I’ve long been annoyed that everyone, including myself uses Paypal/ Venmo for moving money around. What alternatives do you find useful? Here’s a list (https://alternativeto.net/software/venmo/). GNU Taler looks viable (https://taler.net/en/index.html). I would love to have your thoughts!
Edit: Thanks for everyone’s input. I really appreciate it. <3
GNU Taler looks interesting, but is it usable today?
It’s apparently designed around exchanges, and I don’t see any exchanges mentioned on the site. Do any actually exist?
The FAQ mentions depending on wire transfers, which have famously high fees that would have to be passed on to users somehow. Aggregating payments into delayed settlement transfers could mitigate that cost between high-volume organizations, but it won’t help people who just need send money to each other. (Meanwhile, ACH transfers are practically free, but I don’t know if they fit Taler’s design or plans.) Does Taler have a plan to solve this?
No, but it has potential to become the new digital euro in Europe. I hope it does.
I don’t quite understand how it works yet, so wonder: would it work in sanctioned locations, like how, say, Monero can?
Taler is not ment to be completely censorship resistant. It takes the side of dealing with goverment, law and other things and is expected to be used in areas with working democracy.
A private alternative to MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe, etc. not a new currency or completely different banking system. And we need it.
It can work in any place, as long as the sender’s and the recipient’s banks support GNU Taler. But it is not as private as monero.
Ah. I know that a bank is involved with a recipient, but didn’t know a sender needed one too. But as long as the Taler works between banks that are prohibited to interact too - it would be very useful then!
Yeah well, it functions kind of like a nornal cryptocurrency wallet. You send those GNU Taler coins to another GNU Taler wallet. These coins can be directly converted to normal currency via the bank.
So technically, you could buy it from a random KYCless seller like you can Monero too?
Yeah. Technically that should be possible. But why would you do that is the real question. Afaik you won’t be able to use GNU Taler without an existing backend. Your backend would be a bank and why not just withdraw coins from there. I don’t know whether you can self host the backend. There would be no reason to be afraid of the bank knowing where you send the coins to as that is pretty much hidden from the bank. I explained GNU Taler to my best abilities in this comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/10414943
Why would I do that? Maybe if my bank doesn’t want to support a private currency like that. Or if they’re a legal gray area like crypto now is, so while it is semi-legal now, might change in the future.
