This is a digital payment scheme that respects the customers privacy, when buying from merchants. The alternative besides a cryptocurrency, would be a prepaid cc you buy with cash in a store, but then VISA knows everything you buy with it, whereas this system the payment provider (the "mint") and merchant are separated. If you directly buy things with SEPA then your bank knows everything you buy. This allows for lawful payments, allows any company to become a mint (no payment monopolies) and is free software so you can make your own wallet client and not have to rely on proprietary software wallet apps.
People can still become a black market escrow, keep creating new merchants and facilitate user to user transactions unless there is some kind of cost or identification required to accept Taler payments, or exchange Taler for bitcoin. US law makers will likely try to prohibit Taler though if any online gambling accepts it as payment, for example Paysafecard had to design a special UIGEA compliant card in order for it not to be able to be plugged into a gambling site to get into the US payments market.
Speaking of bitcoin pretty much every online exchange will start accepting Taler, then they aren't so exposed to banks shutting them down and can trade in any currency.
This sounds a lot like David Chaum's eCash of the 90s. You transfer ordinary money into a Taler account in a Taler bank and transfer them to other Taler accounts, and from there to ordinary money. That's unlike Bitcoin in pretty much every respect.
It takes some courage to make a crypto-payment protocol explicitly taxation-friendly, but they claim the tax man only gets to see the amounts, not the identities. What a pity the design doc isn't yet on their website.
Governments likely will insist on a mechanism to track electronic currencies, for tax, regulatory and other reasons. Governments seem to have very little concern for privacy. So the mechanism they choose could very well ignore privacy.
By building a mechanism that meets government needs and by being an early mover, Taler could be the de facto solution by the time governments get around to dealing with this issue, and could make privacy the policy.
There's a global racket in market data mining too, to track demographics and see what they are buying. This system defeats any large payment entity from payment tracking.
Taler can also compete with Ukash, since it's free/open any merchant can implement their own Taler for cash business without signing large exclusive contracts with Ukash or waiting a month to be settled by them, as you can freely choose which Mint to do business with.
> This system defeats any large payment entity from payment tracking.
Merchants of physical goods must know the identity and delivery address of their customers in order to deliver them. Given how easy many companies find it to embed 3rd party trackers or adverts on their site, it seems reasonable to believe that they will also find it easy to sell this data ("to help detect and prevent fraud") to the payment processing companies.
True, but at least Taler allows for the consumer to chose merchants who specify they don't sell data. Right now I can't buy anything online and not be tracked by the payment provider unless I use bitcoin. The prepaid credit cards here all require online registration and in store identification, Visa/Mc/Amex then track my purchases. If I show ID to buy $200 worth of Taler in a 7-11, there's no way for my Taler provider to see what I used it for.
* PaySafeCard: A prepaid card; "You don't have to enter any personal information or bank account or credit card details. Your privacy remains completely protected at all times with paysafecard!"
No thank you. With regards to my government, I would like to see more privacy rather than less. This seems to give me less.
I do like the idea of complete transactional privacy between end users and/or merchants. But we already have this today with CryptoNote based cryptocurrencies like Monero - with optional transparency through "view keys".
As far as I understand it, Taler seems to be great for privacy and society (ensuring income is taxable). Governments can't see how you spend your money, but they can see who receives payments.
Bitcoin and others will never succeed because they are too friendly towards illicit behaviour. Taler seems to strike a genuinely interesting and ethical balance here.
The underlying assumption is that governments don't care about how you spend money. This is patently untrue, because "liberal" governments explicitly use taxation as global social modification schemes, for all sorts of things beyond income redistribution - from minimizing percieved vices (alcohol, tobacco) to minimizing environmental footprint, etc.
The idea that this sort of activity is able to be decoupled from surveillance is one of the more unfortunate delusions in politics.
Those schemes don't usually depend on knowing what each particular citizen bought; the tax is imposed on the product, not on the person, so you'll pay it even if you use a perfectly anonymous currency.
That said, I do agree that governments care about the contents of the purchase; around here, all sales must be invoiced with certified software, and a copy of all invoices issued must be delivered monthly to the IRS by businesses. As the buyer, you can opt to remain anonymous, but they're trying to push people into not doing so.
Other less liberal governments will simply ban something they consider sinful instead of try to make money off it while letting their populace (who they are supposed to care about) slide into hell (if the thing is truly sinful). Historically this doesn't work so well in the US, but in other places like Singapore it works better.
Not true at all. Conservative governments often desire things like trade protection tariffs. They may ban 'immoral' things rather than merely tax them differently, but they are still very interested in controlling the flow of money.
I find it fascinating that you think taxation can be generally described as "ethical" without serious qualication; what about taxation by an unethical government, like a dictatorship or a government that uses the money to murder people?
Is cash also unethical because the government doesn't have absolute surveillance on cash spending?
What the project claims is a "liberal" tool can very easily become a very unethical tool of oppression.
I'd like you to define "succeed" and, indeed, "it", so that you're making a testable claim here. Do you mean the present Bitcoin blockchain, or something else?
Bitcoin will never succeed in its current form because its capabilities are limited in a number of ways by design, even if the problem of public's level of expertise goes away. One of such limitations is, even if there are subdivisions down to a "satoshi", "satoshi" level of payments are not currently (and I believe that will not ever be) possible. That is because of another limitation, that is the centralized nature of the ledger which acts as a bottleneck.
I think they're referring to the scalability problem where the number of transactions and size of the blockchain grow to a point where running a full node is prohibitively expensive and leads to a smaller number of miners verifying transactions.
> When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money. However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary.
Again, existing technologies already provide this. And they further empower the user to expressly define how much anonymity they want...down to the transactional level.
Empowering governments with additional taxation tools is about the only thing this brings to the table over existing technologies.
>"No thank you. With regards to my government, I would like to see more privacy rather than less. This seems to give me less."
I'm of the complete opposite opinion, and am also completely against government due to my ideology.
Basically, while we have a government, I expect them to do their job and to employ any means necessary to do so. We currently task them with keeping us safe, to solving crimes when they do happen, and to enforce the laws we have supposedly all agreed on.
Obviously we have to keep government from doing bad things while in the service of the tasks assigned to it. E.g. unjustified violence of any form.
Uses GNUnet's crypto library to generate keys. Biggest problem I've found is fraud potential, the mint operator can run a fractional reserve since it relies on "government authorities doing regular audits" and also that it touts turning Mastercard/Visa into Taler. Carders will become their own merchants, card a mint to get Taler and then cash it all out before anybody knows what happened. You also can't transfer Taler p2p, all transactions go through the mint to prevent "black markets".
Edit: Uses this API http://api.taler.net/ plus seems to have future GNUnet compatibility built into it's system for payments over it.
Does it use GNUnet? I only see them mention REST here, HTTPS there.
As to the carder-friendlyness: credit card companies are known to treat payment aggregators with lots of suspicion, so I suppose there just won't be many credit-card-to-Taler "banks".
Because unless the government can track citizen's income it cannot tax it, and without taxes modern society cannot function at all.
Technologies like this would be a boon to many developing countries like mine where tax evasion and corruption is rampant. It would enable the government to collect funds for infrastructure, education, environmental protection and healthcare (and yes, I am a progressive liberal who would rather have the government provide these at subsidized cost rather than private entities; even at the cost of "efficiency" if need be).
> Because unless the government can track citizen's income it cannot tax it.
That's simply not true. When I do my taxes I have to report my yearly income. The kind of system where a government can monitor all of my transactions in real time is without any court involvement is insane.
You might as well use your bank card as at least those require a warrant or subpoena to acquire.
The text of the announcement seems to imply that individual transactions are not identifiable. The tax is taken per-transaction by the bank on behalf of the government or regulating entity without knowledge of the participants.
> When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money.
Most taxes that merchants and consumers need to worry about at the time of transaction, such as sales taxes in the US and VAT in the EU, are strictly proportional to the value of each purchase.
I don't think Taler is meant to help you do your taxes at the end of the year.
The question remains, why would anyone choose to use a system like this? Wealthy individuals and companies (aka those with most of the money) have a vested interest in having their transactions not easily tracked by the government.
Simple: this aims for regulatory support. If Taler (or a system like Taler) is embraced by governments, and is therefore given the full support of the financial system, Bitcoin could be permanently relegated to black-market-only use.
> Wealthy individuals and companies (aka those with most of the money) have a vested interest in having their transactions not easily tracked by the government.
Many may think or assert that, especially based on the trendy anti-government dogma, but I disagree. They have a vested interest in a fair and enforced taxation system. Otherwise they lose effective government and its services, both of which are absolutely essential to their safety and prosperity.
I guess I'm trying to make a broader point than the IRS here - argue against the IRS and whatever other parts of government you like on a pragmatic basis, that's great.
I just get riled up by the "It's wrong! They have no right to tax me! I have property rights!" stance, because it's inconsistent.
Is it possible for a people to decide to make taxation voluntary? If for example country Q's owners (it's people) voted to not enforce taxation with force of any kind?
That is already true, and with the means of transfers available (cash, gold, banking system, etc...) public institutions still give the public some confidence in that they manage to tax everyone, and pursue those who evade.
If a currency system was available that made taxation appear entirely optional to the public the trust in the tax system would erode in a hurry (Why should I pay when my neighbor or Acme inc. isn't paying?). Tax morale is alreay too low in many countries. Making more loopholes available would just not be good.
If a government is already having trouble collecting funds it is owed, this currency will not help it. The government would just be faced with two problems instead of one.
> without taxes modern society cannot function at all
This is a great example of an argument from ignorance. We can't conceive of a high-functioning society without taxes, therefore, let it be known that one cannot exist.
I suppose it depends on whether or not you like having a fire service, national health system, comprehensive education, social security, national defense, etc.
The authors are employed by TU Munich and Inria Rennes, paid for by taxes, so I guess they assume that some taxation is necessary. At least they designed some anonymity into the taxation interface. How much remains to be seen.
It goes both ways: it prevents a corrupt government from trying to overtax you by just saying you made more than you did, and it could prevent corporations from evading taxes.
But then they can't lie about it, at least not as easily. And if they were better able to collect from tax-evading corporations, maybe they wouldn't need to tax individuals as much.
And if they were better able to collect from tax-evading corporations, maybe they wouldn't need to tax individuals as much.
- Humphrey, this paper says that if we cancel Trident and bring in conscription, we
shall have £1.5 billion for tax cuts, and what do I find?
- What do you find, Prime Minister?
- The Chancellor opposes me. A great chance to be popular with the voters and he
says no. Doesn't that surprise you?
- No.
- Why doesn't it surprise you?
- He's advised by the Treasury and they don't believe in giving money back.
- It's not theirs. It's the taxpayers'.
- That's not the view the Treasury takes. Not once they've got it.
- But if they don't need it?
- Sorry?
- If they don't need it.
- Taxation isn't about what you need.
- What is it about?
- The Treasury doesn't work out what they need to spend and then think how to raise
the money.
- What DOES it do?
- They pitch for as much as they think they can get away with, then think what to
spend it on. If you start giving money back because you don't need it, you're
breaking with centuries of tradition!
Not even in developed countries! If you go to the US for example you will find people doing everyday transactions such as wage payments, taxis or grocery shopping still using pieces of paper with numbers on them. You have to see it to believe it.
From the description it seems like "GNU PayPal" or "XMPP for Stripe".
To me it seems quite desirable: a decentralized protocol for sending government-backed money in a way that is legal (strong crypto isn't protection from being arrested for money laundering), and yet offers better privacy and is more open to competition than existing networks of banks/credit cards/PayPal.
> From the description it seems like "GNU PayPal" or "XMPP for Stripe.
The name itself screams "money": a taler is a thaler is a dollar and they all come from from the valley of Saint Joachim (Joachimsthal) where they had a silver mine. You may thank the Holy Roman Empire for making good coinage.
This is the most political open source project I've seen in a while. I love the idea that it's designed to sit inside a progressive society where we all agree we have a social contract to the state. That is very different to a lot of similar efforts, and at the very least it's an important part of the discussion.
Right now it's vaporware, but I'm very interested in its release. I'd love to help give it a friendly face and integrate it with existing open source social platforms, to make it easier to send and receive money regardless of your technical ability.
In the case of modern countries: The contract is the law + the Constitution (or your local equivalent if not in the US) and your signature is living in and benefiting from the nation/society you live in.
I'm not sure how desirable the new features are compared to existing currencies. It also doesn't seem any freer. Don't know what the association with GNU entails. Furthermore, its name is easily confused with the ancient denomination of "Thaler", I guess it's on purpose, but, once again, maybe not the greatest idea.
If they want to centralize a currency, perhaps that would be better done by a government or other experienced institution.
As near as I can tell, they aren't trying to be a digital currency, just a digital payment system.
This is really an iteration on PayPal (and similar businesses): the new feature is that it is a system for letting multiple PayPals compete. Instead of being forced to make an account with a specific company, you can pick from a hopefully-large number of mints, who will be competing on things like fees and the customer experience. That will hopefully make things suck less.
BitCoin solves a lot of problems most people don't care about. Most people don't care about Byzentine Generals or trustless transactions or very limited forms of anonymity. What most people care about are low-cost transactions which don't suck. We'll have to wait and see if Taler can actually deliver.
Cryptocurrencies (by which I mean, Bitcoin, since it is the one with significant adoption) perform this function, but not particularly well.
For a payment system, being a currency is a negative -- fluctuations between the value of the digital currency and the value of the currency goods are priced in is a headache few people enjoy.
A payment system that is set up as a payment system -- instead of a decentralized trustless network -- can also better optimize things like transaction time (transactions can happen ~instantly if you're willing to trust central agencies) or having a known transaction cost. Right now Bitcoin's transaction cost is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- some combination of inflation from printing money to pay the miners and direct payments to the miners per transaction and payments to the exchanges to put cash in or take cash out and the risk of currency fluctuations mid-transaction. Regardless of whether it costs a little more or a little less, just knowing the transaction cost is a huge benefit to consumers and merchants.
Why, as a rational actor, would I voluntarily choose this system over one that gives me the freedom to decide what the government sees about my spending?
> Why, as a rational actor, would I voluntarily choose this system over one that gives me the freedom to decide what the government sees about my spending?
Because this system ensures fair play of all participants, therefore making cooperative behaviour the rational choice, therefore enabling more efficient solutions on a societal level.
Proper game theory (which I assume you were referring to) is bit more complex than the prisoner's dilemma.
It doesn't ensure fair play of the most powerful participant (the government), and it doesn't ensure fair play of people who have the knowledge or material means to escape surveillance.
The point of it is: it's better than what we have now, and it's something that you can actually have (Assuming only systems that are traceable will ever be legal).
Much love and respect to Richard Stallman / the GNU Project for all the pioneering work and advocacy they did in OSS, but I personally don't want them near my $s. The number of religious / flame wars persistently raging in OSS circles just can not, would not be tolerated in this domain.
Unlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes. Taler is thus a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market.
Sounds pretty useless to me then. I would think, as technologists, we would adhere to a mindset of "we can do better". That is, we can do better than basing our society on a State apparatus that is rooted in the use of violence (or threat, implied or otherwise) of violence, to coerce people into following its dictates. Taxation is damage that we should be creating ways to route around, not something we should be building tools to support.
I will take nonsense like this seriously when its proponents no longer avail themselves of the benefits of assets created through taxation. Which would be never.
This is just the reverse of the (also bad) argument that people who advocate for higher taxes shouldn't be taken seriously unless they voluntarily donate some of their income to the government. For example: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/04/want-higher-tax....
Thus taxes should never change as people would rationally never want to pay more nor receive less benefits. Hence we must have exactly the right amount of taxation at all times.
Weird analogy. But if you want it to be more accurate:
If the government takes your bike and gives it to me after taking my car, I'd be hypocritical to condemn theft and retain your bike. I have no claim to your property under my anti-theft ethics, therefore I should return it to you.
Sure. Except in this case you can't return most of it to me (kinda hard to return "use of roads" or "police protection" to someone); all you could do is return it to the thief. Moreover, since most voters approve of the theft, they are not innocent victims who deserve the bike back.
So following your logic of returning the bike, what one should do is to take as much money as they can from the government services and give it away to other taxation-is-theft people :)
And I'll care about your disingenuous response when the government quits stealing our money and manipulating the market to ensure that there are no alternatives to their theft-funded offerings.
If we remove the State apparatus that enforced law by the threat of violence, we will just replace it by private law that would be enforced by the threat of violence. The only way we could create a society without that is if we genetically modified everyone until no one could commit an act of aggression even if they wanted to do it.
Regardless of the type of tax, roads have been built by governments using tax revenue since history began. [1] Is your grievance with personal income tax in particular or taxes in general? Because for taxes to work at all, there needs to be some way for governments to have some visibility on the flow of cash in the economy, right?
roads have been built by governments using tax revenue since history began
Some roads have been built by government... not all where, and not all are even now. I'll posit that a significant number of Americans drive on at least one private road every single day. Chances are, if you live in any kind of suburban housing subdivision, the road right in front of your house actually wasn't created, and isn't maintained, by the State.
There are, of course, other privately built roads:
Basically, the old (trite) saw that "I want roads, therefore we need government" is pretty much bullshit. Never mind the fact that one person's desire for a road hardly justifies their putting a gun in the face of everyone else around and demanding that they pay for said road.
Again.. we're hackers, we can do better. And I'm not saying I have all the answers, sitting here today. I'm saying that if we put our minds to it, we can come up with a way to achieve positive ends without resorting to violence. Why anybody on this thread would argue against that is hard to imagine? Are you people saying you like violence?
It might be an interesting thought experiment to build a country entirely using private roads, but I find it pretty confusing that one could rail against the government "taking money at gunpoint" and at the same time hold up private roads as an alternative example. How do you think private roads make money? Asking people nicely if they could donate money if they are so inclined?
Yeah, maybe you could say "If you don't want to pay for a private road, don't drive on it. Simple as that." And exactly how do you plan to enforce the "don't drive on it" part?
And mind you, in an alternative universe where every road is private, a poor Joe who has to drive ten miles to work to feed his family will take the road, whether he can pay the toll or not. And if he finds using a gun is cheaper than paying tolls he will absolutely do so, because (in a society where the government can't point guns at employers' head and demand to pay minimum wage) if he doesn't he will be priced out by his neighbors who are willing to use the gun and drive cheaply.
You know, back in the current universe, 3% of LA's streets are already private, yet they don't charge poor Joe to drive on them. Maybe we should look into how those are funded before making assumptions?
Private roads in the UK are residential, and usualy cul-de-sacs. They are paid for by the residents and poor Joe doesn't pay to drive on them because poor Joe doesn't live there and therefore doesn't drive on them in the first place.
It wouod surprise me mightily to find that the citizens of LA were funding public-access through-roads from the goodness of their hearts.
Joe can afford a car, gas, maintenance, but somehow can't afford a toll. Undeterred, he resorts to murder instead of riding a bike or riding the bus/train.
It may be that the disagreement you're encountering is based on your acceptance of the premise that taxes are collected at gunpoint. It's extending a principle to an extreme logical conclusion and appealing to a formulaic interpretation of the world. It is divorced from the real world and makes the perfect the enemy of the good.
> It may be that the disagreement you're encountering is based on your acceptance of the premise that taxes are collected at gunpoint.
Isn't that true, though? I mean, the IRS doesn't send around a tax-person who carries a pistol or rifle or whatever, but the whole system is founded on the idea that "if you don't do what 'society' has agreed is the law, bad things (tm) can and probably will happen to you".
Paying taxes isn't optional in the same way that getting a driver's license is optional. So it's literally true that taxes are collected through the subtle but ultimately real threat of violence. Maybe you won't be executed, maybe you won't be beaten, but you will be made to do things against your will like go to jail.
Sure it's the extreme logical conclusion, but it's also the accurate one if you try not to pay.
It's not even slightly divorced from the real world. If you don't "pay your taxes" they will eventually send men with guns to confiscate your property and/or arrest you. And if you try to protect yourself, said "men with guns" will fucking shoot you dead. That is reality. And it's absolutely horrifying.
But it is nothing compared to the reality without taxes, where ANYONE (who can afford more men with guns than you can) can come and shoot you dead right away and take your property, not even giving you a chance to pay taxes (or vote) first.
> But it is nothing compared to the reality without taxes
Technology has come a long way in the last 1000 or so years. I suspect that there are new solutions to the problem that you describe. But they don't get explored because the State has a monopoly on violence and is very resistant to change.
Most of the time that's a good thing as it means that things get screwed up only very slowly. But it also tends to prevent things from getting better, too. Only the most egregious problems get solved.
> But they don't get explored because the State has a monopoly on violence and is very resistant to change.
No, wrong. Alternatives get explored all the time, and radical changes in the dominant role of social organization have happened over the 1000 year time period you discuss. You've anthropomorphized the abstract concept of the State improperly: the state is whatever entity or collection of entities taken together have a monopoly on legitimate violence, but the entities or collections which do that over time have changed quite rapidly -- the modern nation-state system is only a few hundred years old -- it is a fairly new model -- and there has been considerable evolution within that model (and its one that has been widely perceived as weakening in the face of evolving, powerful, non-nation-state actors of various types.)
You're right of course that the organization of the state has changed greatly over the course of the last 1000 years. But in the last 50 years we've seen tremendous improvement in various technological capabilities and very little adoption of these by the states.
When there's a technological revolution every 20 years or so, but a political revolution only every 200 years or so, I think it's fair to argue that the state is very resistant to change. I might see several technological revolutions in my lifetime, and no political ones.
> Technology has come a long way in the last 1000 or so years. I suspect that there are new solutions to the problem that you describe.
Then give a concrete example of such a solution. The current system (having a state actor) works more or less well in preventing power abuse by private entities. But shouldn't we wait with abolishing it until we have actually found a better solution?
Way to take his point completely out of context. Tax evasion doesn't get you killed, but resisting arrest for tax evasion just might end up with you dead.
But that's exactly the point: "point guns at law enforcement and you'll likely get killed" isn't quite as outrageous as "not paying your taxes gets you killed". Conflating those two only clouds the argument.
I don't think that's accurate. What I'm saying is "taxes are not collected at gunpoint" and also "you will not be executed for failing to pay your taxes". You might be jailed for not paying your taxes. That's not a death sentence.
If the counter-point is that you can escalate the situation by attempting to resist the state's monopoly on violence, then sure. I concede that. I don't believe the thing underlying the veneer is savage. Quite the contrary.
The penalty for rejecting the state's assertion of its authority over you (whether legitimate or not) is generally death. At the hands of whatever agency has noticed your rejection.
So if you think you shouldn't have to pay taxes, because the state isn't a legitimate authority, it's quite likely that you'll end up dying.
Finally while taxes aren't collected directly by a person with a gun, failure to be sufficiently subservient while dealing with the state can result in your death. It's unfortunate that the state grants itself (in all its forms) much, much more privilege or leeway than any non-state actor would enjoy in a similar dispute.
In other words, if you fail to pay a debt to another citizen or non-governmental entity, it's usually handled much, much differently than failing to pay a debt to the government. That double standard definitely doesn't feel right to many folks, and I think that's a very reasonable point to make.
Yes, my comment was sarcastic. Roads have been and still are built by governments and private groups and even individuals for a long time. I have no issues with taxation in general, but I think personal income tax is a mistake and related to other mistakes whose trend started around the French Revolution such as the movement from private to public government and consequently a never-ending cycle of the public trying to vote parts of itself maximal shares of the treasury without destroying the whole thing.
Any entity worthy of the name government has a very simple way of visualizing the flow of cash in the economy: door to door searches. If the organized manpower for this does not exist, the government will have a hard time collecting taxes no matter how many technological shortcuts to the physical searching (like, say, property records on stone tablets) they use.
It's a horrible comparison. It all boils down to the question wheatre you belive in the existence of a socity or if you don't, and if you want to be ruled by the strongest/richest or by the majority.
And many, particularly paved roads [1], were constructed by governments in order to allow the transportation of their armies and trade goods vital to their economies.
In pretty much the entirety of civilization, important roads were indeed maintained by the government. Hence why the constitution had clauses dealing with road construction, hence the Appian Way, etc. Infrastructure projects like roads are one of the universals among societies.
> I would think, as technologists, we would adhere to a mindset of "we can do better". That is, we can do better than basing our society on a State apparatus that is rooted in the use of violence (or threat, implied or otherwise) of violence, to coerce people into following its dictates.
Your conclusion has no relation to your premise at all. I would think, as technologists, we can do logical reasoning better ;)
According to [0]: "2-2015: Taler becomes an official GNU package ... Taler was accepted into the GNU project today. GNU will offer advice, advocacy and cooperation --- and host our official public mailinglist taler@gnu.org."
Also, RMS is listed on the About page [1], though it doesn't say in what capacity (unless "Ethics enthusiast" is a job title).
> The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money. However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary.
> With Taler, the receiver of any form of payment is known, and the payment information comes attached with some details about what the payment was made for (but not the identity of the customer). Thus, governments can use this data to tax buisnesses and individuals based on their income
Unlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes. Taler is thus a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market.
HAH, I love it, they lump both BitCoin and cash! as currencies fit for the black market! I wonder how cash-only convenience stores will feel about that, those outlaw troublemakers! ;p
> Unlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes. Taler is thus a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market.
This simultaneously implies that both Bitcoin and cash are not suitable for the mainstream economy. I think the opinion that cash should be given up would be fairly controversial, even today. Furthermore, a law abiding citizen will still pay taxes on their Bitcoin income - the same way they would for cash. Just because Bitcoin makes it harder to prove tax evasion doesn't mean we should eschew Bitcoin and cash. The technology exists regardless, governments will have to adapt.
> When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money. However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary.
This feature is offering nothing not already available, although it seems to imply that one could not prove payment with Bitcoin, which is false, as it is trivial.
> This simultaneously implies that both Bitcoin and cash are not suitable for the mainstream economy.
No, it implies that Bitcoin and cash are both alike in not simultaneously being:
(a) suitable for the mainstream economy, and
(b) not suitable for the black market.
It neither states nor strongly implies which of those two things bitcoin or cash fail on (nor does it state or strongly apply that they each fail on the same one of those two things), though there's a fairly weak implication that Bitcoin and cash both fail on the second (that, whether or not they are suitable for the mainstream economy, they are quite suitable for the black market.)
I have this strange idea that once the government-agents really understand what e-payments, even block-chain-powered e-currencies bring to the table, in terms of money control, they'll embrace it. It's a no-brainer.
That said, taxes are not inherently bad. Governments on the other hand... Have an awfully bad track-record of power abuse.
Several central banks are interested in cryptocurrencies because it allows them to devalue the currency from a central point. Cash is hard because it can be hoarded, therefore indirect measures are taken to devalue said currency.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Seriously. You have an aging population causing consumption to decline, a global recession along the horizon, ever-increasing productivity replacing the need for labor, and you think your interest rates are going to a damn bit of good? We'll need to keep interest rates at 0 just to keep the whole thing going, forget about negative interest rates (which is going to cause a run on the bank and asset bubbles in commodities, real estate, anything else that can be a value store).
From this premise (and lots of other reading of the political "sciences"), I also find it easy to conclude that the internet and open source are preferable to government as methods of diffusing power.
Not sure how one can both have traceability with merchants and: "However, we also want to stay out of the immediate personal domain, so sharing funds within a family or copying coins between devices should not be subject to monitoring by the state."
I'm guessing this means that you have either "free" trust (help from the thaler system to ensure fair transactions), or "no" trust -- essentially you hand over cash, and hope the other party gives you goods in return?
I have a hard time seeing how you could prevent "anonymous transfer of coins" from one device from the other -- across the Internet (provided the parties are prepared to risk fraud)?
Taxable & anonymous at the same time? The marketing of this sounds shady. I don't know if the "inventors" or whatever really know what they are doing...
It's in development at a university that's known for its computer science research and work: http://www.inria.fr/
For example, Facebook has partnered with the university and it's also the birthplace of the OCAML language. They have some sharp people doing research work there, if this was a VC-backed company or a kickstarter, I would be much more skeptical and think it's shady. However, the bar at a university is much higher so we'll see what they do deliver and how it works whenever they deliver it in the next year.
I don't understand why people seem to constantly associate bitcoin with tax free. There are no inherent reasons why cash transactions are taxable or non-taxable, it just turns out that people don't want to be destroyed by the IRS so they make an effort to pay their taxes.
There's also the aspect of currency vs goods. If I've understood correctly, bitcoin is taxed as (virtual) goods in Norway, meaning that if you make money from price change, the tax is much higher than it would be for making money off of stock/currency etc (which would be 28% off the profit, or a 28% deduction from the loss). Just because some people would like bitcoin to be a currency doesn't make it so (in the eyes of the taxman).
I'm not sure how/if thaler would change that -- but it's worth keeping in mind that "new" assets will be taxed according to how the government thinks it should be taxed, not according to how you might feel it should be taxed.
What's crucially important, and conspicuously unmentioned, is not taxes but monetary policy as a whole: can the central bank (or "mint") control the interest rate? Is inflation possible?
Taler uses an electronic mint holding financial reserves in existing currencies. This means that Taler is not a new currency with the inherent currency fluctuation risks, but instead the cryptographic coins correspond to existing currencies, such as US Dollars, Euros or even BitCoins.
So, yes, inflation is possible, since the digital coins are tied to existing currencies.
That site seems to give no details about how internetpeso works; it confuses "how does it work?" with "how do I use it?".
Also, Taler seems to be very much a Free Software project. internetpeso seems to be proprietary, and also self-contradictory:
> Other cyber-currencies require that you trust complete strangers to verify transactions. This is a patently unsafe way of handling your life savings.
> We leverage best-of-breed closed-source software
Liberty is to be under no restraint apart from standing rules to live by that are common to everyone in the society. Persons have a right to follow their own will in all things that the law has not prohibited and not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others.
As I understand the scheme, I inform the mint I will have, say $200, wired to it. It gives me a code which I give to my bank when they do the transfer, so that the mint knows the money I told it would be arriving did actually arrive from me. I then get a cryptographic assertion that I have $200 in my wallet. Anonymous purchases work, as when I go to buy something all the information I need to give the seller is the assertion I have the available amount of money, and essentially the seller bills the mint for the cost of the game, which the mint transfers to the seller's bank. The first question is how is bookkeeping done so that money can't be spent twice? One option would be that when I go to buy, say a $60 video game the system cryptographically bounds the purchase to my wallet, so if I go to another retailer it says that I have spent $60 of the original $200 in the wallet, and therefore have $140 left. The other option would be that any transfer into my wallet can only be used once and in full. The discussion does say the wallet holds a transaction history, but that doesn't delinate which of the two previous modes of operation is the case.
There are a few issues with this if using the "wallet-bookeeping option" where proofs-of-purchase are bound to the wallet. One, it doesn't protect against dishonest sellers. Say a customer comes in with a wallet that originally held $200 but they've spent $80. The seller can still bill the mint for $150, and there is no way for the mint to confirm that the customer didn't have that much still left over from their transfer to the mint. Secondly, presumably the proof-of-purchase is cryptographically bound to the wallet, else the buyer will simply discard it. With it bound, discarding the proof-of-purchase discards the remaining money on it. However, for this to work, there must be no recourse for the buyer to recoup the money in a lost wallet. But the user can do this by backing up (which the discussion of Taler notes can be done), which would allow the user to simply discard the version of the wallet with a payment and simply return to the one without it.
Because of this, it seems likely that Taler would make any transfers one-use only, to prevent against this issues. In such a case, the user would then transfer the exact amount of funds needed (or something close, hoping to get change in cash, which wouldn't be sustainable for the sellers if all their buyers are using Taler) as needed right before making their purchase. In that case, it is fully reasonable for the mint to be able to link purchases to bank transfers, since there will only be so many $273.67 transfers (remember, the mint knows who the transfers are from) followed within the next five minutes by $273.67 purchases (and the mint will know the name of the seller).
Fundementally, the issue with all these schemes is that for the mint to not be able to track the purchase, it needs to be able to decouple the processes of taking deposits and paying out purchases among the folks who have money in the mint. It can do this either by making the money holder responsible for the bookkeeping, opening the door to fraud, or to make (as Chaum's Digicash did) each certification a one-time use only, which incentivizes buyers to transfer funds as needed, which allows for at least partial linkability, probably not something which would standup in court in and of itself, but would probably be sufficent circumstantial evidence in a number of cases.
I'm wondering if I'm misunderstanding something, since these issues have all been pointed out with previous anonymized e-cash attempts, and it seems unlikely GNU would go to build a scheme that has these well-known weaknesses. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there is some additional information here that I'm misunderstanding or has yet to be presented. Also, for a useful read on this type of thing see Brands' criticism of Chaum's pseudonym approach in "Building in Privacy: Rethinking Public Key Infrastructrures and Digital Certificates" (pgs. 25-32, although the whole intro is very useful).
EDIT: Making my points more clear, got pretty jumbled in my original post...
Very well said. As long as our monetary system is not freed from the grasp of the government/central banks/banks in general, reasonable currencies will never be widespread... Sane money is money that cannot be printed in arbitrary amounts. The money monopoly is particularly harmful to economy & citizens.
People can still become a black market escrow, keep creating new merchants and facilitate user to user transactions unless there is some kind of cost or identification required to accept Taler payments, or exchange Taler for bitcoin. US law makers will likely try to prohibit Taler though if any online gambling accepts it as payment, for example Paysafecard had to design a special UIGEA compliant card in order for it not to be able to be plugged into a gambling site to get into the US payments market.
Speaking of bitcoin pretty much every online exchange will start accepting Taler, then they aren't so exposed to banks shutting them down and can trade in any currency.