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.
Bitcoin?
Bitcoin allows the seller to evade taxes, lacks a central exchange, and has no distinction between Merchants and Consumers.
I’m not interested in defending bitcoin, but that is mostly misinformation. If you want to truly condemn bitcoin you should target it’s actual harm, the fact that it’s accelerated low-friction financialization of capitalist money, so therefore immiserates the working class faster than fiat. Come at it with the good old Marxist critiques of capital, because that’s all it really is. If you argue against it with flimsy falsifiable claims like you just did, a true believer will make you look like a fool.
I’m not condemning Bitcoin. I prefer to make falsifiable claims over unfalsifiable claims. Which claim(s) are incorrect?
The first claim is the most incorrect, as bitcoin is a single permanent public ledger where all transactions are verifiable by anyone, and on/off ramps are almost 100% regulated. I would argue that it’s actually the hardest currency with which to evade taxes, though in the early days where onramps didn’t do KYC and government wasn’t as aware of it, that would have been more true. Physical fiat or Monero (A crypto that anonymizes sender and receiver) are probably the easiest currencies with which to avoid taxes.
The third claim is conditionally incorrect. Bitcoin transactions all have a clear sender and receiver party. Though I figure maybe you refer to some kind of regulatory tax assignment, in which case that would happen outside of the protocol and is up to the local government to decide.
The second claim is just kind of … Hard to parse? I’m not sure what you mean by centralized exchanges. Exchanges of any type are almost always private entities that are themselves a centralized organization, and most currency exchanges process both fiat and crypto. Guessing I just need more context for this one.
Anyway, hopefully that had some new knowledge.
The ledger being public doesn’t prevent illicit use, like darknet markets. They use mixers or onion routed payments.
In the context of this thread, the centralized exchange is Taler Operations AG.
Taler offers anonymity for consumers but not for merchants. Every transaction everywhere - including Taler - has a sender and receiver.
Sorry if this is rude, but you are spreading misinformation, not knowledge.
Excuse me but what did I write that’s misinformation? I wasn’t describing Taler, I was describing bitcoin / crypto. Nothing I said was incorrect, and I was correcting your own misinformation (Mind you it’s not your fault that you were misinformed and I don’t think you were doing so intentionally, it’s easy to pick up misinformation about unpopular subjects because people are more likely to take facts at face value).
Regarding mixers, I have a friend in US gov that says they’re not immune to targeted investigation. You can hide in them only until you catch institutional attention, wherein they have a big enough database of inputs and outputs to simply know who you are. However apparently Monero is truly a pain in their ass.
And saying “a ledger is public doesn’t protect it from illicit use” is kind of silly seeing as you can use any currency for illicit use if you want. What matters is if you can be caught, and its extremely easy to be caught doing something illicit if you do it with bitcoin as the transaction history is right there in front of the world.