On P2P payments from their FAQ: “While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete.”
How about, no? How about me paying €50 to my friend for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated, KYCed, and blocked if they don’t approve of it or know who the recipient is? How about it’s none of the government’s business how I split the bill at dinner with friends? This level of surveillance is madness, especially coming from an app that touts “privacy” as a feature.
GNU Taler is a trojan horse to enable CBDC adoption. They are the friendly face to an absolutely terrifying level of government control in our lives funded by the same government that tries every year to implement chat control. Imagine your least favourite political party gaining power. Now imagine they can see and control every transaction you make. No thanks.
I disagree. Taler also individuals to stay private while preventing crime. I personally could never use crypto as it empowers criminals and is very unpredictable. Taler uses flat currency so you don’t need to worry about it losing value overnight.
It isn’t done yet and it may get abandoned but it is a start. For now it is a interesting project to watch. Also cash is king
Taler uses flat currency so you don’t need to worry about it losing value overnight.
There are a number of stabletokens that you also wouldn’t need to worry about losing value overnight.
Stablecoins are the worst of crypto and central banking combined.
- They are centralized, even more centralized than central banks since they are run by a single company not an board appointed by an elected government
- They can rug you at any time
- They only have value because they are “pegged” to a certain currency and the “backing” must exist to maintain that peg.
- Their source of the backing is often “trust me bro”
- Even if the backing was solid, market shocks and other problems can reduce the value of that backing, leading to them being insolvent and the stablecoin losing its value. And guess what, it wasn’t insured!
- They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely, so you have no reason to trust their claims and probably can’t seek any real remedy if they are lies
- They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation
Several of them have already collapsed spectacularly. More will in time. Avoid stablecoins.
Some stablecoins are centralized, but it’s not a fundamental requirement of how they operate. Stabletokens such as DAI or Liquity are run without a central company. They cannot “rug” you because they’re based on smart contracts.
They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely
Isn’t that kind of the point?
so you have no reason to trust their claims
Smart contract code can be audited by anyone and trusted to run exactly as it’s written.
They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation
Stablecoins aren’t required to peg to any specific measure of value (I assume you’re referring to US dollars?). There are stabletokens pegged to gold, for example, if you really want something like that.
Since US dollars work just fine for commerce, though, using a stabletoken that’s pegged to US dollars works fine for commerce too.
That’s just smoke and mirrors. If there was a “bank run” on a stable coin all of them would immediately collapse as there is nothing of real value backing them.
Anything of value is capable of losing its value under some circumstances, since value is assigned by humans. Obviously you pick and choose based on your use cases.
That’s a cop-out to avoid discussing that none of the stable coins have anywhere close to the assets they claim to have and which would be necessary to peg the value.
You can examine the MakerDAO contract, for example, and see all of the assets they claim to have sitting right there under its control on the blockchain. You can see the contract logic behind how those assets enter and exit its control.
GNU Taler is not your enemy. It may not solve every problem you’d like it to, but its adoption by the masses would be a vast improvement in privacy compared to the current state of commerce in every country where it has the slightest chance of happening any time soon.
I have a feeling its adoption would bring the end of cash a big step closer.
The suggestions like this also scare me in that it might require you to carry a smartphone all the time for things as basic as payment.
This is totally unrelated to GNU Taler though, and if it comes to that you will be happy to have GNU Taler as an privacy preserving option.
Your first example is tax fraud if you hide it
Edit: it looks like you edited your post to state the guy repairing your bike is “your friend”.
Noone is going to go after him if he just fixes your bike. But if he fixes the bike of his 1000 friends each month, they will go after him if he didn’t declare it.
That may technically be true, but it’s currently very normalized. Do we actually want to denormalize it? Should the government know about every trivial transaction?
Which jurisdiction are you referring to? GNU Taler isn’t specific to any particular country or currency.
/c/Libertarian is that way:
/c/Cryptocurrency is over there:
