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GNU Taler v1.0 released
(www.taler.net)
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this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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From the FAQ:
You can lose money if the coins in your wallet "expire".
The fact that this system is shipping v1.0 with such an anti-user design deficiency tells me all I need to know. I wonder how many Taler "beta" users will lose their cash before they fix the design. I wonder how much of the customer support load of the exchanges will be dealing with this issue.
And this comes after a decade of the cryptocurrency industry educating users to store their funds in a cold-wallet to avoid getting hacked, so it's counter-intuitive to anyone with passing experience of digital currencies. If there's one thing that we learnt from the cryptocurrecy industry, it's that users don't care to understand how the technology works, and will do stupid things. Anything that seeks wide adoption needs to be designed for non-technical people.
What a terrible design decision.
Yes, like turning a digital payment system into a speculative asset and making it basically impossible to actually buy anything with it.
But it seems you are totally missing the point of Taler, as it doesn't even aim to be anything like so called crypto-"currencies". It's a digital payment system like Paypal, but decentralized.
No, I'm not missing that point, I understand the design goals of Taler. You seem to have misinterpreted my comment. I am pointing out that the inability to store Taler currency in a cold wallet is counter to existing user education from similar systems (digital currencies) and therefore will lead to loss of funds of users who don't understand how Taler works.
Except for some very niche crypto-currency users no one stores "money" like that. You have a bank account where you store money.
What other digital payment system than crypto allows cold wallets?
I think the whole point is that you're not supposed to keep your money in your taler wallet for an extended period. Its mostly a way to facilitate payment between different crypto/currencies
To maintain the anonymity goal you still want to obtain Talers in advance (otherwise you'd open yourself up to timing correlation) - so they will have to be in the wallet for some non-negligible duration.
Regardless of expiration that also means the device holding the secrets to use the Talers can be lost in that time, so you need some e.g. encrypted cloud backup to restore from. Since people are terrible at printing out recovery codes, you can either have key escrow (leading to a compromise of the anonymity properties), or you accept that some people will lose their money for reasons they will not understand.
Regardless, I would much prefer Taler as a CBDC to whatever permissioned Blockchain garbage the Big4 consulting companies will come up with.
Taler is not a store of value. Exchanging some Taler is like going to the ATM and withdrawing some cash to put in your wallet.
See my first sentence.
Yes, like cash.
So its basically like taking money out if the ATM before you go spend it. You dont have to do it when you're buying things