into electronic money with the help of an Exchange service, that is, a payment service provider for Taler.
That is, the transaction can be offline, but it eventually needs to pass through a central point to be effective.
This.
5. this "cash" has an expiration date, which is chosen at the whim of the central bank. If you stuff it in your mattress like paper cash, it becomes worthless. Therefore, this scheme is a massive step backwards in terms of central bank control over our lives, relative to coins-and-banknotes.
If this takes off, it will affect only a small slice of our economic relations, and it will affect that slice for the worse, not for the better.
I'm disappointed that Tanja Lange was willing to associate herself with this.
The central bank controls how many bills are in circulation, and the central bank regularly expires old bills and coins.
The Bank of England honors all of its old banknotes: "There is no deadline to exchange old banknotes with the Bank of England." https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/exchanging-old-ban...
The United States has never demonetized any of its coins or banknotes. All of them are honored and are in fact still legal tender to this day -- even the $100,000 bill! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_denominations_of_Unit...
Although Canada has revoked legal tender status for some of its older bills, "The Bank of Canada continues to honor them at face value" https://www.bankofcanada.ca/banknotes/about-legal-tender/
So, it's not that uncommon.
https://www.al-bank.dk/presse-og-nyheder/nyheder/2023/1000-k...
Btw, I haven't seen anything like an expiration date in the proposals for the Digital Euro [0], could you provide your sources for that claim?
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-an-ec...
https://taler.net/papers/cbdc2021en.pdf
Page 16: These denomination keys, and thus the coins, would have an expiration date before which they must be spent or exchanged for new coins. Customers would be given a certain amount of time during which they could exchange their coins.
Taler is a payment system, it has nothing to do with central banks at all.
> 5. this "cash" has an expiration date, which is chosen at the whim of the central bank. If you stuff it in your mattress like paper cash, it becomes worthless. Therefore, this scheme is a massive step backwards in terms of central bank control over our lives, relative to coins-and-banknotes
Again, you must be confusing Taler with something else. Also, coins and banknotes have expiration dates too (for instance, try pay something with a Deutsch Mark note today).
Kind of sad to see the “Evil central banks want to control your life” conspiracy theory leaving the mud of 4chan to reach HN…
Where it leaps into conspiracy is the question of when and whom this will be used against. But it's fairly obvious that measures will be taken against drug sellers, sex workers, banned political parties and so on.
> But it's fairly obvious that measures will be taken against drug sellers, sex workers, banned political parties and so on.
Yeah, of course like governments already do with cash!
There's a big difference between saying “governments are going to police things” (which is always true, that's their purpose in fact) and spreading made up claims involving a central bank's conspiracy (spoiler alert: policing isn't part of central banker's job, if somebody is going to do anything it will not be them but the plain and boring law enforcement agencies, but that sounds less bad as a conspiracy to say that police is going to police stuff, I guess).
If anything, a technology like Taler is a big improvement in terms of individual freedom compared to things like credit cards. If governments want to stop cash to combat crime (and save money, the logistics around cash is very expensive) having Taler instead of Visa is a massive benefit for privacy and freedom.
If you live in a country where the police can delete or freeze your bank account without legal control (or at all, even), then you're screwed and you can either change your government or find a new country, the fact that cash exists is not at all a big enough a guarantee for your freedom. At that point the government could also seize all your properties (including cash, something that the US police routinely does[1]) and/or keep you under arrest in secret prisons.
If you hope a technological mean (be it rudimentary like cash, or more modern like a blockchain) can help you protect your freedom against evil government, I have bad news for you. No technology can solve your political problems.
[1]: https://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from...
GNU Taler has been in development since 2014 (10 years now!). I'm very happy to see European Commision's interest in this privacy-protecting technology. Along with GNU Net and GNU Social (amongst others), it seems like one of those technologies that have a huge potential to make internet a better place for everyone.
While many consider GNU projects to be vaporware with development pace of a turtle, it seems that the turtle is slowly starting to lead the race. GNU Hurd has also had significant news lately [0]. I'm feeling really hopeful about this, especially after the somewhat recent RMS lynching campaign that was lead by major corporations.
They did not like the idea. They very much more like the idea of owning the customer and keeping the customer paying subscriptions.
I also know of a media outlet which incentivizes customer to go from credit card payment to automated bank transfers, since credit cards expire every x years but the bank transfer goes on forever.
> If I could rig my browser to pay 1 cent for every newspaper article I read
Define "read". And "article". Should you get charged for every link preview you scroll past on Twitter? (see lawsuits! the publishers think you should, or at least that this is copyright infringement)
Can I build a page with one "article" plus one thousand hidden iframes each of which also contains a one-cent "article"?
Who polices fraud in this system? How much does it cost?
[1]Taler requires explicit user action for payment, it's not like publishers can charge you for scrolling.
It should be up to your user-agent (aka the browser) to implement your decision and protect you from scammers, just like it happens in the rest of scenarios.
> This makes even micro-payments possible, creating an interesting and privacy preserving alternative to subscription- or advertisement-based revenue for newspapers and other publishers.
In "the real world" I really don't want to be dealing with a wallet of electronic cash stored on my computer. What I want to be able to do is relatively seamlessly pay for a curry or send my friend some money I owe them or something.
iDeal you mean?
What makes it (more) cute is that you can use it to reserve entries in their GNS first-come-first-served service. (https://fcfs.gnunet.org/)
GNS being the GNU Name System which is a decentralized/p2p equivalent to DNS. (https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html)
Doomsaying aside, here in Poland nearly everything can be paid with BLIK payments system - whether it's something you purchase on the Internet or small groceries at shop around the corner. You can also withdraw/depo money by ATM or do a small transfer to someone's else phone number
How will the onramp look like? I guess they'll have to do KYC when taking in money?
What software can be used to use it?
Banks will love a solution that completely prevents them from implementing KYC/AML regulation they are required to follow.
Truly baffling that such a project manages, if their claims are true, to get public funding after years of crypto grift scandals.
The only way this gains regulatory acceptance is if the KYC/AML regulation is moved to the audited exchange - I.E. less friction for authorities to get transaction informations, not more.
So a dead initiative?
So not replacing MasterCard/Visa especially as that requires a lot to be able to accept payments.
not to mention online micropayments such as donations which could allow people to just send 1 dollar without fear of fees taking up most of it
I know at least one person employed in banking who thinks it’s insane that Visa and Mastercard get a 2% cut of any transaction.
They don't. In the EU, the intercharge fees is capped at 0.3%. Even in the US they only keep a fraction of the fees, the rest goes to card issuers.
Edit: yes I am familiar with the various 'sending money to people' systems in Europe, but they don't rely on a debit card for the most part, rather, your bank account
What do these 'sending money to people' systems do more than that?
To buy something online using blik your bank's app generates a 6 digit one time code which is valid for something like 2 minutes. You enter that on the website of whoever you're trying to pay rather than give them your card number and cvv. This is nice because in addition to being a lot shorter to enter than a card number a nefarious person can't reuse the code to perform more transactions at a later date (since they don't have your card number).
The phone number is an id into the bilk system.
With bank transfers both parties do not need to be register with an app they just use the id that they have already for other reasons the bank sort code and id. So needs less extra infrastructure but the user interface is more unfriendly (people don't remember their bank account number).
Now if banks linked your phone number to the account number and sort code.....
There is no separate app for blik (at least as far as I'm aware) the functionality is integrated into my bank's app.
I do know why it is not in US as giving bank account details to others allows other to withdraw from your account.
This is not true in the UK so why no similar system here?
As a former resident of the UK my feeling is that the lack of such system there is because most bank apps have traditionally been shit. Its probably better today but back in 2015 (when Blik launched) I would not have expected to do anything useful with my bank's app.
For something like blik to work well you need every participating bank to already have a decent mobile banking app and for them to be willing to put in some time/money into integrating the new functionality with that app. Blik started because a bunch of the biggest Polish banks got together and between them founded a company to launch the service. Its really hard for me to imagine the 6 biggest banks in the UK getting together and doing that.
Poland's banking industry also skipped a bunch of "cruft" that we have in the UK because it started after we'd already progressed past those things being relevant. My Polish bank card doesn't have a "sort code" to identify my home branch (because who the hell cares about that in 2024), Poland briefly had cheques but stopped having them in 2006 because everyone was already using cards. In tech-industry terms the UK banking system has a bunch of "technical debt" it has to work around.
But the bank never had any branches and was phone only from the mid 1980s and then had a web front end I think in the 90s.
Thus they knew what people needed before they wrote the app.
My bank is First Direct - which is owned by HSBC.
However the website functionality was always better than HSBCs 9I do have an HSBC account as well)
Cash only is not really about card fees...
Now, would they swap cash this solution? I doubt it... Privacy is a reason but not the only one.
I have a strong memory of going to a cafe next to my hotel in Berlin and ordering a coffee and being completely shocked I couldn't pay for it by card. I hadn't even considered that I might need cash. After some conversation the nice lady in the cafe told me keep the coffee and to come back the next day with the cash. They really hate card payments for some reason.
On the other hand in Poland I've been unable to use my card in a couple of places because they only take mobile payments/Blik. The contrast is wild.
Young people in particular care way more about privacy that us older people. In fact, young people feel way more anxiety around things that are tied to your identity.
But even despite them, I feel like even in my extended family privacy issues are increasingly very important to people. Everybody knows somebody who has been scammed.. even lost a great amount of money.
Your average user is caring more and more about security and privacy.
Re: being anonymous, I don't know. I suspect the anonymity part is more related to privacy for most people.
The other benefits of this of course is that you can make your own payment system and integration, and you won't need to be dependent upon VISA/Mastercard for your payments. Cheaper transaction fees ultimately helps lower product prices, enables microtransactions and more - I wouldn't discount how much of a big deal this would be.
I'm sure once they've finalized the whole thing, Misa/Vastercard will have employed their lobbying powers to the fullest to inject themselves into the final spec, but here's hoping.
Credit cards are terrible. One has to share a few secret numbers with the merchant and the merchant then takes money out of the cards account. It relies on fully trusting every single merchant to have perfect honestly and security.
Plus credit cards have a transaction cost that is paid to foreign companies. It’s quite ridiculous that a Dutch person buying online in Germany ends up paying a tiny transaction cost to a third country.
pilot + next gen + initiative + european commission .
This combination of terms == no action.
Long winded way of saying 'you're wrong'.
But your win is legislation, apples and oranges, right? so here's a better comparison - "this site contains cookies".
first time you will hear about this and last time.
I'm curious how those companies have budget for playing around and why they believe they will be relevant enough to have any impact on daily life for anyone at all?
Ok. So, privacy?
Given that the system ultimately relies on centralized actors, it can only be private for payment amounts below any applicable travel rule amount in the given jurisdiction.