GNU Taler begins operating in Switzerland, distributed by the Taler Operations AG. Gnu Taler aims to be a “digital wallet” and has been used by the swiss national bank as well as the european national bank as a example for how a digital currency handed out by the state could work. It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.
Currently the Taler is brought out by a special organisation, the “Taler Operations AG”, and not the national bank, although both the national bank as well as the Taler Team have shown interest in a official digial currency by the national bank based on the Taler. But we need to relativate as the national council has stated that the introduction of a digital currency would probably take relatively major legislative changes and therefore take a bit of time.
And we are still waiting for a problem that blockchain can fix.
If you don’t think centralized currency controlled by neo-liberal capitalist states isn’t a problem to solve, we aren’t even in the same plane here.
And you think blockchain fixes that? Lol.
Bitcoin is pretty fucking centralized right now.
It already did fix it. See OWS and wikileaks and the hong Kong protests.
All were able to get instant international donations from allies while the big banks shut down their donations (eg PayPal, swift, wechat, etc)
I’m pretty sure it was centralized currencies.
Decentralized currencies will only actually make sense when the material incentives of our economic system would benefit from them. Capitalism is literally all about concentrating the control of capital and the means by which we produce things. Sadly, decentralized currencies will never be allowed to decouple themselves from these economic systems. There is too much material power to prevent that. And by material power I mean literally the enforcement of these concentrations of wealth through the use of violence.
The tech is cool. But it doesn’t magically solve the problem by simply being invented. It’s why no one is actually paying with these cryptocurrencies on anything but an extremely small scale.
A currency that cannot be manipulated by capitalist for their benefit has no place in our world. So, it will never reach any meaningful real use until those structures are dismantled. It will just continue to be a speculative asset that rich people dump their extra wealth into and poor people play as the lottery.
Yes I agree with this completely. Ethically-minded libertarian capitalists who have convinced themselves that bitcoin will neuter the ability of the state to commit violence are either fooling themselves or haven’t bothered to step back a bit to examine the nature of power. I was just pointing out that bitcoin does provide a way for a money to be managed in a decentralized and automated fashion. That’s the actual technological novelty that a blockchain enables, and IMO that is the only novelty is can or will provide. As all money does in capitalism though, yes it will continue top concentrate and cause harm.
To your point, bitcoin is already centralized around 1% of wallets.
It’s not really decentralized when 1% of people control the value at will.
The data on these things is completely unreliable. Wallets are opened and dumped at will. I don’t think that you’re really wrong. It is likely very concentrated. But I know that there is no reliable way of actually coming to this statistic.
We’re referring to decentralized management, not decentralized distribution. Fortunately I don’t think anyone in this thread is pretending that any kind of money is going to make the world better.
That’s a social problem that technology can’t fix.