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Since this is a privacy community, I’ll mention that Taler has some very deliberate, but interesting, stances in its design. It’s designed to be privacy preserving for the customer, but fully accountable for the vendors.
So the vendor doesn’t know who paid them (ID wise, obviously they can associate payments with orders or whatever), and the state can’t track who is sending money to which vendors, but the state does know how much each vendor got and who they are.
Because of that, Taler has no peer to peer transfers at all, if I’m not mistaken. It’s all “money is issued by the state, you keep it, and then spend it only at state-licensed vendors. End of options, that’s all you can do and that’s the only way you can do it”
Which again, they chose to do for reasons, like preserving the ability to audit companies for taxes and to prevent laundering and shady practices, but some in this community may not like that, even if it does preserve consumer privacy.
More details on the above, Taler does allow to you send money to friends or family as a feature, but it’s in the same way PayPal or banking systems do. I send coins to the state, ask them to be sent to this other person, and the state consumes my coins, issues new ones for them, and there’s nothing private about it. The state knows each party and the value transfered. So useful, but not private. Or maybe the sender is still private, but the recipient definitely isn’t, they’re basically just an ad-hoc vendor, and vendors are not private.
Taler doesn’t have any of the “proof of work” environmental concerns of other crypto currencies, which is good for some people. But the reason it doesn’t is because it’s centralized and non-federated. If I get my money from Exchange A, I can only spend it at vendors who are associated with Exchange A. Period. There could be a scheme where Exchange A is a vendor with Exchange B, and Exchange B is a vendor with Exchange A, and this allows them to build a feature where money is allowed to “flow” between exchanges, but this is just the banking system again, and would be built on agreements and products on top of Taler rather than part of Taler.
Because of the above, the issuer (which I’ve called an exchange and “the state” above because I’m consistent) has the same ability as Visa and Mastercard to pressure vendors and shut them out. Because all spends must go through the exchange, and because there’s no safe way to transfer money without the exchange’s involvement, if they don’t like that you make trans comics, they can freeze you and all your money evaporates with no in-system recourse.
So for all intents and purposes, the benefit of Taler over current banking systems and credit card systems is that it’s an open standard rather than something bespoke, that I can participate in it with an open source wallet, and once I’m using it, as a consumer, they don’t know what I personally am paying for, but they do know what “people in general” are paying for.
That’s about it, because I still need to sign up to get money from an issuer, I still need a vendor account to be a vendor, I still am “locked-in” to whichever exchange my wallet was issued from, and that issuer has unilateral control over which vendors it likes.
But those benefits I mentioned above aren’t nothing, so it really comes down to how you feel about the rest of “the system” you’re in. If you’re an anarchist or abolishionist, there’s roughly nothing for you in Taler. It has hierarchy and control built in. But if you’re an open source person who feels like the legal system is the appropriate place to settle debates and that it’s more valuable to society to have something “simple” with no environmental impact and that doesn’t operate as a tax shelter or money laundering system, Taler can be that!
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.
Unless its widely acceptable at least through EU, it won’t work. The value expiration is also a concern, somehow something messes up and you loose the amount.
I’m not a Taler fan, but it’s my understanding there’s a pretty generous gap there. Like, if it expires in a year, your client will start trying to renew it at 6 months, so things would have to be pretty messed up for you to not be able to renew for a full half a year. That’s more like the system is just fully gone, at that point.
It’s not like the expiration is at 10:05 this morning and your client tried at 10:04, got an error and now you’re ruined.
EDIT: I looked it up rather than pulling numbers out of my bum, and the FAQ says the current wallet renews things a month early. So not as far ahead as I said, but still within the spirit of what I said. What I don’t currently know is if there’s a server-side limit, or if an individual client can be configured to request even more in advance.
Sounds interesting to me…
