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.
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.
When it comes to in-person payment, would Taler be usable without a mobile device? Say, with just a card like normal banking? I would have it much rather coexist with cash anyway.
But yea, sounds like an improvement when it comes to online payments.
The person accepting the money needs online access, or at least some sort of way to receive a validation code. As for the buyer, I think currently there is no implementation of it, but according to my understanding of it it would be technically possible to load Taler tokens on a card chip and use them from that.
Ah, that does make it better but still concerning - that would stop ME from also being paid in cash)