Thank you very much for your input! Would you please publish a proper paper with references to code of the project that proves your statements, that would be incredibly helpful. Also it would be of great importance to backup your words with some facts!

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schoen 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The "fraud" claim is kind of bizarre to me, but it's clear (and not hidden) that Taler intentionally provided less privacy for payees than other designs and systems because of a conscious decision that payees should have less privacy.

I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.

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nullc 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's absolutely deceptive as you're seeing demonstrated in this thread-- I comment on this intentional and-- you believe "not hidden" lack of privacy-- and I get a reply demanding a publish a paper to prove it ("Papers please"... fitting!). This has consistently been the case for Taler. Sure, you and I are aware of the limitations-- but we're domain experts.

People hear that it's private and -- unsurprisingly-- think it's private! :P In my view it's like to Apple's proposed content scanning in end to end encryption that applies a lot of additional cryptographic complexity with language that suggests that it's protecting the user's privacy, but in reality the complexity is entirely there to undermine their privacy (in a somewhat selective way) and a far simpler scheme would give much stronger privacy.

I think it's analogous to promoting a key-escrow cryptosystem as "communicate privately!"-- both in terms of people not getting the privacy from it they would expect and helping to bring about a world where actual privacy is unlawful. The privacy problems of Taler are essentially identical to those of key-escrow: even if you don't have any fear of 'lawful' access, any access that exists may be abused. The only reliable solution to the security/privacy problems is for the access to not exist unless that is literally impossible. But it's clearly not impossible, as many people use more private systems than taler every day including in Germany.

Taler is strictly less private and considerably more complicated than a basic chaum-cash token system-- which actually provides the privacy people expect it to have. So it's not like I'm suggesting blockchain mumbo-jumbo is the only alternative. :)

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riedel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The system was designed by people who value taxation as something important to a functioning state. You can call that a conspiracy, I would rather call it social market economy.

	▲	midmagico an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The tradeoffs of the design itself sacrifice payee safety and philosophically imply that the lives of its users are secondary to socially engineering goals which they dishonestly deny are incompatible with same. https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks That is objectively, justifiably classifiable as manipulative and destructive. To clarify: I assert that taxation and a functioning state, and the safety and security of the users of an online currency are absolutely not incompatible with one another—and I'm not even implicitly asserting that the definition of a "functioning state" is some kind of weird ancap impossible libertarian ideal.