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.

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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      1 month ago

      Dude, I assume my grandma has absolutely been scamed, and her birthday money is basically as valuable as Trump coins

      • Ferk@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        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.

    • Paddy66@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      What is the relationship of fiat currency to tokens? is it €1:1 token?

      • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        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.

  • demunted@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Shouldn’t we gather feedback first from that experiment before scaling up?

        • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          I don’t necessarily have to wait, it’s more a generic advice.

          Can you please expand though, as I’m curious, why you won’t wait and you plan to use it?

          Can you also comment on my follow up question, namely what are the limitations at the moment, both technically and legally? Basically does not living in Switzerland make a difference anyway for users?

          • tabular@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            It was mostly a playful comment on my part (indicated by the emoji) - I’ve waited this long so they might as well do it properly.

            I would like to buy products/services online privately, “using cash” as it were. I also value software freedom and the Taler client is GPL. The API is LGPL but hopefully I can avoid using proprietary software for transactions.

            I looked into setting up a method of donations on itch.io when I was focused on that hobby and the options of PayPal or Stripe just felt icky. I don’t want to use them, or encourage others to do so.

          • tabular@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            I watched technical talks (like this) on GNU Taler ages ago so this might be out of date but the most difficult part to me would be the banks being interested in supplying the service necessary. You get money to your browser wallet by transferring it from your bank account.

            I don’t live in Switzerland and can’t imagine banks or government supporting anything but their own version that gives them control.

            • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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              1 month ago

              Thanks again, if the wallet is “filled” by a bank transfer then I imagine anything able to do so, e.g. my random European bank that allow IBAN transfer, would suffice as long as my wallet itself has an IBAN or that the service provider hosting that wallet has one and then “store” the then “money” for it and allow me to spend it with other GNU Taler wallets.

              Anyway I’ll explore through a recent technical talk indeed, good suggestion.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        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?

    • teslasaur@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      And here is transfer from my Web based wallet to my mobile wallet, again with the testing currency :

  • deafboy@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • davel@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      You say that as if the majority of currency transactions worldwide weren’t already digital.

      • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        Yeah, but at least those are handled by capitalist overlords instead of government overlords. I hear capitalist boot tastes better

      • deafboy@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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.

        • davel@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago
          1. Governments have controlled money for millennia, and governments’ central banks have for over a century. There’s nothing new going on there.
          2. You’re conflating digital currency and cryptocurrency. All cryptocurrencies are digital, but not all digital currencies are crypto.
    • psycotica0@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      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.