Stellar is a distributed ledger that has a native currency to make payments easier.
After reading up on Taler, it sounds like a very similar idea to Stellar, but Stellar removes some of the need for trusted authorities.
From the Taler overview: "The system requires an external auditor, such as a government-appointed financial regulatory body, to frequently verify the exchange's databases and check that its bank balance matches the total value of the remaining coins in circulation."
In Stellar, this service is provided by the ledger and the nodes that validate it.
I've done some work with Stellar and the implementation in the whitepaper sounds very different than how Stellar currently works.
For example, users control their own private keys and they're never exposed to a node, so I'm not sure why the whitepaper mentions storing private keys in the SGX. Perhaps they're going to host wallets for a user and store all keys in the SGX?
I'll be very interested in more details about this project since it doesn't appear to use the Stellar network, only the consensus protocol.
After reading up on Taler, it sounds like a very similar idea to Stellar, but Stellar removes some of the need for trusted authorities.
From the Taler overview: "The system requires an external auditor, such as a government-appointed financial regulatory body, to frequently verify the exchange's databases and check that its bank balance matches the total value of the remaining coins in circulation."
In Stellar, this service is provided by the ledger and the nodes that validate it.
There are other interesting features of the Stellar native currency such as providing a way to transparently convert between currencies when making a payment: https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/explaine...