There's tons of regulatory hurdles to operating any kind of money transmitter, at least in the US. Also, Taler is designed to be reversible which is problematic in some situations. The opposite is of course problematic in other situations.

Chaum's original digicash patents are long expired by now. I wonder if those schemes should be revisited.

Taler needs buy in from banks and irrc it's only being trialled by some Swiss banks atm.

Potentially, maybe. Taler is centralized and has poor privacy protections, but if it ever takes off it might become a good option in jurisdictions where decentralized currencies are illegal.

Meanwhile, Monero already works for the Fediverse:

https://deadsuperhero.com/the-fediverse-and-content-creation-monetization/#honorable-mention-mitra

Tried the demo a little while ago, ready to use whenever it's being actually usable.

I would love an ethical solution to banks and currency. I think it's one of the most important areas for decentralisation.

Sure. Why not?

While not a very well known project, Crowdbucks's (a Liberapay/Kofi alternative for the Fediverse) dev told me that he was investigating how GNU Taler works and wanted to implement support for it in his project: https://mastodon.social/@reiver/115097895209652675

Liberapay's team should also be working on implementing support for it. They got a grant specifically for that: https://nlnet.nl/project/TALER-Liberapay/

If we are lucky, we will see GNU Taler being used by the EU as the system behind the digital euro in a few years. Then it most likely will become mainstream.

I wish it actually became more mainstream than Wero e.g.