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.
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I have a feeling its adoption would bring the end of cash a big step closer.
Not any closer than already existing commercial cashless payment solutions (which are much, much worse for privacy).
You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.
Sure, a crypto wallet might not have your name on it when created, but good luck buying or selling any without giving away your identity.
good luck
except there are many sites dedicated to doing exactly that. you can send cash in the mail, giftcards, exchange via other cryptocurrencies, etc.
CBDCs are coming whether you like it or not and a GNU Taler based payment system is currently our best mitigation strategy against them.
It's pointless to compare GNU Taler to crypto-currencies as it is a payment system and not a pseudo-currency.
Yes, Taler by design allows identifiction of the receiver.
It does not reveal the sender.
It allows you to create and arbitrate your own tokens and to create your own "bank".
Yeah, the fact that out payment system is so centralised is definitely a bad thing. But GNU Taler, from what I understand, is just trying to work within that system. It didn't create the system, and it doesn't have the power to replace it.
It didn't create the system, and it doesn't have the power to replace it.
But it does support the system by being a part of it
I think you are misinterpreting things.
CBDC?
Central Bank Digital Currency. Its a controversial project by many central banks around the world to establish a digital cash alternative, but the current proposals are usually not very privacy friendly.
Sure, it's worse than monero and cash in terms of privacy, but that's not what it's supposed to replace. There are plans to use Taler as an alternative to card payments in the EU and that would be a great improvement. Currently all payment data is visible to multiple of companies, the shop, the bank, and many middle man and is often sold off to other commerical entities. Taler would stop that.
Recently read an ELI5 of the digital euro and was pleasantly surprised. If it works as designed, you can perform offline payments from one device to another, which sounds like your use case. No central servers, no blockchain.
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?
For small sum in-person payments, regular cash is still the best option and will continue to be so, GNU Taler or not.
not if they're only covering the cost of parts
Which jurisdiction are you referring to? GNU Taler isn't specific to any particular country or currency.
When crypto bros stop shilling anti-libre software, maybe i'll start to care.
Funny how we're big into privacy here, and then money comes up and lots of people are "wait no, not that kind of privacy."