Further addendum to the above, because I can’t stop.
If you’re a certain kind of abolishionist, there may still be something for you in Taler.
Taler can be used pretty trivially to make a “downtown dollars” or “store loyalty points” system, where the issuer is the store or local BIA or whoever and it’s just a drop-in open source system that already does all you need. And it doesn’t matter that you can’t move between exchanges, because they’re store loyalty points, and it doesn’t matter that you maybe can’t transfer them between people, because they’re store loyalty points, and it doesn’t matter that the vendor is fully auditable, because the vendor is the issuer, or at the very least the local neighbourhood association. And it doesn’t matter that the issuer can put pressure on the vendors, because they already can.
In this use-case, the consumer privacy component is also basically useless, but it doesn’t hurt and being able to deploy the system and use an open source wallet to “collect and spend points” is better that cooking something up in MySQL. So in that one weird way, Taler might be good for a local community because it’s a free software system that can just be deployed to do a simple thing.
Further addendum to the above, because I can’t stop.
If you’re a certain kind of abolishionist, there may still be something for you in Taler.
Taler can be used pretty trivially to make a “downtown dollars” or “store loyalty points” system, where the issuer is the store or local BIA or whoever and it’s just a drop-in open source system that already does all you need. And it doesn’t matter that you can’t move between exchanges, because they’re store loyalty points, and it doesn’t matter that you maybe can’t transfer them between people, because they’re store loyalty points, and it doesn’t matter that the vendor is fully auditable, because the vendor is the issuer, or at the very least the local neighbourhood association. And it doesn’t matter that the issuer can put pressure on the vendors, because they already can.
In this use-case, the consumer privacy component is also basically useless, but it doesn’t hurt and being able to deploy the system and use an open source wallet to “collect and spend points” is better that cooking something up in MySQL. So in that one weird way, Taler might be good for a local community because it’s a free software system that can just be deployed to do a simple thing.