https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler
Or perhaps The Lightning Network?
(Yes, I know that TLN uses Bitcoin)
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.
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.
Absolutely not.
Just use bitcoin and traditional contracts if you’re going to use blockchain technology. “Smart contracts” are a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. Altcoins are a scam.
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
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.
Taler needs buy in from banks and irrc it’s only being trialled by some Swiss banks atm.
Private banks would not relinquish the power and profit they get from the need of a bank account with them in order to be able to pay electronically. In reality central banks can reliaby provide that ability to the people in their jurisdictions. But private bank interests stand in the way of that.
I wish it actually became more mainstream than Wero e.g.
Wero is a trap at best or more likely a figleaf that is meant to fail.
EU private banks much prefer the status quo over systems like the Brazilian PIX taking over the digital payment systems.
So when the EU central bank started looking into a sovereign alternative to Visa/Mastercard etc. the private banks scrambled to put together Wero to delay and maybe prevent the central bank from coming up with a system like PIX.
Sadly GNU Taler was never really an option for these banks, as it is an open standard and thus even if they supported it, the central bank could still plug into it with their own system and thus they would be forced to compete with that.
