Cryptocurrency is speedrunning ruining everything. We might as well have a laugh at the cryptobros’ expense in the meantime.

I loved the concept at first, the idea of a decentralized currency all handled by encryption, and transactions permamently stored in a public ledger for all to see.

Then the cryptobros and the scammers caught wind of it and it’s all downhill from there.

If you want the name of a payment techology that isn’t snake oil, isn’t blockchain-based, isn’t a cult, doesn’t claim to be a currency, doesn’t work on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, but actually does provide certain privacy guarantees for your basic purchasing needs, is cryptographically secure, and can be used with only FOSS, I recommend looking into GNU Taler.

The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.

Yea, that is interesting! I don’t really understand a lot of it though. Wonder how censorship-resistant it can be, and whether the receiver would be able to cash it out anonymously.

I’m not an expert on it, but I’ve done a certain amount of study on it.

I’m pretty sure there are no privacy guarantees for money receivers. Merchants/sellers would still be identifiable by banks and governments and such. So Taler isn’t what anyone selling heroin or doing murder for hire would want to be using as an accepted payment method. (At least not any more so than credit/debit card transactions will help the seller with keeping their doings secret.)

But Taler can keep the buyers’ identity secret. Unless you’re doing things in ways that reveal information about yourself, your bank and your government wouldn’t know you were buying fursuits even if they knew the merchant was selling fursuits.

So all that to say that no, the merchant couldn’t cash out anonymously.

What I don’t understand is whether it is like “Taler is obtained and cashed out only in a bank, but the link between two events is unknown” or if Taler can change hands during said “link”.

If the former - I really hope it gets implemented as a card replacement, but it would need to coexist with something like Monero (which is what I use now) that is more akin to cash. But I really hope that somehow non-blockchain full-on “digital cash” could one day be invented, so wonder if this could be it :)

How I understand it is:

• You go to your bank (or use a webapp or whatever) who knows who you are and get them to initiate a withdrawl from your bank account to your Taler wallet in the amount of, say $100.
• The balance in your Taler wallet goes up by $100. The bank also decrements your bank account by $100 and puts that $100 in an escrow holding intending to pay it to whatever recipient(s) can provide cryptographic proof that you gave them Taler.
• You go to a merchant and pay out of that $100 Taler balance $9 for a cheeseburger and fries.
• The merchant receives $9 in Taler from you and checks with your bank that that $9 hasn’t already been spent previously before concluding the payment process and giving you your receipt and burger.
• You now have a burger and fries and your Taler balance is $91.
• But the merchant doesn’t learn anything about your identity in the process. But they do have proof that your bank has $9 in escrow earmarked for them (the merchant) specifically.
• And your bank doesn’t know which of their customers to which they’ve ever given Taler is the one buying from the merchant in question. They just know that of the total sum of Taler they’ve issued that hasn’t been collected yet, $9 is earmarked for such-and-such merchant/burger joint.
• The merchant can settle up any time, but theoretically the bank can charge per-transaction fees. In order to minimize fees, it behooves the merchant to batch up settlements. The merchant can claim actual USD for every dollar that was used at that establishment by customers via Taler over, say, the last week or whatever in one big settlement batched transaction.

I’m leaving out some details, but that should give you a decent idea of how things work with Taler.

Now, as for this bit:

if Taler can change hands during said “link”.

That, I’m not sure of. It might be that you can transfer Taler from your wallet to someone else’s wallet (that they could then spend) without any identities being revealed, though they wouldn’t be able to get real USD or whatever without working with your bank which would generally insist on confirming their identity. But I’d think in order for the recipient in that situation to know that they actually had real Taler and not Taler that you had already spent and that wouldn’t actually work if they tried to spend it or cash it in, they’d have to make basically an API call to your bank, though unless the bank blocked all traffic from every VPN and traffic anonymizer (like Tor or I2p) in existence, I see no reason why it couldn’t be done in a way that preserved the recipient’s anonymity.

So yeah. Not sure. But even if that bit isn’t a thing, I still want Taler to take off.