Posted by dewey 16 hours ago
It's basicially david chaum's blind-signature money idea. It's centralized but the central issuer can't connect the outputs to the inputs. (but unique inputs signed by the issuer correspond to unique outputs)
>Also are transactions final and irreversible?
I think so unless you are able to reveal the secrets of the transaction. Hmm, however revealing the secret to someone is basicially same as spending it to them (analgous to releasing a signed and finalized transaction into the mempool in cryptocurrency). It's finalized by the issuer signing it.
Like you basicially send the vendor the secret, and then they hand it in to the coin issuer and wait for the issuer to sign a new input, before giving you the merchandise. So idk how it would work reversing the transactions
[edit] Yes, he has been involved. https://www.heise.de/en/news/39C3-How-the-open-source-cash-G...
original https://chaum.com/ecash/
new and improved https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/eCash_2.0_9-7-2...
Interesting stumble upon. https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Better-than-mon...
it's a practical doable improvement to the existing system in the existing legal framework
the outcome might be similar but there is a big difference in intend and framing there
large companies, that should work
the state if it does an criminal investigation, that won't work, also at least for now there is no need to do so if you don't to anything criminal. Sure if fascists take over that would change but they then also would ban any system which would allow avoiding their gaze so not sure it's relevant tbh.
and as things are currently you have to far more worry about US companies and state knowing about what transactions which are legal but you want to keep private then about your local EU government
So if you get Taler from your bank and spend it somewhere, the government can see it at your bank, and they can see it where it was spent, but they don't see you at all. You've done your trusting out of band.
If that's right, it could still be used for illegal and untaxed transactions if the entire chain was trusting out of band. I could use it to buy drugs without paying taxes if by dealer would be happy to shoot me later if they couldn't spend it at a retailer, rather than to check if it was good.
I still don't understand it. I've tried periodically for years, but I'm missing something.
it's more transaction tokenization system then a crypto currency, so you don't really "buy Taler (currency)", you give Taler digital Euros and they give you a token representing this digital Euros in a more anonymous way. (They also can work for other currencies, but doesn't do currency exchanges/cross currency transactions itself).
Effectively this means:
- The merchant (e.g. your local grocery store, restaurant etc.) doesn't get information about you they can aggregate, sell etc. This is the main improvement.
- It's not controlled by a US company, this is also a pretty big improvement.
- Taler doesn't strictly require customer wallets to be bound to an bank account nor do they identify who you are as a customer. This makes it hard for Taler to abuse the audit log, which is also an improvement.
- It does strictly require merchants (anyone receiving money) to be bound to a bank account for given currency (here Euro). It's best to think about it as the money going directly to the merchants normal bank account.
- Taler has audit logs containing what token was used from which customer(id) with which merchant (which is strictly bound to having to have a bank account), as well as logs about how money got into the customers wallet and all this methods you can put money into it will (likely) be traceable, so criminal investigator and similar can still pretty much trace back who did which transaction when. Just with a bit more effort/extra steps. So with enough automation states can as much surveil you then they can now. Practically it seems to make things a bit more high effort then today, which is a good thing to have.
IFF Taler allow putting digital Euros into a wallet using gift cards buyable with cash this indeed could still be used for money laundering (similar to how most gift card systems can be used for it), but I think it's unlikely they allow such things and most people practically will likely link up their bank account.
Another thing to consider is that for any ordering of physical good you normally have to put in a shipping address with your name, even if you send it to a post box.
And for a bunch of other things the vendor also has to get your identity out of band (independent of used payment processing). E.g. many kinds of contracts, high value payments, currency exchanges etc. etc.
This doesn't make it useless. It still is an improvement. Especially if payment terminals in physical shops get support for it and/or digital goods can be bought with it. In Germany a lot of the large chains with physical shops more or less all use the same payment terminals for card payment with support relative flexible software so it's actually possible I think. Just hard to happen without regulatory pressure, similar to Wero support on a payment terminal.
If you want to maintain FOSS principles and provide people with monetary technology, you need to be noncompliant — whether in letter or just in spirit — with the law in most of the world, where the law limits people's access to financial activity, in order to fulfil a public policy of empowering gatekeepers.
And that backdoor for spying in this entirely free/libre software is…?
(And I think the exchanges aren’t expected to be run directly by the state, but that’s probably irrelevant to the topic at hand.)
Blockchains that support stablecoins are already here and millions of people already use them (and soon agents will use them as well).
All for worldwide, instant and extremely low fee payments and transfers.
That's just not true, and I'm not talking about "you can pay with Bitcoin in the store" use case but the stable coin use case for settlement, which you can see Stripe expand a lot in the past years.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. But in terms of mass adoption? I wouldn't say that has happened, because there is still too much friction in terms of dealing with your own opsec, keeping your keys secure, etc. Like I don't see average Joes going into it en masse. But anyone with enough determination will use it.
I say this as someone who is personally opposed to the technology on principle, but I'm not deluded to think that nobody else is using it either. It has a market.
Step out into the wider world and that isn't remotely true.
Canadians understand this problem much better than many european politicians. In particular Merz is like a lame obedient duck here. And Macron too now, after failing the french population again and again. He had many years time to fix France and did not do so. That is deliberate failure.
I’m all for fast-forwarding and you can pull this off I will donate towards a statue in your honour.