Yes, I know that stuff. What I don't know is how Taler exchanges would handle customer information. The reliance on bank transfers and card payments is troubling. I've read https://taler.net/ with some care, and I'm still not clear.
> Taler is an electronic payment system that was built with the goal of supporting taxation. With Taler, the receiver of any form of payment is known, and the payment information comes attached with some details about what the payment was made for (but not the identity of the customer). Thus, governments can use this data to tax buisnesses and individuals based on their income, making tax evasion and black markets less viable.
However, at https://taler.net/citizens I see nothing about anonymizing deposits via bank transfer from payments. I can buy Bitcoin in the same way. But before I spend them, I can anonymize by mixing via Tor. Without that step, there is no substantive anonymity.
If I understand correctly, the reliance on bank transfers and card payments is only to put money in your wallet, which is a distinct (and asynchronous) operation from anonymous purchase. Kind of like a cash withdrawal irl (except it is not as obvious as looking at the bill's serial number to track where you spent the money).
> The focus of this paper is GNU Taler, a new free software payment system designed to meet certain key ethical considerations from a social liberalism perspective. In Taler, the paying customer remains anonymous while the merchant is easily identified and thus taxable. Here, anonymous simply means that the payment process does not require any personal information from the customer, and that different transactions by the same customer are unlinkable. Naturally, the specifics of the transaction|such as delivery of goods to a shipping address, or the use of non-anonymous IP-based communication|may still leak information about the customer's identity.
That sounds pretty good, except for merchants ;)
But exchanges would clearly know customer identity, and they also handle payment to merchants, so there's the need to trust a single party. Real anonymity is impossible under those circumstances.
At https://taler.net/governments I see:
> Taler is an electronic payment system that was built with the goal of supporting taxation. With Taler, the receiver of any form of payment is known, and the payment information comes attached with some details about what the payment was made for (but not the identity of the customer). Thus, governments can use this data to tax buisnesses and individuals based on their income, making tax evasion and black markets less viable.
However, at https://taler.net/citizens I see nothing about anonymizing deposits via bank transfer from payments. I can buy Bitcoin in the same way. But before I spend them, I can anonymize by mixing via Tor. Without that step, there is no substantive anonymity.