On P2P payments from their FAQ: "While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete."
How about, no? How about me paying €50 to my friend for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated, KYCed, and blocked if they don't approve of it or know who the recipient is? How about it’s none of the government’s business how I split the bill at dinner with friends? This level of surveillance is madness, especially coming from an app that touts "privacy" as a feature.
GNU Taler is a trojan horse to enable CBDC adoption. They are the friendly face to an absolutely terrifying level of government control in our lives funded by the same government that tries every year to implement chat control. Imagine your least favourite political party gaining power. Now imagine they can see and control every transaction you make. No thanks.
For one Taler doesn't enforce central control. Also it protects the identity of the person paying but not the seller. This means it is easy to hold a business accountable but hard to try and track customers. Overall this is a much healthier system that protects the consumer.
You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.
There's some truth to this but it's also not really the case.
Each address is pseudononymous even in original Bitcoin.
Bitcoin lightning transactions are completely opaque to the network, they are never on-chain. At this point, there are vastly more transactions on lightning than on-chain. They confirm instantly and are known only to your node, the receiver's wallet, and intermediary nodes (if any). Lightning inherits security from the main chain while giving you sub-second transaction confirmation times.
Monero exists, coinjoin (Bitcoin) exist, changing addresses and having multiple wallets exists, liquidity swaps exist. The chain analysis game is getting harder and more complex every year.
Yes. But the draw is that it is still leagues easier use privately than the traditional banking system. With cryptocurrency, you "only" need proper understanding of OPSEC. With banking system - you also need to break the law somewhere in the KYC process.
Cash is physical and can be traced. At the end of the day you need to send it or meet someone to transfer goods. That's also why it is good for privacy as it is physical.
I guess he means the banknotes having individual numbers on them. However, that still doesn't give full automatic traceability - between these being recorded, a lot can happen to the banknote.
Agreed. You can identify cash, but it doesn't have traceability built in. So the private transactions between two people are only identifiable if you get the cash before and after the transaction. You don't have any idea about the intermediate path it took