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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

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

private and anonymous, especially from the government are two totally separate things.

If I am understanding Taler, it is not like cash coins/paper where the government does not and has no way to know that you, e.g., bought a bottle of wine from a vintner with cash, and that vintner can use that bill/coins in many different ways and the gov't has essentially no way to trace or track that.

The way I am seeing it... please correct me where I'm not understanding something... the Taler architecture would require you to pay cash into an exchange, then you extract (likely IDs/tagged/marked) Taler, you then pay that Taler to a merchant, e.g., who by policy cannot remain anonymous, and that merchant deposits that market Taler into the exchange. So in that scenario, what has happened is that the Taler the merchant received "privately" is clearly associated with the Taler you extracted from the exchange to pay the Taler deposited by the Vintner.

It's maybe private in that the Vintner does not need to know who you are, but you can bet the control freak tyrants in the government will know that you bought that wine.

So what you may say, wine is fine, but what if it's something the government doesn't want you doing, buying, supporting? Maybe wine is now illegal because {fill in the reason}, maybe you are not sufficiently obedient and compliant during an "emergency" and need to be cut off? Maybe you are sanctioned by the EU and all your money is taken and you have no means of even feeding yourself other than the "humanitarian" limit of living on €200/month and you can't even return to your native Switzerland from Brussels because you are not allowed on trains, planes, or allowed to drive across borders like happened to Jaques Baud for speech some tyrannical EU politician or bureaucrat did not like?

Private and anonymous are different but the digital euro proposal is for both things, it is supposed to be equivalent to cash but only for small sums.

I have no idea how that's supposed to work.

If you ask the ECB, they tell you "it's supposed to work very good, thank you"...

Your whole argument is looney. Do you live in the EU?

"It's maybe private in that the Vintner does not need to know who you are, but you can bet the control freak tyrants in the government will know that you bought that wine." -- actually no. Because the digital cash you "extracted" from the exchange was blindly signed, the exchange/central bank would NOT learn that you bought wine. Only that someone (anyone who previously withdrew a sufficient amount of digital cash) bought wine. Please do read up on cryptography, how to do this is known since 1989.

It's not the primary path you should be thinking about. It has been revealed in many cases, situations, and through many different methods that the primary path is effectively neutralized by circumventing it altogether, well before 1989 too.

It's never the primary battlefront that is really important, it's always the flanks my friend.

One point of Taler's architecture is that blind signatures are used to create tokens, so the issuer doesn't know which coin was issued to which person. Then the merchant doesn't know who the coin was issued to but can redeem it with the issuer if it's valid. So if there's enough transaction volume it'll be hard for issue of coins and redemption at merchants to be correlated.

What worries me is the SNB whitepaper on "how to issue a digital currency" they worked on with Taler: https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r...

> > In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.

And also I don't think they have a privacy-preserving solution for money transfers between consumers. So if I wanted to give you 20€ I think that has to be represented as a burning of tokens and a reissue, so the central issuer learns all those transactions even though purchases at merchants are private.

The privacy properties for P2P transfers between consumers are identical to those with merchants: the exchange can require the receiver to provide information about themselves, but the payer remains anonymous just like for purchases at a merchant. And yes, it involves spending (burning, if you prefer) the old tokens (we prefer digital coins) and issuing (blindly signing) fresh coins. Afterwards, the fresh digital coins are indistinguishable from those issued during a regular withdrawal from a bank account.

Right, because you can issue coins as a "purchase" of the coins being transferred. That makes sense, but still doesn't address the concerns around the system being designed to support negative interest rates and withdrawal rate limits.

Would it be technically possible to transfer tokens to another user directly, without an exchange acting as an intermediate?

My assumption is that this is possible but not supported by default, since there’s no way to guarantee (without using an exchange) that the giver has really deleted the tokens they sent to the receiver, and will not spend them before the receiver can (which would render the receiver’s copy of the tokens unusable).

But assuming someone implements this in software, would it be possible to make direct transfers like this while relying entirely on trust? Or are the tokens somehow tied to the wallet that has first received them?

You can backup tokens and restore them to another wallet (and we are in the process of making that easier). We call that sharing, and it is not a transaction as it is simply granting access to the same money to both wallets.

No, the "coins" (as we call them) are not tied to the wallet - if you trust the sender to delete them after you received them, then you can use them from your wallet as if you withdrew them, or got them via the standard P2P send protocol.

> you can't even return to your native Switzerland from Brussels because you are not allowed on trains, planes, or allowed to drive across borders like happened to Jaques Baud for speech some tyrannical EU politician or bureaucrat did not like

Adding the relevant context: Jacques Baud, someone who is actively supporting Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Europe. Taking active part in attempting to destabilize European democracies.

Somehow that never fails. Anytime a comment complains about a tyrannical EU it’s always coming from Russian apologists…

You are a perverse petty tyrant no matter how much you try to use manipulation, gaslighting, and emotive abuse to try to beat people down. You are not talking to your wife or other weak people you abuse, you can dispense with that childish tyrannical mindset when you talk to a man.

If words scare you so much you are a mere animal. But you know that.

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