GNU Taler – Payment system for privacy-friendly, fast, easy online transactions
I read about Taler a few years back, and I'm excited to see that it is still under development.In my opinion, for those of us who aren't anti-government, Taler represents an ethical future of digital spending:It is interoperable, so unlike our current Visa situation, the free market should be able to bid down payment fees to a fair rate. It's insane to me that Visa and Mastercard have basically positioned themselves as exclusive middlemen on the vast majority of digital transactions, in an age when so much commerce necessarily is digital.It offers privacy that Visa / PayPal / etc cannot.It makes income traceable in a way that bitcoin does not, to facilitate lawful taxation.It is inherently scalable in a way that bitcoin arguably is not (bitcoin has offchain scaling mechanisms, sure, but if you're being honest it's a stretch)It's not introducing a new currency or coin that will be endlessly speculated on, unlike most every crypto solution out there (even stablecoins rely on eth or others for transaction fees)