GNU Taler is a Free Software payment system that preserves the privacy of payers while ensuring that income is visible to authorities.
From the FAQ:
How to avoid digital cash expiration?
Taler e-money is issued with a validity period. One month before the expiration date, your wallet should automatically exchange any digital cash that is about to expire for new digital cash with an extended validity period. However, if your wallet is offline for an extended period of time, it may be unable to do so. Ensure your wallet is regularly online to avoid losing money due to expiration!
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.
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.
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
I have seen 0 articles relating GNU Taler with the digital Euro, and I am very worried this incredible project will end nowhere. Because the digital Euro is definitely coming and that would be the moment to put Taler to work.
Taler has a completely different application. Digital euro won’t use it
Could you expand?
AFAIK Taler is for payments, the Digital Euro is for storing value.
Yes, but also, your Taler wallet stores value too, I guess.
In any case, I wonder why Taler has not made it a point that they are (or could) be a payment system for the digital euro.
Who is the Payment Service Provider?
I can’t tell if this is decentralised.
Wow that sounds like a terrible product no one would want, who is the target audience for such a thing?
I’ll stick with monero.
