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No, it is a payment system, not a pseudo currency. Think of it as an open-source Paypal.
It has been used as a digital voucher system on some events, and there is afaik a trial with a inofficial regional currency somewhere in Italy.
But mainly people are currently waiting for the first bank to offer an option to charge your Taler wallet with Euros. There is a German coop bank that plans to do so in the comming weeks.
Sounds like it'll be superfluous once the digital euro wallet lands
Maybe, but the digital Euro has none of the buyer's privacy protection of Taler.
I personally suspect that the digital Euro will not see much every-day uptake because it will be overly bureocratic and a hassle to use, but it might end up as an common way to charge your Taler wallet.
We'll see, it's not far away
It's very possible that the digital Euro will be a GNU taler system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler
n 2020 the project received a grant from NLnet and the European Commission's Horizon 2020 Next
The European Commission is the Executive Arm of the EU.
Commission is not involved in developing the digital euro, afaik. Am I missing something?
thanks for the clarity!
do you have any links to share about it?
https://www.gls.de/taler is the page of the German bank.
The forum of the ongoing project has some interesting links, but is sadly not very active: https://ich.taler.net/
Its not "out" in any sense. Its an experimental model project. Nobody really accepts it for payment afaik.
https://www.taler.net/en/faq.html
Are there any projects already using Taler?
We are aware of several businesses running exploratory projects or having developed working prototypes. We are also in discussions with several regular banks as well as several central banks about the project. That said, there are currently no products in the market yet, and we believe this would be premature given the state of the project (see also our bugtracker for a list of open issues).
It's in a process of development and testing in Europe as an official currency/payment technology.
taler.net has a post about that - NGI Taler - too.
We may be seeing much more concrete news and use in and from two years from now.
i really wish someone could explain it to me in a way that makes sense, because the concept just seems like complete magic to me
I looked at Wikipedia; Taler then Blind signature, then looked for docs on GNU Taler where I didn't immediately find any technical overview of how that works. Phind gave me a seemingly reasonable and understandable answer. (Surely sourced from somewhere.)
When we multiply the original message by rere, sign it, and then multiply by r−1r−1, the blinding factors cancel out while preserving the signature.
The success of this process relies on two critical properties:
- The blinding factor must be relatively prime to N
- The RSA keypair must satisfy the congruence relation red≡r(modN)red≡r(modN)
The magic is that you can
and the signature remains valid.
It does sound like magic. But isn't most of cryptography like that?
There's a python example in there as well, with such a calculation. I didn't go through it though.