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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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Wow that sounds like a terrible product no one would want, who is the target audience for such a thing?
Target audience: People who want to pay for stuff anonymously through the Internet. It's a large and underserved market.
It's a big part of why people got so excited about bitcoin, and why it was so disappointing when it spectacularly failed to be any good at that application.
It doesnt sound very anonymous. If the info is "visable to authorities" then its not very private.
Paypal and most other services already allow for payments to be "private" but visable to authorities.
People who actually want private and anoymous payments already use crypto.
Taler ensures asymmetric privacy. The buyer does not expose their identity to the seller (or the government), not what they bought to their bank/payment-provider. But the seller needs to expose their income for tax purposes. This is a good compromise as it follows existing law and prevents tax-evasion and (to some extend) money laundering.
Taler does use crypto, aka cryptography, to make sending payments securely anonymous. That is the main point of it.
The same audience as Paypal, which seems to be reasonably popular. Except this is privacy preserving and an open standard that many providers can use.