YHK - yet another hacker news clone

This is a proposal to operate a regulated payments processor, supervised by BaFin. All the usual, necessary regulations and consumer protections will apply under German law.

>What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled?

It's basicially david chaum's blind-signature money idea. It's centralized but the central issuer can't connect the outputs to the inputs. (but unique inputs signed by the issuer correspond to unique outputs)

>Also are transactions final and irreversible?

I think so unless you are able to reveal the secrets of the transaction. Hmm, however revealing the secret to someone is basicially same as spending it to them (analgous to releasing a signed and finalized transaction into the mempool in cryptocurrency). It's finalized by the issuer signing it.

Like you basicially send the vendor the secret, and then they hand it in to the coin issuer and wait for the issuer to sign a new input, before giving you the merchandise. So idk how it would work reversing the transactions

This is a surveillance oriented alternative to cryptocurrencies which uses the distraction of complicated cryptography to obfscuate the fact that by design it intentionally undermines the privacy of its users: it attaches the receivers identity to every payment they receive, along with the amount and makes it non-private-- potentially opening the door to abuse by kidnappers, extortionists, marketers responding to income signals, plaintiffs attorneys, and other such scoundrel.

The claims that is is privacy preserving are deceptive, and in my option constitute an act of intentional fraud on the part of its creators -- the fact that people are deceived by the privacy claims is clear in your comment: You ask why would the banks adopt something private. The answer is: it isn't.

Its existence is justified under a fairytale model of how the world works-- a false belief that actually anonymous payments are unlawful and that their compromised alternative is the best possible. In the path of doing so, they not only falsely sell a system with compromised privacy as private, but they also help bring about a dystopia where privacy is unlawful in much the same manner that doing business with companies that refuse to accept cash does.

It would be fair to say that its an upgrade to privacyless systems-- because it doesn't attach the sender's identity to the transactions themselves--, but to characterize it as a private or privacy preserving system is a lie.

> I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.

The wording on the Taler website is a bit wishy-washy, but I THINK the TL;DR is:

1. They tried to do be a payments processor with assistance from a German bank.

2. That didn't work out for what Taler claims are "unrelated reasons" but I suspect we all can agree it was due to KYC/AML hurdles.

3. The Taler plan now appears to not be a payments processor but rather merely an issuer.

And in that respect, there is plenty of precedent for that passing in the EU, i.e. there are are already many online places you can go swap your Euro for Bitcoin legally.

So, yes, there will still be KYC/AML. You will still need to provide your ID to swap your Euro for your Taler. But after that, Taler has nothing to do with transaction processing, you go spend your Taler balance elsewhere and somebody else's server processes the transaction. Taler will know and be obligated to retain records of who bought how much, when and how but not when and where (of if) they spent it.

At least that's my interpretation of the word-soup on their website.

I don't get your point. The current proposal for a digital euro supports private peer-to-peer transactions

If I understand correctly, you'll just have payments and receipt correlated at the exchange and you won't even need KYC all while giving the impression of anonymity.

I agree, there is absolutely zero chance that especially the tyrannical government of the EU, which requires total control for the next phases of its very existence, will not fight with any and every dirty trick it can to arrest total control over spending/money.

Where and how people spend money is almost more valuable than communications information and other relationships. Money is intentional, it is committed. You can say all kinds of things in chat, and the European tyrants are already using that to imprison people and are working even harder to simply punish you without even charges, but money changing hands clearly demonstrates far more than just words.

Unfortunately for Europe, if it had only been able to hold on for the last 25 or so years on their own currencies, this kind of payment processing network that is actually anonymous could have fully replaced and made the Europe totally irrelevant and useless by simply making I possible to make a payment in one currency and it arrive instantaneously in another currency. You could have paid for things anonymously just like you could when you had paper and coins, a transaction between you and a product/service provider. The future will be far bleaker in a way that I don't think we can even imagine since there is not a single comparable thing that has existed or happened in all of human history that is remotely similar, losing total anonymity that all the worst dictators, tyrants, and maniacs of all of human history could not have collectively even dreamt of... now in the hands of the illegitimate, and unelected EU Commission and its apparatchiks.

The buyers are anonymous, the recipients (i.e. shops/merchants, generally) are not. The idea is that this will effectively prevent money-laundering and tax evasion as merchants wouldn't be able to hide any earnings.

It is a project supported by the EU.

> The NGI TALER project is funded under Horizon Europe (Pilots for the Next Generation Internet) with the aim of bringing GNU Taler to market across Europe. https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html

Unlike crypto, it is designed from the beginning with KYC/AML in mind. https://www.taler.net/en/principles.html

The issue seems to have been that GLS Bank was not able to support this beyond Germany. KYC/AML is a pretty complex topic. And since GLS is a tiny local bank (1,100 employees) it would have been a very large project for them. https://ich.taler.net/t/taler-en-belgique-en-france-ou-au-lu... https://www.gls.de/taler

More on the implemtation here: https://www.taler.net/en/kyc.html https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/023-taler-kyc.html https://docs.taler.net/taler-kyc-manual.html

Blockchain isn't necessary at all for instant, low fee payments. And no, pretty much nobody is using cryptocurrencies

Yeah, so it isn't intended to you. It is intended to be electronic cash, where the seller still has accountability for regulators and the buyer has some minimal amount of protection.