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EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

taler.net

91–100 of 146 posts

Re: EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

#91
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how the physical representation of money works as well. The central bank controls how many bills are in circulation, and the central bank regularly expires old bills and coins.

Only unstable third-world countries do that. The Bank of England honors all of its old banknotes: "There is no deadline to exchange old banknotes with the Bank of England." https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/exchanging-old-ban... The United States has never demonetized any of its coins or banknotes. All of them are honored and are in fact still legal tender to this day -- even the $100,000 bill! https://en.wik…

In contrast, all of Europe has demonetized its old currencies (Deutschmark, French Francs, Italian Lira, etc.) when switching to Euros, and a few times before that. I've just looked it up and one Napoleon Franc is currently worth ~20€.

So, it's not that uncommon.

Re: EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

#92
post #41

If I could rig my browser to pay 1 cent for every newspaper article I read, I would happily do so. The biggest issue with paying for news is that you are reduced to a small handful of sources. I would like to read a couple of articles from a hundred sources, not a hundred articles from one source. Not sure this platform solves the problem, but it would be a game changer if it did.

Yeah, it's weird that no one ever made that model work. I think it was tried?

A long time ago, Mozilla had a prototype of this, but it never took up, in part because there was no standard for web payments. Then Brave claimed to be working on this, I don't know the status. I believe that Chrome had someone working on this, too, at some point, but the project vanished.

Re: EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't pay your average person with a Debit or Credit card Edit: yes I am familiar with the various 'sending money to people' systems in Europe, but they don't rely on a debit card for the most part, rather, your bank account

In the UK I can use my bank's app/website to send money to another person's bank account. What do these 'sending money to people' systems do more than that?

To send a normal person money using blik you just need their phone number, this is usually more streamlined to obtain/deal with than the traditional identifying numbers for bank accounts.

To buy something online using blik your bank's app generates a 6 digit one time code which is valid for something like 2 minutes. You enter that on the website of whoever you're trying to pay rather than give them your card number and cvv. This is nice because in addition to being a lot shorter to enter than a card number a nefarious person can't reuse the code to perform more transactions at a later date (since they don't have your card number).

Re: EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

#95
post #35

Where is the balance in my wallet stored? Your wallet stores digital coins and thus ultimately your computer holds your balance. The exchange keeps funds matching all unspent coins in a settlement account. What if my wallet is lost? Since the digital coins of value in your wallet are anonymized, the exchange can not assist you in recovering a lost or stolen wallet. Just like with a physical wallet for cash, you are r…

Brilliant! The downsides of both crypto and centralized control! Just use Monero instead.

Re: EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

#96
post #84
post #35

Where is the balance in my wallet stored? Your wallet stores digital coins and thus ultimately your computer holds your balance. The exchange keeps funds matching all unspent coins in a settlement account. What if my wallet is lost? Since the digital coins of value in your wallet are anonymized, the exchange can not assist you in recovering a lost or stolen wallet. Just like with a physical wallet for cash, you are r…

> That may make it a politically acceptable substitute for cash. I think you misspelled un acceptable. Anonymous donations are a massive source of corruption, which is why they tend to be capped by law (and even then, I'm sure a lot of bad people manage to get around it). Political money needs total transparency. (Unless you meant "more acceptable to the general public for average transactions"; in which case I agree…

It is much better for govt as well. Instead of having untracked cash flows not paying taxes, now you can ensure taxes are paid (in EU seller is responsible for paying taxes). So your local govt can sell you this new (old) system as being just like cash, decentralised, anonymous, with no banking institutions at play, while having a closer watch on increasingly convoluted tax codes.

As for donations, it's still good. Instead of having vast amount of cash flow unnoticed as bribes/corruption, now you atleast know that the politician received that amount of money. I don't see how it is worse that normal cash.if one can cap amount of anonymous donations with banks and cash, why not do the same here?

Re: EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

#97

Another one? Europe already has multiple private and secure online payments: for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik

Each country's banks/tech firms have invented their own way that is either tied to one app or the banking system/bank account. It is not anonymous for the buyer, and it always requires a central server for every transaction. From what I gather GNU taler solves those problems.

Re: EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

#98
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only unstable third-world countries do that. The Bank of England honors all of its old banknotes: "There is no deadline to exchange old banknotes with the Bank of England." https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/exchanging-old-ban... The United States has never demonetized any of its coins or banknotes. All of them are honored and are in fact still legal tender to this day -- even the $100,000 bill! https://en.wik…

In contrast, all of Europe has demonetized its old currencies (Deutschmark, French Francs, Italian Lira, etc.) when switching to Euros, and a few times before that. I've just looked it up and one Napoleon Franc is currently worth ~20€. So, it's not that uncommon.

You can still convert old DM into Euros at the initial rate in Germany (https://www.bundesbank.de/de/aufgaben/bargeld/dm-banknoten-u....)

Re: EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

#99

People should know that 1. it's not based on any kind of blockchain, 2. it's not a currency, it's a payment system which you could use to transfer other currencies (euro, dollar, ...) and 3. unlike most blockchain-based currencies it offers anonymity (only for buyers, not for sellers, though)

4. the central bank gets to decide how much "cash" each individual deserves to have at any given point in time. All of the proposals I've heard set that limit at less than one month's apartment rent in most EU cities. Therefore, this scheme is not competing with any form of money or payment besides coins-and-banknotes. 5. this "cash" has an expiration date, which is chosen at the whim of the central bank. If you stuf…

> 4. the central bank gets to decide how much "cash" each individual deserves to have at any given point in time.

Taler is a payment system, it has nothing to do with central banks at all.

> 5. this "cash" has an expiration date, which is chosen at the whim of the central bank. If you stuff it in your mattress like paper cash, it becomes worthless. Therefore, this scheme is a massive step backwards in terms of central bank control over our lives, relative to coins-and-banknotes

Again, you must be confusing Taler with something else. Also, coins and banknotes have expiration dates too (for instance, try pay something with a Deutsch Mark note today).

Kind of sad to see the “Evil central banks want to control your life” conspiracy theory leaving the mud of 4chan to reach HN…

Re: EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

#100
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In contrast, all of Europe has demonetized its old currencies (Deutschmark, French Francs, Italian Lira, etc.) when switching to Euros, and a few times before that. I've just looked it up and one Napoleon Franc is currently worth ~20€. So, it's not that uncommon.

You can still convert old DM into Euros at the initial rate in Germany ( https://www.bundesbank.de/de/aufgaben/bargeld/dm-banknoten-u... .)

The majority of EU member set a limit date: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/exchange/html/index.en.html
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