Cryptocurrency: Richard Stallman wavers on Privacy and Privacy Coins, Offers GNU Taler

[grarpamp]

https://www.coindesk.com/free-software-messiah-richard-stallman-we-can-do-better-than-bitcoin
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/11/26/0627230/richard-stallman-criticizes-bitcoin-touts-a-gnu-project-alternative

Richard Stallman doesn't like bitcoin, and has never used it, reports
CoinDesk: To Stallman, bitcoin isn't suitable as a digital payment
system. His biggest complaint: bitcoin's poor privacy protections. He
told CoinDesk, "What I'd really like is a way to make purchases
anonymously from various kinds of stores, and unfortunately it
wouldn't be feasible for me with bitcoin." Using a crypto exchange
would allow that company and ultimately the government to identify
him, he said.... Asked what he thought about so-called privacy coins,
Stallman said he'd gotten an expert to assess their potential, and
"for each one he would point out some serious problems, perhaps in its
security or its scalability." And speaking broadly, Stallman
continued: "If bitcoin protected privacy, I'd probably have found a
way to use it by now."
Fortunately, Stallman's GNU Project has a better answer: The GNU
Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital
payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is
not -- forgive the hair-splitting -- a cryptocurrency. The Taler
project's maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system
is, rather, designed for a "post-blockchain" world.... It's based on
blind signatures, a cryptographic technique invented by David Chaum,
whose DigiCash was among the first attempts at creating secure
electronic money. Plus, Taler's attempt to create a digital money that
resists surveillance by governments and payments companies aligns it
with many cryptocurrency projects.

Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments
are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than
peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system
"would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice."
Indeed, in a break with the anti-government ethos that has tended to
characterize bitcoin and some of its peers, Taler's design explicitly
tries to block opportunities for tax evasion.... Privacy in the Taler
system, then, is limited to users spending their digital cash. They
are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, "the exchange,
when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or
customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look
identical from the exchange. Nobody," he added, "exactly knows who has
how many tokens." Merchants (or anyone) receiving payments, on the
other hand, do so visibly and in the open, making it possible for
governments to assess taxes on their income -- not to mention harder
for the recipients to participate in money laundering....

Currently, Taler is in talks with European banks to allow withdrawal
into the Taler wallet and also re-deposit from the Taler system back
into the traditional banking system.
"I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview,
"because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes
at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."