GNU Taler begins operating in Switzerland, distributed by the Taler Operations AG. Gnu Taler aims to be a “digital wallet” and has been used by the swiss national bank as well as the european national bank as a example for how a digital currency handed out by the state could work. It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.
Currently the Taler is brought out by a special organisation, the “Taler Operations AG”, and not the national bank, although both the national bank as well as the Taler Team have shown interest in a official digial currency by the national bank based on the Taler. But we need to relativate as the national council has stated that the introduction of a digital currency would probably take relatively major legislative changes and therefore take a bit of time.
GNU Taler has been specifically designed to allow authorities to control (or at least monitor) the flow of money, though.
Provided enough members of the EU don’t agree about the evils of sexual preference, that is less of a problem than MasterVisa.
Mind, I would prefer true privacy coin like Monero to become big, so that we can just have digital cash and be done with it. No gods nor kings, just us getting on with our business, whatever that may be.
Does it costs a lot to send somebody monero coins?
monero’s transaction fees are very low. I don’t know the exact numbers but for most transactions with normal priority it’s fraction of a dollar (but it depends on the transaction size, as in data size, which basically depends on how many small “outputs” are you paying with). even if the transaction trafficgets higher because of increased usage, the system balances itself so that fees don’t get enormous.
a major pain point though is that transactions are taken for granted only after ~10 minutes. this is a security measure, not actually defined by minutes but by number of confirmations