6d ago

GNU Taler (a swiss FLOSS alternative to Visa, Mastercard and Paypal) begins operating in Switzerland as Version 1.0 releases

news.itsfoss.com

Digital Payment System GNU Taler Gets Green Light to Operate in Switzerland

GNU Taler begins operating in Switzerland, distributed by the Taler Operations AG. Gnu Taler aims to be a “digital wallet” and has been used by the swiss national bank as well as the european national bank as a example for how a digital currency handed out by the state could work. It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.

Currently the Taler is brought out by a special organisation, the “Taler Operations AG”, and not the national bank, although both the national bank as well as the Taler Team have shown interest in a official digial currency by the national bank based on the Taler. But we need to relativate as the national council has stated that the introduction of a digital currency would probably take relatively major legislative changes and therefore take a bit of time.

129 comments

I looked at this a looong time ago, but the basic idea is that the tokens (equivalent to cash coins/banknotes) are generated on the end user's device, through some public-key cryptographic back-and-forth protocol. The issuer (bank/central bank/payment provider) does not see these tokens (they're only on the end users device), but can verify that they're legit (i.e. issued by them) somehow.
You can take one of these tokens to them, and deposit it in an account. They won't know who it's from but they know it was legitimately issued by them. Depositing a token is also supposed to be the only way of figuring out if it is a legit token, the bank will not tell you if a token is legit unless you deposit it.
When someone pays with these tokens in a shop, the shop will want to immediately (during checkout) deposit them, to make sure they're legit, and also to make sure the token hasn't been double spent. A shop that doesn't do that makes itself vulnerable to fraud. This means shops will have a hard time hiding their revenue (to dodge taxes) compared to cash.
If someone you trust gives you a token (birthday money from your grandma, say), you don't have to immediately deposit said token, since presumably you trust your grandma to not give you fake or double-spent tokens. Since you trust you grandma, there is no need to deposit the token and involve the bank, and that transfer would be untraceable (it's literally just copying a number from her phone to yours).
The idea is that shop owners would have a hard time dodging taxes without opening themselves up to fraudsters using fake tokens, while the customer cannot be identified. You'd also be able to exchange tokens with family and friends in a way that isn't traceable, as long as you trust them to not screw you over.
- iirc they did have some mechanisms to prevent token fraud but I honestly can't remeber how it was implemented.
- Dude, I assume my grandma has absolutely been scamed, and her birthday money is basically as valuable as Trump coins
  
  Then you wana deposit it immediately to find out, like a seller does
  
  I'm expecting that if she has been scammed and her token was stolen, you can report this token to the police and they might be able to ask the banking system in which account was this token deposited, to hopefully trace the scammer back.
  If so, this looks safer than the scams that ask grandmas to get giftcard codes.
  But that's assuming that the token was obtained from grandm's bank and not that the grandma paid a scammer in some other untraceable way to obtain a fake token from the scammer. That would be a different kind of scam.
- Can you find the link from where you originally got this information?
  
  Go on the official Taler Website, they have all the info there iirc
- Great write up. Thank you.
- What happens to my funds when my phone is lost or stolen?
  
  If you don't have a backup then you're likely out of luck. But that's better than cash, where you can't make a backup
- How would other types of taxes, like in you example, gift tax, be handled?
- What is the relationship of fiat currency to tokens? is it €1:1 token?
  
  The tokens can be worth different amounts. There can be 1 ¢ tokens, 10 ¢ tokens, 1 € euro tokens, 10 € tokens, whatever. Your wallet app will, when withdrawing, generate various tokens worth different amounts.
  Using those tokens will be somewhat like paying in cash at a store that does not return any change. You gotta pay the exact amount. In order to facilitate that, you'd withdraw tokens worth only small amounts. There wouldn't be like be any 50 € tokens in practice. If you wanted to withdraw 50 €, you'd get 1000 1 ¢ tokens, 100 10 ¢ tokens, and the rest 1 € tokens or something like that, to make sure you always have the exact amount ready to pay for anything.

Digital currency without "blockchain", say it ain't so! This is why I think it might actually work. It's not based on some kind of Rube Goldberg experiment to run the world power into nothingness.
- Is Taler decentralized?
  
  Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.
  The digital exchange seems to be centralised.
  
  Somewhat
- Its centralized you mean, and is at the whims of the creator. Like comparing a scarce asset like Pokémon card to gold
  
  So the blockchain supporting $Trump makes it so much more trustworthy?

Could this be scaled to other European countries?
- Shouldn't we gather feedback first from that experiment before scaling up?
  
  Been waiting for Taler for ages. I'm ready now, you wait 😝
  
  Of course. I was only curious if it could be done.
  
  Also... I'm wondering what that means in practice because if it's online infrastructure then... it can be operating in Switzerland but both sellers and buyers, remotely or face-to-face, can rely on it to exchange money.
  So... what are the limitations at the moment, both technically and legally?
- I mean. Someone will have to maintain the same kind of infrastructure that visa and mastercard does. It would require a monumental amount of investment. Not to mention that it can, under no circumstances, go down during peak use.
- I'm all for it.
- At which point is this worthy to try?

Can we get GNU Taller to all europe please

LETS GO!?!?!?!? I have been waiting for taler to be usable for ages now. I doubt it will ever come to canada, but hey, small wins are small wins.

What's their stance on porn?
- That'll be a big one. I could see tons of artists wanting to flock to a platform without risks of a ban.
  
  And any platform that wants to allow adult content would have a viable means to secure funding. You can't overstate how far the chilling effects of VISA et al's anti-porn stance reaches.
- It seems sellers can host their own payment receipt service and the verfication comes from cryptographically signing the money when it's issued from issuers

would be pretty based if they actually succeeds

I warmly recommend anybody who didn't use GNU Taler yet to do so right now, for free, in minutes :
GNU Taler provides a well done demonstration https://demo.taler.net/ that one can try right here in the browser, going from a virtual bank to their wallet and buying items in "KUDOS". It does address quite a few points raised in different discussions here.
- And here is transfer from my Web based wallet to my mobile wallet, again with the testing currency :

What's their stance on heroin?
- Buy all you want, sell and you're fucked.
  
  Well it probably depends on your local laws
  
  That's pretty in line with Taler then

Cool

Sounds a lot like Zelle.
- Yup but Zelle is proprietary. I think an open source payment system could reduce transaction fees quite a bit.
  
  Zelle does not have any transaction fees.
- Not really. Zelle seems to just be US banks implementing the payment and bank-to-bank transfer systems that other countries already have. Except, at least for Australia with our 'Osko' system it has the involvement of our Reserve Bank and is mandated to be supported universally, whereas Zelle is completely private. The traditional lack of that bank-to-bank transfer ability is why apps like Venmo and Cash App have been popular in the US, which I think explains why Zelle has had an app until last month, as consumers expect that, even though it's owned by the major US banks.
  Taler on the other hand seems to be "What if crypto but with fiat currency and also the recipients aren't anonymous".
  
  Every US bank has the ability to wire money, but there's no easy way to do it.
  
  US banks have wires and ACH. How is zelle different?
  
  You know most cryptocurrency reciepts are super transparent, right? The blockchain is a public ledger. There is no anonymity on non privacy coins like bitcoin

I didn't read the article but based on the headline it sounds interesting. I'm just worried about adoption rate but I guess they've got to start somewhere

How different is this from Indian systems like PayTM or PhonePe ? functionally.
- UPI is basically a way to sent money from bank account to bank account. Privacy is no where in UPI system.

Bitcoin?
- Bitcoin allows the seller to evade taxes, lacks a central exchange, and has no distinction between Merchants and Consumers.
  
  I'm not interested in defending bitcoin, but that is mostly misinformation. If you want to truly condemn bitcoin you should target it's actual harm, the fact that it's accelerated low-friction financialization of capitalist money, so therefore immiserates the working class faster than fiat. Come at it with the good old Marxist critiques of capital, because that's all it really is. If you argue against it with flimsy falsifiable claims like you just did, a true believer will make you look like a fool.

“Based in Switzerland.”
I rather support a real European country and not a made up one.
- All countries are "made up".. modern Italy was fully unified in 1870 and Germany in 1871.
  What is a real European country in your opinion?
  
  I think they mean one in the EU
  
  Switzerland always benefited from being a secure and reliable country thanks to his position in central EU and his cowardice in modern conflicts.
  If you are known to be neutral, then accept people will treat you with indifference. Join the EU, abide by its law (especially the fiscal ones) then you will have my support.
  Until this happens I rather support Italian or German companies who pay taxes to the EU community.

I rarely wish for an opensource project to fail, but Taler is an exception. Offering a digital currency system for the government to use is like sending an efficiency improvement proposal to Auschwitz.
- You say that as if the majority of currency transactions worldwide weren’t already digital.
  
  Yeah, but at least those are handled by capitalist overlords instead of government overlords. I hear capitalist boot tastes better
  
  Physical or digital does not really matter. Gving such a powerful tool to a central bank seems too dangerous. If implemented, it's not really a question of IF it's going to be abused, but WHEN it's going to be abused.
  The digital currencies were supposed to give more power to the people, but the Taler is working in the oposite direction.
- You might actually like Taler, it's fundamentally different from blockchain based systems, to the point of being a cryptocurrency only in the technical sense, but not having any of the properties people associate with that word culturally.
  Taler doesn't use any kind of proof of work, and so doesn't consume excess power or other resources, at least not more than, like, visiting any normal webpage. It's also not decentralized, and only partially anonymous, so I can acquire money anonymously and no one can trace the money I got to a particular spend, but the only place I can reasonably spend it has to be registered to the centralized issuer and is firmly not anonymous. And the only things they can do with the tokens they receive is redeem them, which means there's no place for tax evasion because the issuing authority can track every dollar the registered vendors redeem with them. And you can't really transfer money from random person to person, so there's no black market opportunity, etc.
  So basically the only thing Taler "protects" is that the buyer's identity can be anonymous, but any vendor accepting Taler must not be and are highly trackable.
  These are things I actually don't like about Taler, but we may be on opposite sides of a few issues, which is fair.
  
  How would one acquire tokens anonymously but in a way that you can verify that you acquired genuine tokens, and what keeps those tokens from being given to multiple people? This is really where the privacy aspects fall down. It’s a hard problem to solve in Bitcoin, but at least you can have Bitcoin ATMs that you can verify that you received the funds.
  A Taler ATM it seems could issue invalid tokens or issue the same tokens to every client and there would be no way to know until you tried to spend it or deposit it in your account (thus defeating the anonymity).
  
  You've pretty accurately described everything that's wrong with it.
- Thing is, most money is already digitised and tracked. Taler has the genius of giving (hopefully) enough accountability on the receiving end to satisfy tax and counter-fraud, whilst at the same time giving privacy and anonymity to the spender.
  
  That's my main problem. They had a chance to make it fully anonymous and fungible, yet decided to implement an intentional vulnerability to reveal the receiving party.
- Uh what?
- most tactful .world user
- can you explain your train of thought here? GNU taler is finally an open source payment system buisnesses can actually use without needing to jump through a bunch of legal loopholes and headaches
- I don't even know what you're saying. Is this anti-money, anti-government, anti-technology...

129 comments