The GNU Foundation has announced a new cryptocoin called...
Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserve
From their website...
One of the key goals of Taler is to provide anonymity for citizens buying goods and services, while ensuring that the state can observe incoming transactions to ensure businesses engage only in legal activities and do not evade taxes (such as income tax, sales tax or value-added tax). However, we also want to stay out of the immediate personal domain, so sharing funds within a family or copying coins between devices should not be subject to monitoring by the state.
That just sounds Orwellian and gives me the creeps, but wait! It gets worse!
In Taler terminology, we distinguish between transactions where the exclusive ownership of the value of a coin is passed from one entity to another, and sharing whereafter control over a coin is shared by multiple electronic wallets (which may belong to different individuals). In Taler, the receiver of a transaction is visible to the state and thus can be taxed, while sharing is invisible to anyone not involved. Once a coin is shared among different individuals, any one of those can try to spend it, but only the first spender would succeed. Thus, sharing requires a strong trust relationship among the individuals involved, and thus represent interactions in the protected immediate personal domain, and not commercial transactions.
So dox yourself when you get money, or you HAVE to trust everyone else to play nice?
Judging from their design it looks like their plan is to kill Tether which has a similar design. But at least it HAS a blockchain! Honestly I thought Tether represented the absolute endpoint of how crappy a crypto can get.
As it turns out, I was oh so horribly wrong!
Another flaw is that it's core design mandates the use of a centralized exchange and the lack of a blockchain in their own words allows...
a fradulent Exchange might go bankrupt instead of paying the Merchants and thus the Exchange will need to be audited regularly like any other banking institution.
To my mind this a major step backwards and their logic makes absolutely no sense.
This could slow adoption of peer 2 peer crypto solutions in the open source world.
Bitcoin and even Steem are probably safe for now. But the danger here is that there are rumblings that Taler might become deeply entrenched in other GNU apis, this is only possible because they are a project of the GNU foundation. It could become a fundamental API similar to OpenSSL. If this happens, then you need to understand that this is a reserve backed crypto with apparently no blockchain? One that requires you to trust every actor in the system???
I'm posting this, because I've read everything I can find and I still have a lot of questions and a lot of apprehension.
The level of integration possible at the API level may give this currency a preferred status in the GNU ecosystem. The GNU ecosystem is the foundation of the entire open source world.
This has the potential to lockout other cryptos such as Bitcoin and Steem in terms of integration and interop prospects with other projects, or at least make integration harder.
It would be like Microsoft spinning a "crypto" of their own and integrating it into the core windows APIs.
We should raise the alarm bells as far and wide as we can on this and urge the GNU foundation in no uncertain terms to drop this silliness. They could just use OpenLedger or literally ANYTHING else!
Top image chosen because it has about as much to do with cryptocurrency as Taler does