For all the talk about cryptocurrency, there hasn’t been much discussion of GNU Taler, a reserve and payments system which aims to permit monetary and taxation policy by enforcing anonymity for customers and transparency/accountability for merchants, unlike Bitcoin which is simply a pseudonymous, commodity and public ledger that facilitates transaction. Also, instead of having fixed quantities being doled out at constant rates (which assumes a quantity theory of money which is not empirically backed) as is the case with bitcoin mining, it’s a reserve and payment system.
Taler just made its first public release with software for banks, exchanges, merchants, and a wallet for consumers.
There are many questions to be asked, but it seems like a project that shows promise and potential for use for distributed nations with actual economic policies.
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