That would indeed be strange. I hadn’t read anything about it before, but I hadn’t really looked into GNU Taler yet either. It just sounds promising to me because it’s FOSS and aims to break the monopoly of payment service providers so we can finally get away from US companies.
I’m not sure that’s Taler’s goal really. Ultimately if you don’t want to use Visa or MasterCard you already can, through instant SCT for example. IIRC that is mandatory to be supported by all banks soon. This does require a SWIFT connection, but I don’t think getting an alternative for that is on the cards anytime soon.
Taler is still a cool project though, and I’m interested to see where it goes next. IIRC it’s main advantage is privacy, though I wonder how certain KYC/money-laundering checks are supposed to happen.
Good point, technically it’s a SEPA conenction but they use basically the same ISO messages as SWIFT, and typically use the same endpoints too. It’s quite rare to find a bank that does SEPA but not SWIFT on the same channel for example.
Sheesh, that would boost “economy” to no ends, all billionaires would salvate at the thought of the plebs having expiring currency, it would be impossible to boycott
That expiry feature was actually scrapped in the final proposal - the ECB confirmed last year that Digital Euro holdings won’t expire, they just capped the max amount at €3,000 per person to prevent bank runs (which is still pretty resonable for everyday transactions).
IIRC it had a weird sort of quirk where funds inside your wallet can “expire”, which is a bit of a hard sell imo.
That would indeed be strange. I hadn’t read anything about it before, but I hadn’t really looked into GNU Taler yet either. It just sounds promising to me because it’s FOSS and aims to break the monopoly of payment service providers so we can finally get away from US companies.
I’m not sure that’s Taler’s goal really. Ultimately if you don’t want to use Visa or MasterCard you already can, through instant SCT for example. IIRC that is mandatory to be supported by all banks soon. This does require a SWIFT connection, but I don’t think getting an alternative for that is on the cards anytime soon.
Taler is still a cool project though, and I’m interested to see where it goes next. IIRC it’s main advantage is privacy, though I wonder how certain KYC/money-laundering checks are supposed to happen.
Do you mean SEPA?
Good point, technically it’s a SEPA conenction but they use basically the same ISO messages as SWIFT, and typically use the same endpoints too. It’s quite rare to find a bank that does SEPA but not SWIFT on the same channel for example.
The only (big) difference is that SEPA is controlled by the EU, while SWIFT it isn’t
Sheesh, that would boost “economy” to no ends, all billionaires would salvate at the thought of the plebs having expiring currency, it would be impossible to boycott
That expiry feature was actually scrapped in the final proposal - the ECB confirmed last year that Digital Euro holdings won’t expire, they just capped the max amount at €3,000 per person to prevent bank runs (which is still pretty resonable for everyday transactions).
I don’t think Taler is the same thing as the digital Euro, is it?