GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
1–10 of 188 posts
Re: GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
#2This is good but how does it compare to internetpeso.com?
Re: GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
#3> Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income
So exactly why would I want to use this?
Re: GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
#4Unlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes. Taler is thus a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market.
HAH, I love it, they lump both BitCoin and cash! as currencies fit for the black market! I wonder how cash-only convenience stores will feel about that, those outlaw troublemakers! ;p
Re: GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
#5> Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income So exactly why would I want to use this?
If I had to guess, automatic calculation of income tax. No need to file taxes.
Re: GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
#6Re: GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
#7This sounds a lot like David Chaum's eCash of the 90s. You transfer ordinary money into a Taler account in a Taler bank and transfer them to other Taler accounts, and from there to ordinary money. That's unlike Bitcoin in pretty much every respect.
It takes some courage to make a crypto-payment protocol explicitly taxation-friendly, but they claim the tax man only gets to see the amounts, not the identities. What a pity the design doc isn't yet on their website.
And I hope the eCash patents have expired...
Re: GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
#8Unlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes. Taler is thus a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market.
Sounds pretty useless to me then. I would think, as technologists, we would adhere to a mindset of "we can do better". That is, we can do better than basing our society on a State apparatus that is rooted in the use of violence (or threat, implied or otherwise) of violence, to coerce people into following its dictates. Taxation is damage that we should be creating ways to route around, not something we should be building tools to support.
Re: GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
#9Re: GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
#10> Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income So exactly why would I want to use this?
Because there's already enough loopholes for you to use if you really don't want to show your income to the government?
I'm not sure what exactly this kind of tracking helps with; it would be nice if they had more examples or case studies.