Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

taler.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 146 posts

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

#131

Post by littlestymaar »

pjc50 wrote: post #125
littlestymaar wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with what GP invented (amount control and expiration date set by central banks). > But it's fairly obvious that measures will be taken against drug sellers, sex workers, banned political parties and so on. Yeah, of course like governments already do with cash! There's a big difference between saying “governments are going to police things” (which is always true, that's their purpose in fact) an…

The argument is that, if the money is just a database, the police will get it policed, or the bank will police it themselves, in an extra-legal way of just deleting or freezing accounts on request.

Like with regular bank accounts you mean? (Btw, Taler being just a payment system, you don't have anything but a regular bank account tied to it: you don't hold money through Taler anymore than you hold it on Visa: there's a small short lived wallet for transaction purpose but it's supposed to act like a purse, not a safe).

If you live in a country where the police can delete or freeze your bank account without legal control (or at all, even), then you're screwed and you can either change your government or find a new country, the fact that cash exists is not at all a big enough a guarantee for your freedom. At that point the government could also seize all your properties (including cash, something that the US police routinely does[1]) and/or keep you under arrest in secret prisons.

If you hope a technological mean (be it rudimentary like cash, or more modern like a blockchain) can help you protect your freedom against evil government, I have bad news for you. No technology can solve your political problems.

[1]: https://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from...

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

#132

Post by grothoff »

littlestymaar wrote: post #119
amadeuspagel wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link doesn't work.

It's pretty apt since the argument doesn't either[1]. [1]Taler requires explicit user action for payment, it's not like publishers can charge you for scrolling.

Not quite. GNU Taler's reference implementation requires explicit user consent for payment. But as GNU Taler is Free Software, you are free to modify the code on your system (and share your with others) to not require an explicit confirmation if you prefer that. Or even better, to add an option to do that on some "trusted" sites which you make configurable for each user via settings. I don't know if the risk is worth the UX improvement, but a key contribution of GNU Taler is that it is a Free Software payment system where you actually have the full four freedoms. Use them!

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

#133

Post by littlestymaar »

grothoff wrote: post #132
littlestymaar wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty apt since the argument doesn't either[1]. [1]Taler requires explicit user action for payment, it's not like publishers can charge you for scrolling.

Not quite. GNU Taler's reference implementation requires explicit user consent for payment. But as GNU Taler is Free Software, you are free to modify the code on your system (and share your with others) to not require an explicit confirmation if you prefer that. Or even better, to add an option to do that on some "trusted" sites which you make configurable for each user via settings. I don't know if the risk is worth…

While what you say is completely valid, that doesn't save the original argument by pcj50 which was made up claims about the ability for scammer to drain your wallet. Of course you could build your own implementation that allows for such an attack, it is not a valid criticism of the project.

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

#134

Post by stevage »

oblio wrote: post #102
stevage wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not hard enough. The problem with this model is that it would be vendor agnostic and no one wants to be the "dumb pipe". Everyone wants to own the entire system, ergo, proprietary payment systems (Google/Apple/Samsung/Microsoft/... Pay).

I don't think that's contradictory though. You sign up for you "media smorgasboard" service, and pay for it however you pay for it.

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

#135

Post by zilti »

arnorhs wrote: post #42
oaiey wrote: post #18

My question is: How does the average Jane and Joe benefits compared to Debit and Credit Cards? Privacy, they do not care. Being anonymous, they do not care. So a dead initiative?

Anecdotally, privacy is actually something that people care about today. I used to think that it was mostly software geeks that cared about privacy, but during the past few years there's been so much discussion about various privacy issues, as well as discussions in my community etc. Young people in particular care way more about privacy that us older people. In fact, young people feel way more anxiety around things…

Most people don't care at all about privacy, or at most veery selectively. There are tons of services that'd have way less users otherwise. And just a few years ago, two referenda (peoples' vetoes) against new surveillance laws in Switzerland failed miserably. In one case, we weren't even able to get the needed 50k signatures.

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

#136

Post by grothoff »

littlestymaar wrote: post #133
grothoff wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. GNU Taler's reference implementation requires explicit user consent for payment. But as GNU Taler is Free Software, you are free to modify the code on your system (and share your with others) to not require an explicit confirmation if you prefer that. Or even better, to add an option to do that on some "trusted" sites which you make configurable for each user via settings. I don't know if the risk is worth…

While what you say is completely valid, that doesn't save the original argument by pcj50 which was made up claims about the ability for scammer to drain your wallet. Of course you could build your own implementation that allows for such an attack, it is not a valid criticism of the project.

Indeed, I just wanted to point out that the "game changing" desire of entropyie to fully automate payments can still be done with GNU Taler. So you are right that the scammer in the default deployment won't succeed, but additionally entropyie could still totally get what entropyie wants as a feature on their own system (and conceivably make this reasonably secure, too).

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

#137

Post by imtringued »

crotchfire wrote: post #89
t_mann wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing Taler with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs, the Eurozone incarnation of which would be the Digital Euro). I suppose the project being funded through an EU grant could mean that it's in consideration to be used for the Digital Euro, but your criticism would apply independently of whether Taler or another technology is used, and Taler could also be used in different contexts without those limita…

No, I'm not confusing anything. I think you're trying distract from the incredibly antisocial effects this project will have. Everything I wrote comes from the position paper published on the Taler project's website: https://taler.net/papers/cbdc2021en.pdf Page 16: These denomination keys, and thus the coins, would have an expiration date before which they must be spent or exchanged for new coins. Customers would be…

That sounds more like a technical aspect. It is probably related to cryptographic key expiry, not the balance itself. Also, even if what you said was true, having all your money expire all at once is so easy to avoid that it is kind of meaningless to even think of it as a problem. It's more like a pointless micromanagement hassle than a realistic way of stealing your money.

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

#139

Post by pasc1878 »

eigenket wrote: post #118
pasc1878 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in this case the two parties both need to be registered with the app and then can exchange money that they easily know e.g. the phone number. The phone number is an id into the bilk system. With bank transfers both parties do not need to be register with an app they just use the id that they have already for other reasons the bank sort code and id. So needs less extra infrastructure but the user interface is more…

The way it works in Poland is that the banks which participate in the blik system (which I think is all or most of the banks with large usership) take care of the link between phone number and account for you. You don't need to register for anything special just provide your number when you open your bank account. There is no separate app for blik (at least as far as I'm aware) the functionality is integrated into my…

Ah thanks - so why is this not more common in other countries.

I do know why it is not in US as giving bank account details to others allows other to withdraw from your account.

This is not true in the UK so why no similar system here?

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

#140

Post by eigenket »

pasc1878 wrote: post #139
eigenket wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way it works in Poland is that the banks which participate in the blik system (which I think is all or most of the banks with large usership) take care of the link between phone number and account for you. You don't need to register for anything special just provide your number when you open your bank account. There is no separate app for blik (at least as far as I'm aware) the functionality is integrated into my…

Ah thanks - so why is this not more common in other countries. I do know why it is not in US as giving bank account details to others allows other to withdraw from your account. This is not true in the UK so why no similar system here?

I don't think the lack of such a system in the US is for the reason you think - all you do is tell your bank to send money to the account attached to whatever phone number you enter so it should be technically possible.

As a former resident of the UK my feeling is that the lack of such system there is because most bank apps have traditionally been shit. Its probably better today but back in 2015 (when Blik launched) I would not have expected to do anything useful with my bank's app.

For something like blik to work well you need every participating bank to already have a decent mobile banking app and for them to be willing to put in some time/money into integrating the new functionality with that app. Blik started because a bunch of the biggest Polish banks got together and between them founded a company to launch the service. Its really hard for me to imagine the 6 biggest banks in the UK getting together and doing that.

Poland's banking industry also skipped a bunch of "cruft" that we have in the UK because it started after we'd already progressed past those things being relevant. My Polish bank card doesn't have a "sort code" to identify my home branch (because who the hell cares about that in 2024), Poland briefly had cheques but stopped having them in 2006 because everyone was already using cards. In tech-industry terms the UK banking system has a bunch of "technical debt" it has to work around.

Post reply on HN