grothoff

Eh, we never called it decentralized. And you are right, it absolutely is not. We can disagree about whether allowing the government to see your income is ethical or not. However, we have consistently stated the facts (not decentralized, income visible, expenses non-traceable).

I appreciate your concern that income transparency enables (some) surveillance. However, are you willing to acknowledge that without it, you will have significantly more criminal activity in the system and will never be legal in most jurisdictions? And that this would force most people to effectively use account-based systems without any privacy? (Or staying with physical cash, which we also advocate for, btw.).

We have a mailinglist (taler@gnu.org), and my personal e-mail is also not difficult to find out. We can always use help. Still looking for an iOS developer, for example.

At this point, different things look plausible in different countries. Consider the possibility of a major banking technology provider offering it as a feature, in which case basically on day 1 you have 1000 banks that can choose to offer it if they believe their customers want to use Taler. Or you may have a smaller bank offer Taler as a limited experiment just to see if there is a business case, with very limited publicity. Or you may have a big bank offer it as a strategic product. Or you may have even a central bank beat everyone else and launch it as the official central bank digital currency. Personally, I'll probably sleep better if it starts small.

GNU Taler uses some libraries from GNUnet (and there is some overlap in core developers), but GNU Taler does not use the P2P (or GNS) functionality of GNUnet.

Correct. The income is merely made visible. Paying taxes is still something each merchant has to do (and calculate correctly).

This will change in the future once we have implemented P2P payments. So consider it a feature on our roadmap. See https://docs.taler.net/design-documents/013-peer-to-peer-pay...

Yes, but we still need to make it easier to setup/deploy this.

There is no public roadmap on the business side as the commercial banks we are talking to are not yet willing to have their names disclosed to the public. They're rather conservative institutions (by nature), so they want things to be checked and double-checked and ready to go before going public. Plus it is not trivial (for them) to check all of the regulatory, technical and business checkboxes. I remain hopeful that we'll get through this mess "soon", but I've been too optimistic in the past.

What I can say is that we have presented GNU Taler to over a dozen central banks already. We're trying to convince them that they must give citizens privacy and that an account-based system would give them too much power.

So while the business side is not exactly transparent, what we do technically is all out there. And it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra time to reduce the list of known bugs before we go live. :-)

I am the GNU Taler co-maintainer and working paper co-author. The development is community-driven. But as you see from the paper, the community is talking with central banks about deploying it. There is no contradiction.