GNU Taler is built on top of existing payment systems. It’s just a token you exchange money for, like those arcades you go to where you exchange money for arcade tokens. So it’s only as decentralized as the system it’s built on top of.
It does provide some privacy, but only for buyers, so this doesn’t prevent censorship. If the banks want to ban porn sites from accepting money, or block Steam from accepting transactions for porn games, they can. Censoring sales is the same as censoring purchases.
On top of that, if GNU Taler is built on top of centralized banking like it’s currently pushing for, then it inherits the same problems. The government can say “Poor people can’t be trusted, so we won’t let poor people get tokens, they’ll just have to use trackable methods like Paypal.” Or they can have a social credit system and say “Only people with 5000 credit or above can use Taler.”
And the government and banks still control the value and supply of the currency. They can print money however they want.
GNU Taler also doesn’t try to solve the distributed consensus problem. Afaik, it offloads the problem to the implementation. I have no idea how current implementations deal with multiple servers disagreeing on the ledger of transactions (say, due to network issues or server crashes), but it sounds like it trusts that servers will cooperate, and uses government audits to verify compliance. Again, centralized, and vulnerable to corruption, coercion, and collusion. GNU Taler could technically be built on top of bitcoin and blockchain, it even says so in the official FAQ, but that’s not their current vision
Nope, I considered this as well.
GNU Taler is built on top of existing payment systems. It’s just a token you exchange money for, like those arcades you go to where you exchange money for arcade tokens. So it’s only as decentralized as the system it’s built on top of.
It does provide some privacy, but only for buyers, so this doesn’t prevent censorship. If the banks want to ban porn sites from accepting money, or block Steam from accepting transactions for porn games, they can. Censoring sales is the same as censoring purchases.
On top of that, if GNU Taler is built on top of centralized banking like it’s currently pushing for, then it inherits the same problems. The government can say “Poor people can’t be trusted, so we won’t let poor people get tokens, they’ll just have to use trackable methods like Paypal.” Or they can have a social credit system and say “Only people with 5000 credit or above can use Taler.”
And the government and banks still control the value and supply of the currency. They can print money however they want.
GNU Taler also doesn’t try to solve the distributed consensus problem. Afaik, it offloads the problem to the implementation. I have no idea how current implementations deal with multiple servers disagreeing on the ledger of transactions (say, due to network issues or server crashes), but it sounds like it trusts that servers will cooperate, and uses government audits to verify compliance. Again, centralized, and vulnerable to corruption, coercion, and collusion. GNU Taler could technically be built on top of bitcoin and blockchain, it even says so in the official FAQ, but that’s not their current vision