Has anyone tried this out yet? Ive been somewhat following its progress as well as the progress of the whole gnunet project and they seem to be doing really good work.
I have tried out their Kudos demo, which works great. Otherwise there is sadly not much you can try out yourself yet and self-hosting is a bit complicated from what I have seen in their documentation.
This is interesting, I can see this being a more accessible alternative to crypto. It does reduce the use cases, I can see it being used for cross-border purchases where the product is illegal in the buyers country
It’s a way to digitally pay money like Visa or Paypal but (FOSS and better for privacy), so you could use it for everything from online shopping (micropayments on the fediverse?!?) to paying at the supermarket. If people adopt it …
There should be a screenshot of the interface on the homepage not just a bended phone. Cool idea though I hope this is implemented by Patreon and Gumroad style services
We provide a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and easy. Payments without registration Data protection by default Fraud eliminated by design Not a new currency! Empowers communities to run their own payment infrastructure Free Software
I think that could be said about a lot of specialized communities , you can do a wikipedia search , that’s better then just repeating the descriptions of software whenever they are mentioned.
The link doesn’t explain what Taler is, you then also have to click through to the home page. How hard can it be to add literally a single sentence like
Taler is a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and easy.
You may want to change the fr link to en. While the served content text is English, the page advertises its content as French. (My Firefox offers me to translate the supposedly French text to English - which is obviously unnecessary.)
It would be amazing if you could pay in the command line. Like imagine when you appreciate a foss library and can easily make a donation. Then you can build all sorts of software on top of that.
Iirc the pirate bay guys made something like that, but only in the browser, and only for very few websites. It gives the content a like button. Periodically it then distributes money over all your likes from a preset pool of cash.
As far as I understand it inflation is an important tool that allows for redistribution of wealth to where it is needed in hard times. For example when a bank fails.
Then you can say that banks shouldn’t borrow out more money than they have, but that would reduce growth.
Then you can say growth is bad but growth doesn’t necessarily mean consuming more resources. It’s mainly needed for the system to sustain and adapt. For example to climate change.
Which ties in back nicely to Monero, as it uses proof of work which is a senseless waste of resources if you ask me.
Overall I just wish for a cli/api that works regardless of which payment provider you personally select.
As far as I understand it inflation is an important tool that allows for redistribution of wealth to where it is needed in hard times. For example when a bank fails.
With a cryptocurrency as long as you hold the keys, then you are the bank, and no one will look after your money better than you will. If you end up with no money, it’s no one else’s fault but your own. The primary use for inflation is to fund wars, which I disagree with. And far from redistributing the wealth to where it’s needed. Inflation actually hurts those who are poor the most because those who are poor don’t hold assets such as gold and silver and stocks. They hold cash and their cash gets worth less and less all the time.
Then you can say that banks shouldn’t borrow out more money than they have, but that would reduce growth.
I do firmly believe this. You cannot lend out people’s money and then say that everybody can have their money on demand. If I put $1000 in a bank account and then the bank lends out $900, they still tell me i can withdraw $1000 on demand, but i cant because they don’t have it. Now, if I chose to take $900 of my dollars and loan it to the bank for, say, a year, then the bank would take my $1,000, take $900 of it, leaving me with $100, for, say, a year, and I would be fully aware that I could not withdraw my $1,000 in full until the year was over. A CD works this way. Some people will choose to lend out their money to the bank in order to make a profit, while others who are more conservative will not. And that’s their choice, but that choice should not be made for them.
Which ties in back nicely to Monero, as it uses proof of work which is a senseless waste of resources if you ask me.
You say proof of work is a waste of resources, and you may be right, but factor into your calculation how much the banking sector uses in resources in electricity, fuel to move money around in armored trucks, people coming to work, etc. If we were to move to a fully cryptocurrency world, sure we would have proof of work. Consuming resources, but at the same time, we would completely eliminate the entire banking sector at the same time. I don’t personally know whether the resource use would be less or not, but the fact that the governments would not be controlling the money supply would be one major, major advantage.
One final point, since you own the keys to your cryptocurrency, the government or anybody else cannot take your money at any time. Right now, when you put your money in a bank, instead of being your money, it’s their money with a pinky promise that you can have it whenever you want. But if Uncle Sam comes knocking they will break that promise in a heartbeat. If they want to arrest you, they should arrest you, but they should not be able to compel somebody to kick you out of the financial system. Plus the fact that they can do this for any reason becomes a serious power trip for the government. You are a political malcontent. Stop paying your rent and see what happens. And yes, the United States government absolutely does this. And they’ve done it to lots of famous people such as MLK or the Canadian truckers. Whether you believe these groups are right or wrong, the fact that this is done should scare the crap out of you because they could easily do it to you in future.
We may ultimately end up disagreeing, but I definitely appreciate your reply, because most people would just throw a downvote and move on.
I appreciate your reply. My UI does not allow for downvoting.
Hmm it seems to be a very political issue. I get the appeal of using technology to make social progress. But personally I feel that political issues are just that: political issues. The US has a bipolar government, and that’s an issue that needs solving. I’m not sure if crypto is the way to go there. I also trust in the inherent good of people and that they are open to reason, and that we can’t solve issues by being overly individualistic, aka hide behind public keys. That’s my perspective, that’s all.
Inherently, I think that positions of power such as governments attract people who wish to abuse power and abuse others. So the smaller that power structure is the less psychopathic the people that can get into power can become. Personally, I think the United States is too large and should be broken up into at least five smaller nations. By doing so, each nation could not afford a huge military, so would have to focus more on local issues instead of dominating the rest of the world like the United States does now. That’s why everybody hates us.
Iirc the pirate bay guys made something like that, but only in the browser, and only for very few websites. It gives the content a like button. Periodically it then distributes money over all your likes from a preset pool of cash.
Enabling micro payments is huge, and when combined with buyer privacy and merchant fraud protection it has the potential to finally rid us of online ads.
The concept of micro payments has been around for a while but there’s been no corporate incentive to make it work since Google who controls the browser with the largest market share also has a vested interest in ads.
The idea behind micro payments is that instead of seeing ads everywhere you are asked to pay a very small amount (cents or fractions of a cent) to read an article or simply to support a website. If you agree, the payment would be very simple and instantaneous because the technology would be integrated in the browser.
It would also be possible to simply disable this feature and stop seeing any requests, or to take the middle road and automatically agree to very small payments as long as they don’t add up too much or too quickly.
Das neue EU-Projekt NGI TALER soll private und sichere Online-Zahlungen in der Eurozone ermöglichen.
Die Organisationen GNUnet e.V. und Taler Systems SA geben die Gründung eines europäischen Projekts bekannt, das für die nächsten 36 Monate laufen wird. Dieses Internet-Pilotprojekt der nächsten Generation mit dem Namen "NGI TALER" wird von einem Konsortium aus 11 Partnern aus 8 europäischen Ländern betrieben und hat den Auftrag, ein innovatives elektronisches Zahlungssystem zum Nutzen der europäischen Bürger, Händler und Banken einzuführen.
This is great news! I thought GNU taler was dead, but having a private method of transferring money without some payments processor in the middle that loves your payment data? That’s amazing and it’s exciting to see it finally get off the ground.
taler.net
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