Does it ever work for real payments yet?
Comment on Petition to tell MasterCard, Visa, and activist groups to stop censoring legal fictional content
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Or just use Gnu Taler instead and encourage others to use it as well. We only need 3.5% of the population to use it and then it’ll become a universal option that will break Visa’s fucking business model’s back and kill Visa.
gressen@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Define what you mean by real payments. You can buy food from businesses with it (if the stores support it yet, as customers have not been demanding it yet)
gressen@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Show me a place that accepts it and a way to deposit into the wallet.
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Look at who the commercially supported businesses are
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Taler isn’t a general payment solution, it’s designed so that separate entities can have their own way to handle small transactions. For example, you attend a conference and deposit some cash into the event, and then you go and use those tokens to exhange for various stuff at the event, and the event organizers settle up with merchants after the event.
Rolling this out on a more global scale mea a you’d need some major institution, like a bank, to back the currency and handle settling up. AFAIK, this hasn’t happened anywhere and isn’t likely to happen because banks already have a system that works that requires far less effort: credit and debit cards.
We already have a solution here that has some market presence, and it’s cryptocurrency. Get some Monero and you can go buy stuff today without those transactions being public. The fees are minimal, transactions are fast, and merchants exist. The main issue is the negative public perception of cryptocurrencies, which is mostly due to speculation and bad actors running scams, but there are solid, proven currencies that can be useful as a cash alternative.
gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
If taler uses the same banking systems as visa and mastercard, they can be pressured the same way. It sounds like taler shifts even more responsibility to the merchants and they would still comply with KYC which means you can expect stuff like submitting an ID scan for “Verification” in order to comply with laws.
I do hope it takes off, because fuck visa and mastercard, but im not gonna get my hopes up.
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well countries tend to hate alternative currencies and for extremely good reasons. As once a nation stops having control over their own currency; it very quickly can stop being a country.