marc_taler

> Also, you can't realistically buy a physical book about Tiananmen Square because you will give up your address to the shipper and by extension to the state

Nope. In many european countries, incl. Germany you can let the sender ship to an automatic station, and pick up the parcel by entering a PIN code. Just use a fake name. And the payment trail is solved by paying anonymously with Taler.

Fantastic, yes. Unfortunately the 3 needed/wanted properties offline, anonymous, and secure cannot be achieved simultaneously. MC/Visa work offline and secure, but not anonymous. Taler is anonymous (payer) and secure, but not offline. At least the payer needs to be online to prevent double-spending.

Just look at https://ngi.taler.net, and scroll down to the bottom...

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

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.

I've never been in a Costco - is that a mall where you pay in each shop individually, or a single store where you pay the total at the exit? In the latter case, the customer is legally only buying from one merchant, who can of course decide which payment system(s) to accept. But in the former case, in the EU it would be illegal for the mall operator to dictate which payment methods shops may offer their customers.

I am the author of the article. The EU wanted to increase competition by allowing Alternative Payments, thus Apple had to change its rules. I shortened the term "App Store In‑App Purchase system" for "purchase of digital goods or services" for "developers with apps in the European Union" (==> doesn't apply to the rest of the world, and it doesn't apply when you sell physical goods) to `ApplePay`, because nobody except developers has ever heard of the long term.

If Apple's new rules would be accepted by the EU, the result is that the EU consumer either can (continue to) use the payment system linked to their Apple account to pay for e.g. some outfit in a game like they did the last 15 years, or they can't anymore because the developer chose a 3rd party payment system (e.g. Taler) and is no longer allowed to offer that.

If you think the use of "ApplePay" is confusing, please suggest another short term we should use in the article instead. What about "Apple payments"?

(Demanding all shops in the mall use only 1 payment card (e.g. Costco) is illegal in the EU - except if you don't pay individually in the shops but only once when you leave the mall, since then you are (legally) paying a single merchant (Costco) who of course can decide which cards to accept. But for my airport analogy the customer is paying in the shop/app and not in the mall/AppStore.)