Depositing money in the system is not anonymous - it can't track whether you bought your own fake product or something else, but you would already have to have "clean" money to convert it to Taler at an exchange.
Yes, I know that stuff. What I don't know is how Taler exchanges would handle customer information. The reliance on bank transfers and card payments is troubling. I've read https://taler.net/ with some care, and I'm still not clear.
> Taler is an electronic payment system that was built with the goal of supporting taxation. With Taler, the receiver of any form of payment is known, and the payment information comes attached with some details about what the payment was made for (but not the identity of the customer). Thus, governments can use this data to tax buisnesses and individuals based on their income, making tax evasion and black markets less viable.
However, at https://taler.net/citizens I see nothing about anonymizing deposits via bank transfer from payments. I can buy Bitcoin in the same way. But before I spend them, I can anonymize by mixing via Tor. Without that step, there is no substantive anonymity.
Validation of which requires a functioning pervasive VAT or similar mechanism to prevent laundering and fraud. There's no way to win here.
Truly anonymous, or even mostly anonymous money is basically isomorphic to bitcoin: it's mostly fraud and illegality, with just enough privacy advocates (and a few dirty preppers) to make it look legitimate.
That is completely incorrect. In cashless payment systems like GNU Taler customers are anonymous while only merchants e.g. recipients of payments are not anonymous to comply with anti money laundering and income transparency for the purpose of taxes.
That's just wrong. If me and 10 other people buy things for 5 bucks from a vendor with taler, there is no way to trace it to us as I understand, and no way to distinguish which of us paid which 5 bucks. How is that isomorphic to full surveillance? It's more privacy than both traditional payment Systems and most cryptocurrencies
I don't see why this would be an issue. Merchants deal with all of this today while accepting cash, which is an anonymous payment. None of this relies on tracking the individual customer.
The merchants accepting Taler payments would still be responsible for computing and including the applicable sales taxes in the final price charged to the customer. The customer then pays that, anonymously.
Chaumian digital cash is fine, but that isn't what taler actually implements.
Instead, it requires the recipient to identify themselves and the amounts for every payments. This is a continuous realtime surveillance which does not exist for cash.
Used perfectly it might be potentially more private than paypal, but no one is under any illusion that paypal is particularly private.
On a scale of ethical behavior providing strong privacy is superior to providing limited privacy but both are vastly superior to falsely claiming something has strong privacy when it is limited.
Taler takes matters a step further a falsely claim that its continuous realtime mass surveillance is required to facilitate lawful taxation. This claim is false-- an outright lie in fact. Not only is it technically not required, it's not legally required either and taxation has existed for countless generations when this kind of electronic surveillance was unimaginable.
> The bank, government and mint will also never learn how you spent your electronic money. However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary.
> With Taler, the receiver of any form of payment is known, and the payment information comes attached with some details about what the payment was made for (but not the identity of the customer). Thus, governments can use this data to tax buisnesses and individuals based on their income
> There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy.
Private payments can easily solved without a blockchain. For private payments you don't need a completely trust-less system. Taler[1] solves this quite elegantly: they provide completetly anonymous payments for the customer but still require the merchant to be 'on-record' to make money laundering harder/impossible. For that they rely on a regulated and trusted party as you would with a regular payment provider or bank. No proof of work needed, no value volatility, just an online representation of cash with accountability for the merchant built-in.
Of course, this also means that your second point is still valid for Taler: The involved trusted parties could collectively decide that they want to discriminate against certain merchants, in the same way the current payment providers did.
What about real currency isn't anonymous? If (god forbid) someone took $100 in cash to a pedophile and bought pornography, how is this traceable in the existing system?
Cash is already somewhat traceable (what did you think it was numbered for?) and it's illegal to buy some things anonymously, so it's really strange that you believe these things.
Traditional currency isn't really anonymous. Sure it is theoretically possible to do an anonymous 150 million dollar cash transaction in USD but in practical terms it's basically impossible without a great deal of money laundering. I believe by law in North America banks have to report any cash transactions >= 10k per 24 hour period to the government. Additionally every bill has a traceable serial number on it.
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