On P2P payments from their FAQ: “While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete.”
How about, no? How about me paying €50 to my friend for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated, KYCed, and blocked if they don’t approve of it or know who the recipient is? How about it’s none of the government’s business how I split the bill at dinner with friends? This level of surveillance is madness, especially coming from an app that touts “privacy” as a feature.
GNU Taler is a trojan horse to enable CBDC adoption. They are the friendly face to an absolutely terrifying level of government control in our lives funded by the same government that tries every year to implement chat control. Imagine your least favourite political party gaining power. Now imagine they can see and control every transaction you make. No thanks.
I disagree. Taler also individuals to stay private while preventing crime. I personally could never use crypto as it empowers criminals and is very unpredictable. Taler uses flat currency so you don’t need to worry about it losing value overnight.
It isn’t done yet and it may get abandoned but it is a start. For now it is a interesting project to watch. Also cash is king
There are a number of stabletokens that you also wouldn’t need to worry about losing value overnight.
Stablecoins are the worst of crypto and central banking combined.
Several of them have already collapsed spectacularly. More will in time. Avoid stablecoins.
Some stablecoins are centralized, but it’s not a fundamental requirement of how they operate. Stabletokens such as DAI or Liquity are run without a central company. They cannot “rug” you because they’re based on smart contracts.
Isn’t that kind of the point?
Smart contract code can be audited by anyone and trusted to run exactly as it’s written.
Stablecoins aren’t required to peg to any specific measure of value (I assume you’re referring to US dollars?). There are stabletokens pegged to gold, for example, if you really want something like that.
Since US dollars work just fine for commerce, though, using a stabletoken that’s pegged to US dollars works fine for commerce too.
That’s just smoke and mirrors. If there was a “bank run” on a stable coin all of them would immediately collapse as there is nothing of real value backing them.
Anything of value is capable of losing its value under some circumstances, since value is assigned by humans. Obviously you pick and choose based on your use cases.
That’s a cop-out to avoid discussing that none of the stable coins have anywhere close to the assets they claim to have and which would be necessary to peg the value.
You can examine the MakerDAO contract, for example, and see all of the assets they claim to have sitting right there under its control on the blockchain. You can see the contract logic behind how those assets enter and exit its control.
If you can’t see how the snake bites its own tail here I can’t really help you, but on-chain “assets” do nothing for a stable coin that needs to be secured by off-chain assets.
Criminality is unfortunately a very subjective term. Data brokers are not criminals, neither corrupt politicians, but you can easily become one by not doing any harm, but going on a protest, or standing up to bad things imposed on you or other people.
True but in this case I’m talking about dark web illegal activity
Taler can be used for custom currencies too. Anyone can run a mint for their own currency, and anyone can participate in handing out coins of a given currency, problem in exchange for things outside of the system. The reporting capability of Taler is tied to the currency.
We will probably see it if it can really be done, but I think “traditional” cryptocurrencies could be implemented on top of taler.
You could use Crypto with Taler but it wouldn’t make a lot of sense as crypto is digital anyway. It also would have all the draw backs of crypto.
Do you also avoid cash?
I like cash as it is a physical and reasonably traceable while preventing mass surveillance
Yes, they’re a nuisance to carry around anyway.
I stick to cash because I don’t think my bank should know things as sensitive as the full history of my transactions, which may or may not also be sold to others. Also in times like these I would not be surprised if you’d get in trouble for transferring some funds to a dissident’s card, while in reality it was just splitting the bar bill.