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Quinte neat. It simply using open source to preserve the existing financial players. Financial intermediaries are not eliminated.
> It would be possible, however, to withdraw coins denominated in Bitcoin into a Taler wallet (with an appropriate exchange), which would give some benefits over plain Bitcoin, such as instant confirmation times.
I don't really know what to make of it.
It's a federated system/protocol that doesn't have a currency of its own. There should be Exchanges you are supposed to trust, that accept your CURRENCY_NAME and give you anonymous tokens (think of it as electronic cash) in exchange. You spend them in Merchants' shops. The Merchants claim the CURRENCY_NAME back from the Exchanges. No one knows what you bought but the Merchants can be audited by the Government to be taxed. That's their plan as I understand it.
On the contrary, GNU Taler is only a transaction system, and uses advanced cryptography and infrastructure that allow it to be bearer-based, i.e., actually decentralized transactions between two offline parties can take place. It can actually do digital cash, with buyers privacy, and all.
That said, I'm not saying we need such a technology. Only that it's clearly not cryptobro bullshit.
I guess Satoshi would disagree with the notion since the initial promise of Bitcoin was that it was in fact "electronic cash".
> "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"
1. It's not cash as so many properties of cash are not met. It is technically a simple writing game, just like wire transfer between accounts at a same bank.
2. It is not p2p. The underlying protocol that allows to maintain the distributed ledger is; but transactions, since they're account-based and only a writing game (contrary to actual cash transactions which are bearer-based), are centralized on that distributed p2p-maintained ledger. So the "cash system" (which is not that either) is not p2p.
> quotes because there is no such thing, "cryptocurrencies" are purely speculative securities
Fellow gold money user in the thread?