Bitcoin solved the “move money from A to B securely, internationally, quickly” problem 15 years ago. Taler strikes me in the most generous terms as a new attempt as an unimaginative effort to re-envision the banking system that existed before that watershed moment. We have instant, international settlement, we have that technology, it’s here, it’s mature, it works, it continues to get better, it has a market cap higher than Sweden’s GDP, and the average long-term trend has been growth no matter what way you slice it. It’s already more widely used and reliable than most national currencies. And it solves the delivery problem.

Taler is explicitly positioning itself as a better international payment standard to prevent central bank digital currencies from taking that role

From the Taler FAQ:

The exchange would be operated by a bank or in cooperation with a bank, and that bank would hold the funds in escrow respectively on an internal settlement account. Note that this bank could be a regular bank or a central bank for a central bank digital currency. Irrespective of this, the bank would fall under the relevant financial services regulations, which is one reason why consumers can rely on the conversion of Taler coins into normal bank money.

That doesn’t sound like opposing a CBDC to me, it sounds like explicitly building infrastructure for its existence. To review, Taler is

• Money I don’t control (held by another entity) of a money supply I don’t control (can be printed at will by government)
• That can’t be used internationally
• That is funded/sponsored by the EU, which wants to push a CBDC
• That has built in support for the concept of money expiration

You ever wonder why GNU Taler for some reason seems to be everywhere? Seems to have like advertising money to be everywhere, unlike basically every other GNU project? Because it’s a backdoor to a central bank digital currency (CBDC) which will be one of the greatest threats to personal liberty and freedom in our lifetime. That’s why you’ll see “Funded by the EU” and a host of banks listed on their funders page. You know, the same EU that wants chat control.

Money you can only spend certain places? A CBDC can do that! Money that expires if you don’t spend it fast enough? A CBDC can do that! Money that can disappear if you decide to be a dissident? A CBDC can do that too! But don’t take my word for it, ask Taler’s FAQ:

Taler e-money is issued with a validity period. One month before the expiration date, you wallet should automatically exchange any digital cash that is about to expire for new digital cash with an extended validity period. However, if your wallet is offline for an extended period of time, it may be unable to do so. Ensure your wallet is regularly online to avoid losing money due to expiration!

We believe the European Electronic Money Directive provides part of the regulatory framework a Taler exchange with coins denominated in Euros would have to follow.

Oh, and it doesn’t work for international transfers either. And it’s going above and beyond to make sure you’re only “private” under certain conditions:

As a payment system must comply with local laws in order to operate legally, GNU Taler must be designed to comply with these requirements. GNU Taler must provide an audit trail for investigators operating under the law. Furthermore, we consider levying of taxes as beneficial to society, and fair taxation requires income transparency. Thus, GNU Taler must enable authorities to track income.

Weird. I didn’t see anything in the Bitcoin source code about that, but apparently Taler thinks it’s their moral responsibility to make sure the authorities have total financial surveillance over their subjects. Taler, in this description, offers less privacy than cash or even a typical bank account. And it gets worse, even small transactions between friends are monitored:

Taler supports push and pull payments between wallets (also known as peer-to-peer payments). 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 a guy for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediaried and KYCed? 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.

And their FAQ deliberately spreads FUD about Bitcoin. From their FAQ

It would be possible, however, to withdraw coins denominated in Bitcoin into a Taler wallet (with an appropriate exchange), which would give some benefits over plain Bitcoin, such as instant confirmation times.

Wrong. Fud. Bitcoin lightning offers instant confirmation times, fully settled, instant confirmation times. Taler isn’t self-custody. Putting Bitcoin in a taler wallet means trusting Taler and co not to rug you, no thanks. Taler isn’t international, Taler requires KYC to use, it’s worse than cash. Unlike Taler, your Bitcoin can’t be programmed by the government to “expire” if you don’t use your public assistance or wages in time. We all have to do our part to keep the economy going!

GNU Taler seems like the final pleas of a desperate soon-to-be-ex, “I’ll stop, I promise! I’ll do better this time, I’ll even give you some privacy! Just don’t leave!”. But it’s not about the privacy, is it? Really? It’s about the lack of trust, the lack of sovereignty. People have lost trust in governing institutions, they have seen the value of their currency inflated away no matter which party is in charge, they have seen massive privacy violations again and again, they have seen the slow but steady creep of authoritarianism and state control over our lives, they have had to fight EU chat control year after year, and they are opting out of these systems through decentralized, trustless alternatives. The beauty of Taler, of course, from the perspective of the state, is that it enables these system to provide us with “privacy” while still maintaining total state control and centralization. Decentralized identity credentials are the future, not centralized ones. Decentralized currencies are the future, not centralized ones. The future is here, and this is the last gasp of a dying system trying to keep you ensnared in its web of control.

Final overview:

• International transactions to anywhere on earth? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• Money that doesn’t expire? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• Wallet can safely go offline without losing funds due to expiration? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• Money you can use even if you are a dissident and the govt wants to shut down your account? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• Fully self-custody? You control the money, not anybody else? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• 100% FOSS? Anybody can run a node/be a full network participant? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler (must be approved by govt)
• Can be used without trusting a centralized entity? ✅Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• Will work even if EU government collapses or your country gets kicked out? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• High degree of privacy (when used properly)? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• Instant settlement? ✅ Bitcoin ✅ Taler
• Known, auditable supply which can’t be manipulated by money printing or a 2-3% “inflation target”? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• Able to use without providing ID? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler
• Not part of financial surveillance infrastructure wet dream that EU wants? ✅ Bitcoin ❌ Taler

tbh I haven’t played around w them much so idk

Is nobody going to point out that the DNC already had a primary? And that by replacing the candidate last minute, against the will of their voters, the DNC would be acting incredibly undemocratically? Do you want your core voting block to start voting in republican primaries instead? Because throwing out their primary vote is how you get that to happen.

The DNC had a primary, there were multiple candidates, Biden lost the primary in American Samoa. I voted for Biden, he won, if the party elite swap him out last minute regardless of what their primary said, why would anybody care to vote in their primaries?

Because people vote for them in the primaries and there’s rarely any young people who try to run.

Anonymity is also crucial for democracy. Anonymity is required for sources to leak material to the press about corruption and malfeasance. Anonymity is required for people to speak honestly and freely. When the government turns against its critics, anonymity is required for those critics to speak safely.

You can still investigate crimes without eliminating the right to privacy or anonymity. It requires talking to people, finding witnesses, and doing good old detective work. The simple fact of the matter is that police have more tools today to fight crime than they ever have in human history. All of our communications, our phones and CCTV tracking our every move, etc yet crime still happens. Most crimes go uninvestigated and unprosecuted despite this wealth of invasive access. The reason for this is either lack of will or lack of resources, but it surely isn’t lack of access. We were told if we traded our privacy and liberties we would be safe from crime, but the truth is that criminals will still crime and rich and powerful people will still get away with crime. The only difference now is that we lost our freedom and privacy along the way. And every day, we are told we need to give up even more freedom and then really, truly, the system will find those bad guys and eliminate them. Except the bad guys are often the ones who run and benefit most from the system. And they’ve gone so far to convince much of the population that doing things privately (like making transactions) is in and of itself a sign of criminal behavior or intent.

People 100 years ago in the US would scoff at the idea that the government would be able to monitor every financial transaction they made or read all their mail. Yet all day I see people in these comments saying how this is normal, needed even, for society to operate well.

Read the article, not the headline, he’s not saying he won’t do it or would veto legislation around it. He says he’ll consider court reform. He’s “dismissing it” as a thing to focus on right now because you need an an unrealistic amount of congressional votes to pack the court. Good luck with that. The supreme court interprets laws, with less votes than you need to expand it, you can write blisteringly clear legislation that leaves no room for interpretation. Supreme court problem solved.

One option is to ask open source language models to make lessons/quizzes/etc for you

No, you may have to re-login every time you connect, but once you connect, your MAC would be stable for that session.

deleted by creator

How has the purchasing power of your USD held up over the last 5 years? Because BTC has done pretty damned well. And your BTC still represents the same portion of supply as it always did. BTC is already more widely used and more stable than most national currencies. Unlike fiat currency, it isn’t designed to lose value over time to inflation of the supply.

Here’s how much USD, Gold, and BTC it takes to buy a house in the US over time.

click for full image

Yes absolutely, because any time the government can increase surveillance and control, they will. The Pirate Party is one of the few political forces in the EU fighting hard against this. Central Bank Digital Currencies will be the biggest threat to individual liberty and privacy we see in our lifetimes. In a time of global instability, these threats to our freedoms continue to compound from all over the political spectrum. People are more willing to accept some loss in freedom in the promise it will protect them from the “other side” gaining too much power or from worsening economic or other environmental conditions.

Bitcoin is a solution for those who want privacy, money, and autonomy to work hand in hand. Bitcoin offers much more robust privacy than a bank account and the degree of privacy it offers continues to improve. It’s not controlled by a central bank, entity, or board of directors who can mess with the supply or have any kind of special access to your financial information. You don’t need six forms of ID to use it, in fact, you don’t even need one! It’s truly autonomous money that separates the role of the state from the role of money.

With Bitcoin, I can send money to anybody anywhere on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (using Bitcoin lightning). And I can send that money to anybody even if they have an unstable banking system, no banking system at all (billions of people), or their banking system excludes them due to their gender, sexuality, or status as a political dissident. Venmo can’t do that, Paypal can’t do that, my bank can’t do that, Taler can’t do that. It has a clear fiscal policy of a 21 million coin cap. It has faced attacks and attempted bans from nation states and world powers, yet it has reliably performed this function of sending money around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, without a single hack, without a single bank holiday or failure or any kind. It has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP. It is more widely adopted than most national currencies. It can’t be controlled, debased, or inflated by any corrupt central bank. It actually has use and value. You may not use it, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t get immense use out of it.

Monero is king when it comes to privacy coins though. So from a privacy perspective, that’s worth looking into as well. Long-term I think Bitcoin will eat Monero for lunch since it can easily adopt the privacy technologies Monero has and the Bitcoin community is very pro privacy. Monero also lacks an L2 like lightning which means transactions are slower and more expensive and eventually fees will get ridiculous if adoption reaches parity with Bitcoin. Depending on your use case, that may or may not matter.

Nobody in this community cares about opening a tab on Lightning and needing to continually police it to make sure you don’t lose your coins

You don’t have to do this. This is all automated and abstracted away in UX. I’ve never manually looked at any channels. There is also zero incentive for an attacker to do an attack as your describing because prevention of such attacks is automated and they have to put coins at risk to do it. In lightning’s early days what you’re talking about was real and true, but it’s been years since that’s been the case. I dismissed lightning out of hand as well and came back round to it recently and it’s really matured a lot.

Other algorithms are designed to use a large amount of memory also, and memory is harder to scale than computing power.

Ultimately you are replacing one type of scale with another. At the end of the day, it’s hardware, and people will buy the appropriate hardware to mine, and if you can achieve economies of scale you can mine more efficiently all other variables the same. What route they use to turn that energy into BTC is almost immaterial.

Other algorithms enforce that multiple nodes need to work in concert, and the network delays between them also enforce an additional cost.

Until a device is created that can do it without concert, then you’ve ended up at square one except worse because one actor can now gain a significant advantage much more than say the party who gets the new ASICs first. You can “prove work”, you can’t “prove network latency”. Basing anything on network delays will cause clustering and centralization and is a less equitable distribution of mining power than energy can provide.

but can severely restrict where mining can happen if they think it is burning too much power and endangering other parts of the economy.

I’m not sure they want to though. Bitcoin miners are ‘buyers of last resort’, they’re not buying power at peak demand times. They’re not competing with existing electricity buyers. They’re helping grids over-provision renewables and ensuring they’ll have a buyer for any extra power produced during non-peak time and driving down the electric rates for their normal ratepayers since your rate is essentially cost to produce electricity/units of electricity produced and as you scale and bring in more renewables cost per unit goes down. Regulators have taken both pro and anti-mining stances, we’ll see how it shakes out, but regardless, as you say, it’s math and mining will still happen regardless. My money is on the grids which have 100% of produced electricity bought 100% of the time at the most efficient scale possible.

That’s a “real primary”. A democratic process doesn’t mean you’ll like all the options, just that anybody is welcome to participate and become an option if they want and you can vote for them if you want. Few people ran because there was no reason to run, they already had a very strong candidate. But if they’d won the primary vote, they would have replaced Biden. I don’t say my city elections aren’t “real elections” because only one or two people run for a position, that’s just who showed up, it’s as real an election as any other.

If you are knowledgeable about how US elections work, you know that if you vote for somebody in the primary and they win the general, they will probably be the primary winner/default pick for the next cycle too since it gives them an advantage. If they fuck up badly enough, somebody else can beat them in the next primary, it’s happened before.

Nobody transacts with it anymore, because it is a StOrE oF vAlUe.

I transact with it daily. Other people do to especially in the developing world, there is constant competition for blockspace, those people aren’t just sending transactions between their own wallets. Its price has little to do with value as a transactional currency. I think you are conflating price with transaction fees, which lightning has solved. You can use a single on-chain transaction ($1.50) to open a lightning channel which can have over a billion transactions in it for less than a penny in fees each. Lightning transactions take under a second. You can use that lightning channel to transact with anybody else on lightning. All while being secured by main chain. It’s powerful stuff and it’s not even the only L2 in existence for Bitcoin.

BTC’s PoW algorithm simply doesn’t scale

It absolutely scales. It has scaled till now and will continue to do so. There are plenty of valid criticisms of PoW, this one isn’t one of them. The energy is used to secure the network, it decides who can update blocks, that is literally the point. You can say that ‘proof of ownership/stake’ are ‘secure enough’ but there is no argument they are more secure. It’s literally “who owns the coins controls the network” and once you get enough coins to 51% attack, you can 51% attack the network forever at no additional cost. It also causes increased centralization of wealth. Proof-of-work requires you to keep pouring money/resources/energy into your attack and when you can’t do that any more, your attack essentially gets rolled back. Energy is the most equitably (but not perfectly equitably) distributed resource on earth.

Yes agreed

Your. Use. Of. Periods. Make. A. Very. Convincing. Argument. Despite. Me. Showing. How. It’s. Actually. Useful.

It enables me to send money to anybody anywhere on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees. And I can send that money to anybody even if they have an unstable banking system, no banking system at all (billions of people), or their banking system excludes them due to their gender, sexuality, or status as a political dissident. Venmo can’t do that, Paypal can’t do that, my bank can’t do that. It has a clear fiscal policy of a 21 million coin cap. It has faced attacks and attempted bans from nation states and world powers, yet it has reliably performed this function of sending money around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, without a single hack, without a single bank holiday or failure or any kind. It has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP. It is more widely adopted than most national currencies. It can’t be controlled, debased, or inflated by any corrupt central bank. It actually has use and value. You may not use it, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t get immense use out of it.

And it does this with <1% of global electricity usage, almost entirely from renewables since miners chase the cheapest electricity which comes from renewables and times of non-peak demand. Moving money around costs energy no matter how you do it. For a network that moves trillions of dollars every year, that’s a pretty small amount of energy to do it with.

They picked Hillary in 2016, not Biden. But you’re right generally.

Yes but that dollar buys less stuff. And that 1 dollar represents 1/total supply, and total supply increases. It’s literally worth less even if it is still “one dollar”.