I should stress that GLS has been very helpful, and continues to be helpful.

It is a project supported by the EU.

> The NGI TALER project is funded under Horizon Europe (Pilots for the Next Generation Internet) with the aim of bringing GNU Taler to market across Europe. https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html

Unlike crypto, it is designed from the beginning with KYC/AML in mind. https://www.taler.net/en/principles.html

The issue seems to have been that GLS Bank was not able to support this beyond Germany. KYC/AML is a pretty complex topic. And since GLS is a tiny local bank (1,100 employees) it would have been a very large project for them. https://ich.taler.net/t/taler-en-belgique-en-france-ou-au-lu... https://www.gls.de/taler

More on the implemtation here: https://www.taler.net/en/kyc.html https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/023-taler-kyc.html https://docs.taler.net/taler-kyc-manual.html

The buyers are anonymous, the recipients (i.e. shops/merchants, generally) are not. The idea is that this will effectively prevent money-laundering and tax evasion as merchants wouldn't be able to hide any earnings.

> I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.

The wording on the Taler website is a bit wishy-washy, but I THINK the TL;DR is:

1. They tried to do be a payments processor with assistance from a German bank.

2. That didn't work out for what Taler claims are "unrelated reasons" but I suspect we all can agree it was due to KYC/AML hurdles.

3. The Taler plan now appears to not be a payments processor but rather merely an issuer.

And in that respect, there is plenty of precedent for that passing in the EU, i.e. there are are already many online places you can go swap your Euro for Bitcoin legally.

So, yes, there will still be KYC/AML. You will still need to provide your ID to swap your Euro for your Taler. But after that, Taler has nothing to do with transaction processing, you go spend your Taler balance elsewhere and somebody else's server processes the transaction. Taler will know and be obligated to retain records of who bought how much, when and how but not when and where (of if) they spent it.

At least that's my interpretation of the word-soup on their website.

I don't get your point. The current proposal for a digital euro supports private peer-to-peer transactions

This is a surveillance oriented alternative to cryptocurrencies which uses the distraction of complicated cryptography to obfscuate the fact that by design it intentionally undermines the privacy of its users: it attaches the receivers identity to every payment they receive, along with the amount and makes it non-private-- potentially opening the door to abuse by kidnappers, extortionists, marketers responding to income signals, plaintiffs attorneys, and other such scoundrel.

The claims that is is privacy preserving are deceptive, and in my option constitute an act of intentional fraud on the part of its creators -- the fact that people are deceived by the privacy claims is clear in your comment: You ask why would the banks adopt something private. The answer is: it isn't.

Its existence is justified under a fairytale model of how the world works-- a false belief that actually anonymous payments are unlawful and that their compromised alternative is the best possible. In the path of doing so, they not only falsely sell a system with compromised privacy as private, but they also help bring about a dystopia where privacy is unlawful in much the same manner that doing business with companies that refuse to accept cash does.

It would be fair to say that its an upgrade to privacyless systems-- because it doesn't attach the sender's identity to the transactions themselves--, but to characterize it as a private or privacy preserving system is a lie.

Wero, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Twint. The usual GNU story: FLOSS competes against AT&T, SCO, SGI, IBM, Sun, HP, ...

You need to read more carefully. "Cash-like tokens in your wallet under self-custody." would be correct. Taler has no accounts.

Yeah, so it isn't intended to you. It is intended to be electronic cash, where the seller still has accountability for regulators and the buyer has some minimal amount of protection.

> In a free society we should be able to both purchase and publish e-books about Tiananmen Square

What? You can definitely publish about it in a free society, and cash anonymity has nothing to do with it.

I think I have your understanding of it, and if that's correct then what's happening is that Taler isn't helping somebody sell books about US support of Nazi militias in overthrowing the elected government and ethnically cleansing ethnic Russians from Ukraine, it's just enabling them not to necessarily reveal the buyers. If they want to make money from this publishing without the government seeing, they'd have to come up with another reason to have been receiving Taler that wouldn't make the government suspicious.

That's pretty hard unless Taler is very widespread. I could see a world in which that would work - if people generally made all small purchases in Taler and it replaced cash. But there's no reason for governments to buy into that (except as maybe an intermediate pretense after ending legal cash payments entirely), and no reason for large corporate chains to buy into it unless (and maybe even if) government has bought into it (too much legal exposure for too little benefit.)

So any merchant who dealt in Taler would be maximally scrutinized, and whatever exception they were riding in order to be allowed to deal in Taler would be too valuable to give up through selling forbidden books. Like maybe your doctor could deal in Taler fairly freely, and he's not risking his medical license to screw around in politics.

Blockchain isn't necessary at all for instant, low fee payments. And no, pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies

>What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled?

It's basicially david chaum's blind-signature money idea. It's centralized but the central issuer can't connect the outputs to the inputs. (but unique inputs signed by the issuer correspond to unique outputs)

>Also are transactions final and irreversible?

I think so unless you are able to reveal the secrets of the transaction. Hmm, however revealing the secret to someone is basicially same as spending it to them (analgous to releasing a signed and finalized transaction into the mempool in cryptocurrency). It's finalized by the issuer signing it.

Like you basicially send the vendor the secret, and then they hand it in to the coin issuer and wait for the issuer to sign a new input, before giving you the merchandise. So idk how it would work reversing the transactions

This is a proposal to operate a regulated payments processor, supervised by BaFin. All the usual, necessary regulations and consumer protections will apply under German law.