On P2P payments from their FAQ: “While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete.

How about, no? How about me paying €50 to my friend for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated, KYCed, and blocked if they don’t approve of it or know who the recipient is? How about it’s none of the government’s business how I split the bill at dinner with friends? This level of surveillance is madness, especially coming from an app that touts “privacy” as a feature.

GNU Taler is a trojan horse to enable CBDC adoption. They are the friendly face to an absolutely terrifying level of government control in our lives funded by the same government that tries every year to implement chat control. Imagine your least favourite political party gaining power. Now imagine they can see and control every transaction you make. No thanks.

        • jet@hackertalks.com
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          5 months ago

          So does encryption, and peer to peer conversations, and talking to your neighbor, and trading things at the swap meet.

          Requiring absolute central control removes freedom from people and removes accountability from governments.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            5 months ago

            For one Taler doesn’t enforce central control. Also it protects the identity of the person paying but not the seller. This means it is easy to hold a business accountable but hard to try and track customers. Overall this is a much healthier system that protects the consumer.

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOP
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      5 months ago

      You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.

      There’s some truth to this but it’s also not really the case.

      • Each address is pseudononymous even in original Bitcoin.
      • Bitcoin lightning transactions are completely opaque to the network, they are never on-chain. At this point, there are vastly more transactions on lightning than on-chain. They confirm instantly and are known only to your node, the receiver’s wallet, and intermediary nodes (if any). Lightning inherits security from the main chain while giving you sub-second transaction confirmation times.
      • Monero exists, coinjoin (Bitcoin) exist, changing addresses and having multiple wallets exists, liquidity swaps exist. The chain analysis game is getting harder and more complex every year.
    • refalo@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      good luck

      except there are many sites dedicated to doing exactly that. you can send cash in the mail, giftcards, exchange via other cryptocurrencies, etc.

    • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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      5 months ago

      Yes. But the draw is that it is still leagues easier use privately than the traditional banking system. With cryptocurrency, you “only” need proper understanding of OPSEC. With banking system - you also need to break the law somewhere in the KYC process.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            5 months ago

            Cash is physical and can be traced. At the end of the day you need to send it or meet someone to transfer goods. That’s also why it is good for privacy as it is physical.

              • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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                5 months ago

                I guess he means the banknotes having individual numbers on them. However, that still doesn’t give full automatic traceability - between these being recorded, a lot can happen to the banknote.

                • jet@hackertalks.com
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                  5 months ago

                  Agreed. You can identify cash, but it doesn’t have traceability built in. So the private transactions between two people are only identifiable if you get the cash before and after the transaction. You don’t have any idea about the intermediate path it took

                  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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                    5 months ago

                    That’s why I like it. It still can be used to bust crime but it is to difficult to track everyone in mass.

        • kugmo@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          You’ll need a gun when the glowies go after you for not using Windows 12 with TPM 2.0 and latest updates applied.

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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      5 months ago

      Yes, most crypto are totally useless, for privacy or anything else other than lottery and heating the home. But why are those discussed any further than just telling not to use them?

      • jet@hackertalks.com
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        5 months ago

        https://www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/

        Because everything in life has a trade-off, and talking about the utility, and the costs, is a reasonable thing to do. And yes there are ways to enable greater levels of privacy online using cryptocurrency then any other method available to us. So it is worth a discussion sometimes