GNU Taler (Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Resources) is a new secure electronic payment system based on open standards, free software, and advanced cryptography. GNU Taler provides privacy guarantees to the buyer while offering the possibility to audit merchants, making sale incomes transparent and fraud difficult. To online merchants and retailers, GNU Taler offers instant transaction clearance without risks of fake payment methods. Computations needed to clear the payments are efficient and scalable so that banks can pass on lower transaction costs to consumers and merchants.
Why wouldn’t you just use Monero for this?
Taler is not a (crypto)currency, but a payment protocol. Think of it as an open source alternative to Stripe, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, etc. Can be used with EUR, USD, GBP or even XMR. It is to enable very efficient money transactions to friends, buying movie tickets or paying for online services with the wallet app of your choice with very low fees and with respect to privacy in mind.
Oh, okay, that makes more sense.
This looks promising. Two of the things I’ve always been curious about is how anonymous payments can be without allowing fraud, and how anonymous online voting can be without compromising authenticity of the votes cast.
Taler is anonymous for the payer, but not for the payee. For example you can buy or rent a movie online, know who you are paying and have a cryptographic prove you paid (to use if you have to redownload the movie file or access streaming), but the service and payment processor won’t know who you are. When buying with delivery of course they would require a shipping info and customer name for things like warranty, but the fact what you bought won’t be available to processor like is now with credit cards.
Hope I explained it well. For voting, this is not about voting at all.
It’s a lot to wrap one’s head around, that’s for sure… But it’s very interesting. The cryptographic stuff sounds similar to how cryptocurrency is treated, except without all the extra baggage of that. (Which is a good thing, because the cryptography was never the problem!)
I suggests trying out their demo page (https://demo.taler.net) with the Taler Wallet app. There is an example bank page and an example book store, not the prettiest but can help imagine the vision.