GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions(taler.net)

101 pointsby bratwurst30005 tahun yang lalu48 comments

GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions

https://taler.net/en/index.html

51 comments

Nextgrid5 tahun yang lalu

> Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering.

That seems like a very peculiar definition of privacy.

darthrupert5 tahun yang lalu

Privacy doesn't imply freedom from taxation or freedom to do crime.

Nextgrid5 tahun yang lalu

Maybe you are lucky to live in a country where you agree with your government's definition of what a crime, but in certain parts of the world they call "crime" what you would call "democracy".

To add to this, I think it might be better if the protocol was private by default but allow the sender to choose the level of disclosure and the recipient to publish (as part of the address?) what levels are required (so a sender can’t submit a payment whose disclosure level doesn’t match the policy set by the recipient - the transaction just wouldn’t happen as the miners would enforce this and reject the TX).

That would allow the protocol to be flexible to accommodate different use-cases depending on the jurisdiction the payment falls under and allow recipients to be compliant (as the protocol implicitly rejects transactions that don’t match the recipient’s chosen policy). The same protocol can thus be used across many different jurisdictions and anti-money-laundering regulations.

captn3m05 tahun yang lalu

The protocol is private by default (with a few regulated entities that issue coins).

The “taxable and disclosure” part is mostly ensuring that all the money earned by a merchant goes back to a real bank account. Where tax authorities should already have checks and balances in place for taxation purposes.

throwaway20485 tahun yang lalu

I don't think many people consider tax evasion "democracy"

peoplefromibiza5 tahun yang lalu

money laundering is a crime everywhere.

chucktingle5 tahun yang lalu

Why, yes, of course. I wonder if it's possible to run a children's defense organization, or a women rights one, or maybe an agriculture union, and get labeled as terrorist. That would qualify all money transfers to and from your entity as money laundering.

I wish I was making this up... https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/inside-israel-s-decision...

wizzwizz45 tahun yang lalu

I don't think that's what money laundering means. Surely it would be “financing terrorism” or something, rather than money laundering (which is about faking / hiding a paper trail)?

summm5 tahun yang lalu

So this would be a system for the civilized world, for democracies, where the government's definition of what a crime is at least coarsely coincides with my definition? More authoritarian or non-democractic governments will just not approve it and have their citizens use surveillance-based mechanisms that allow their secret services to track everything their citizens do, even as private customers. Mechanisms, like, for example Visa, Mastercard, or Paypal.

alkonaut5 tahun yang lalu

The distinction between functioning democracies and dictatorships/autocracies is that in one you might need anonymous financial transactions to have dissent.

In the other, being able to hide transactions from authorities will quickly erode the democracy you have.

Whether complete financial anonymity is a net positive or negative is likely context dependent.

Nextgrid5 tahun yang lalu

Which is why I think having transparency as a non-negotiable feature of the protocol is bad and calling it "privacy" is very misleading.

I edited my comment above to suggest a configurable level of disclosure which the sender & recipient can enforce, so that way the same protocol can support both traceable and anonymous payments depending on the desired use-case and local laws.

darthrupert5 tahun yang lalu

Yeah, you have a point. I'm actually unlucky enough to live in a country where the authorities have made growing and purchasing even the mildest recreative drugs illegal roughly half a century ago, and haven't yet fixed this error. So I buy them illegally, using crypto.

sneak5 tahun yang lalu

Privacy does strongly imply the potential to effectively evade taxation (if one chooses), however, although it does not of course imply freedom from tax obligations under a defined legal code.

It's sort of how the right to keep and bear arms does imply freedom from government overreach. Privacy rights are similar. They can be used to do things contrary to the desires of the state, if the end user wishes, but having transactional privacy no more means one will be evading taxes than having a rifle means one will be murdering government employees as a revolutionary, though in both cases the option is there.

alkonaut5 tahun yang lalu

But just like I don’t approve with my neighbors right to own a handgun I’ll also never support their right to take their financial transactions and hide them from me. Because my freedom to live on a street where zero people have guns is a lot more important than his right to keep one, and my (and the majority’a) choice to live in a country where authorities can strongly enforce taxes trumps his right to even have a theoretical possibility to avoid them.

sneak5 tahun yang lalu

> Because my freedom to live on a street where zero people have guns

You have no such freedom, and indeed no such is possible, unless you have correctly classified police as non-people.

The state always has guns, and the state is comprised of people. There is no world where "zero people have guns", ever, and it is intellectually dishonest to claim such. It takes people with guns to enforce a ban on private gun ownership.

Ultimately the debate is solely around which people have guns. Four legs bad.

alkonaut5 tahun yang lalu

Yes, obviously my statement excludes the state. I’m glad you understood that but I’m not sure it needs clarifying…

DarylZero5 tahun yang lalu

> Privacy does strongly imply the potential to effectively evade taxation

Except gas fees, of course.

ls155 tahun yang lalu

Privacy doesn't imply tax evasion or crime.

lazyeye5 tahun yang lalu

Few merchants are going to use a payment system where their income is public.

captn3m05 tahun yang lalu

It doesn’t publish it anywhere. Taler just ensures that money ends up in your bank account. What happens after that, is entirely up to the law.

Proven5 tahun yang lalu

bratwurst30005 tahun yang lalu

Its privacy friendly on the customer side of the transaction. And Imho thats one of the big problems actually. Too many people know what I buy and at the same time those people have the possibility to do tax evation. Thats a loose loose for me and society… as long as I trust my society

bratwurst30005 tahun yang lalu

There are 2 different entities at stack. First one the privat citizen and second one the enterprise. Talers offers privacy for citizens… and isnt that the world we want? Transparent enterprise and intransparent citizen? Also talking from first world perspective … could work for the third world if the country aint corrupt.

vidarh5 tahun yang lalu

I'd take more of an issue with the fact they suggest this avoids money laundering.

One of the easiest ways of doing money laundering is using businesses that can get away with large amounts of anonymous income without proportionally large production or purchase costs, and then buy your own products and services with ill-gotten money to produce a legitimate-looking revenue stream.

"Just" having to pay tax on the income is hardly a major barrier to using it for money laundering.

captn3m05 tahun yang lalu

It avoids the “money laundering” problem to the extent that it gets introduced by privacy-preserving transactions.

amai5 tahun yang lalu

The origin of the word „dollar“ is actually „Taler“.

p2hari5 tahun yang lalu

Wow, this looks awesome. As somebody who was considering an alternate way to build new payment systems this gives a good start. If my understanding is correct KUDOS(the currency of taler) is pegged at 1 to 1 with all the currencies? Is it based on the real forex markets that calculates how much KUDOS I get? But if not, I can always get conversion benefits in this system. Maybe have to read more.

zinekeller5 tahun yang lalu

You misunderstand. KUDOS is simply a "toy" currency, and this is not a cryptocurrency. It's basically solving the MasterCard-Visa duopoly problem, and it doesn't aim to replace existing currencies (although it doesn't also preclude from adopting a new one though).

p2hari5 tahun yang lalu

Yes, thanks. I know it is not cryptocurrency. I know it was just a currency to be used inside the taler system. But my thinking was about the exchange. I, as a buyer, will upload some EUR to my wallet, the exchange then converts it into KUDOS, and I use that to pay the merchant. Now if the merchant has set up the product prices in USD and accepts USD, somehow the KUDOS will need to match the USD. right? So my question was related to that. If that is the case, I see some ways of abusing the system. Maybe set up both merchant and buyer accounts and convert EUR to USD at rates better than the market..

summm5 tahun yang lalu

No, in a real deployment, the denomination will not be KUDOS, but USD, or EUR. You just pay 100 EUR to the bank, the bank issues you, for example, 100 digital coins of 1 EUR each. And you pay with these coins (simplified, there are different sized coins and a mechanism for giving change) It's more like paypal or visa than like bitcoin in this regard.

bratwurst30005 tahun yang lalu

I think the kudos is only the „container“ for the value in dollars you transferred to it. So one kudos could be one dollar or 100 dollar. Its written down in the kudos. Did I get that right?

p2hari5 tahun yang lalu

That is what the document says, but it does not detail in how it is actually done. If I transfer 100 USD, then it should somehow fluctuate to market conditions. So, the question is does GNU taler also vary the kudos to match FOrex rates? If not then how is currency exchange happening in this system.

bratwurst30005 tahun yang lalu

No as someone stated its a gift card. A voucher that your bank is giving someone N dollars or whatever. So if the value of dollar decreases the value of your gift card is also decreasing but it is still the same amount of dollars but with less purchasing power

Edit: its an anonymous check

summm5 tahun yang lalu

There is no currency exchange in this system. You just setup the system for each existing currency separately. The kudos is really just for development and demonstrating the system.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

bennnnn5 tahun yang lalu

No, Kudos is not a real currency. It was an example for the explanation. Basically it seems the goal here is a sender-agnostic (or currency-agnostic I cant really tell which comes first) payment system which is pretty awesome

wizzwizz45 tahun yang lalu

That's my understanding of it. Kudos is like a gift card.

gefhfffh5 tahun yang lalu

I really like the concept and wish it was reality.

Sadly, while the project even seems attractive to states, I think they killed it before it could become reality by choosing a GPL licence.

Probably nobody will touch it...

PS: it's not like I have a problem with it, but mostly it's reality

PPS: move to GitHub or alternatives, please - accessibility right now doesn't seem great

summm5 tahun yang lalu

I feel you. Just like the GPL killed Linux. That said, the GPL only covers the software, not the protocol. So banks are free to just re-implement that protocol, it's not that complicated. This should be peanuts for any larger bank. Or maybe pay money to Taler Systems to re-license the software under a commercial license?

gefhfffh5 tahun yang lalu

I don't know if they're open to that, since they didn't dual license it or use something like https://polyformproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PolyF... , or if still realistically possible.

I hope it works out in the end anyways ...

netizen-9368245 tahun yang lalu

>I really like the concept and wish it was reality.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Does the project not actually exist? It seems like it is real and has been under development for some years now....

gefhfffh5 tahun yang lalu

It exists as a demo (and on a student campus for food), but it's not like you can get Taler from your bank and pay at the supermarket or a random shop in the internet

netizen-9368245 tahun yang lalu

That just sounds like a lack of real world implementation to me. Assuming it works for what the school needs, it can probably be adapted to other systems I would think. Just like if you or I wrote a project, is it not real until someone else implements it?

Banks are notoriously slow on the uptake of tech projects, it might take some internal pushing from people who care to adopt a FOSS solution. Most business I've run into prefer proprietary projects because its easier to just throw money at something, although they could throw money at their internal team to implement FOSS. Unsure if it would be more expensive in this case, I'm not very familiar with fintech

captn3m05 tahun yang lalu

It’s not just technical, but regulatory challenges that come with issuing a new kind of prepaid-instrument (it is akin to a Casino Chip that can be accepted by _any person with a bank account_).

Central Banks are not known for speedily approving such proposals.

0xCMP5 tahun yang lalu

iiuc this is a very similar design to how Mullvad accepts payments[0] except that they have a token used to pay multiple merchants.

[0]: https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#numbered

edit: add mullvad link. correct typo.

summm5 tahun yang lalu

Interesting, you got a link how they do it?

0xCMP5 tahun yang lalu

I would look at how they basically maintain minimal tables of payments which can be used to pay for service. Taler is more complex to handle being a 3rd party doing this, but Mullvad seems to do a similar idea of separating payment from the account itself to allow for anonymous payment.

kybernetyk5 tahun yang lalu

Geee5 tahun yang lalu

GNU taler is based on Chaum's e-cash. There are certain issues with chaumian mints. Obvious one is that the mint owner can run with the money, and thus the system requires trust. Compared to a centralized payment system such as Paypal, the only benefit is anonymity of transactions.

There has been some development of federated chaumian mints, such that the required trust is split over multiple parties. This is possible with Bitcoin, and it would make sense as a scalability and privacy solution. See: https://fedimint.org

merricksb5 tahun yang lalu

Major discussion 10 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261314 (346 points/111 comments)

Also:

5 months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301172 (47 points/9 comments)

4 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274110 (479 points/149 comments)

6 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11840453 (276 points/192 comments)

Ozzie_osman5 tahun yang lalu

This is cool. I think as crypto pushes the boundary of ideas of what's possible, there will be more feedback loops where people will then realize (and build) those similar ideas in a better way but _without_ crypto or full decentralization.