I don't understand the question. Greed exists in every human system because it's a human quality, not a system quality. Real people are driven by many, sometimes conflicting things at the same time.
Non-greedy action is by definion an action that doesn't directly and materially benefit the one acting. That is universal across all political and I would argue all biological systems.
I think Taler is designed to be privacy-preserving while being able to comply with national laws. So not the currency you're looking for if you wanna buy something illegal.
Sounds like that's the only thing it's good for. As far as I can understand it's designed so the merchant has to report it in order to verify it exists. I find it really hard to understand, but I think the thing I'm missing is that the person who buys Taler in the first place simply has to trust the issuer - because they can't verify that they've actually received any without leaving a record i.e. becoming a merchant who is receiving Taler in exchange for cash.
So if you get Taler from your bank and spend it somewhere, the government can see it at your bank, and they can see it where it was spent, but they don't see you at all. You've done your trusting out of band.
If that's right, it could still be used for illegal and untaxed transactions if the entire chain was trusting out of band. I could use it to buy drugs without paying taxes if by dealer would be happy to shoot me later if they couldn't spend it at a retailer, rather than to check if it was good.
I still don't understand it. I've tried periodically for years, but I'm missing something.
it's more transaction tokenization system then a crypto currency, so you don't really "buy Taler (currency)", you give Taler digital Euros and they give you a token representing this digital Euros in a more anonymous way. (They also can work for other currencies, but doesn't do currency exchanges/cross currency transactions itself).
Effectively this means:
- The merchant (e.g. your local grocery store, restaurant etc.) doesn't get information about you they can aggregate, sell etc. This is the main improvement.
- It's not controlled by a US company, this is also a pretty big improvement.
- Taler doesn't strictly require customer wallets to be bound to an bank account nor do they identify who you are as a customer. This makes it hard for Taler to abuse the audit log, which is also an improvement.
- It does strictly require merchants (anyone receiving money) to be bound to a bank account for given currency (here Euro). It's best to think about it as the money going directly to the merchants normal bank account.
- Taler has audit logs containing what token was used from which customer(id) with which merchant (which is strictly bound to having to have a bank account), as well as logs about how money got into the customers wallet and all this methods you can put money into it will (likely) be traceable, so criminal investigator and similar can still pretty much trace back who did which transaction when. Just with a bit more effort/extra steps. So with enough automation states can as much surveil you then they can now. Practically it seems to make things a bit more high effort then today, which is a good thing to have.
IFF Taler allow putting digital Euros into a wallet using gift cards buyable with cash this indeed could still be used for money laundering (similar to how most gift card systems can be used for it), but I think it's unlikely they allow such things and most people practically will likely link up their bank account.
Another thing to consider is that for any ordering of physical good you normally have to put in a shipping address with your name, even if you send it to a post box.
And for a bunch of other things the vendor also has to get your identity out of band (independent of used payment processing). E.g. many kinds of contracts, high value payments, currency exchanges etc. etc.
This doesn't make it useless. It still is an improvement. Especially if payment terminals in physical shops get support for it and/or digital goods can be bought with it. In Germany a lot of the large chains with physical shops more or less all use the same payment terminals for card payment with support relative flexible software so it's actually possible I think. Just hard to happen without regulatory pressure, similar to Wero support on a payment terminal.
> Taler has audit logs containing what token was used from which customer(id) with which merchant
This is completely wrong. The Taler exchange doesn't know which tokens you have. When you spend them as a customer, the merchant passes your tokens to the exchange. It's like physical coins: you give them to the merchant, the merchant deposits them in their account. The exchange know which merchant deposits the tokens but has no information on the customer because the tokens (like coins) are anonymous.
I think the proper comparison point is not something like Monero, but multinational credit card companies. Taler is obviously much more private than those.
the state if it does an criminal investigation, that won't work, also at least for now there is no need to do so if you don't to anything criminal. Sure if fascists take over that would change but they then also would ban any system which would allow avoiding their gaze so not sure it's relevant tbh.
and as things are currently you have to far more worry about US companies and state knowing about what transactions which are legal but you want to keep private then about your local EU government
The problem with this line of reasoning is that is works for all values of "they", "criminal", "investigation", and "fascists". Right now we probably don't think it's a problem that you can't buy drugs with this system. In the future, if they ban books about Tiananmen Square, and this system gets introduced and it also doesn't let you buy books about Tiananmen Square, we won't think that's a problem either.
They have an interactive mode right now (crystal i), but it's not very comprehensive. You cannot use certain libraries with it etc.
Shouldn't be terribly hard to make it good though. Some time ago, I added a JIT REPL in a few afternoons with Claude, ending up with roughly the same performance as their compiler, and with it working reliably with all the libraries I tested. But since they don't want LLM contributions in Crystal, I just left it as an interesting experiment and started working on my own language instead.
Crazy how easy it is these days, isn't it? The last 20% that matters is gonna be a bit harder though, I assume. Plus with everybody being able to do it means that making yours be interesting is going to be extra difficult.
It is a lot easier, but I've been working on this language project for almost 8 months now. I've spent a lot of time in research papers and thinking about both dev UX and how it works with LLMs. Knocking together a working compiler on LLVM is WAY easier now, but making something nice is still hard. A language is so much more than a compiler and syntax. So to your point, standing out is incredibly hard.
I'm doing this because it interests me and I'm learning, but it does feel quixotic at times.
Cool. I'm about 3-4 months in, this is the current result: https://hanki-lang.org/docs/reference/ -- sorry about the LLM smell. I haven't paid much attention to making the documentation beautiful yet.
Seems like you're slightly more ambitious with the features (linear typing, refinement typing are way beyond what I dream about). I'm focusing more on a small practical application language with ruby-like aesthetics.
I wanted Hanki to be a general-purpose language that could be used with minimal compromises as a scripting language, a configuration language and a reasonably high-performing application / server-side language. I wanted a good REPL, arbitrary precision arithmetics by default, reasonable safety features (effects, strong typing, concurrency via message-passing actors, erlang-like supervising) and excellent readability for human reviewing.
I wanted to include features that force AI agents into a style, so the linter is included as part of the checker and every linter complaint is an error.
The implementation is currently 300K+ lines of Rust, about 60Kloc of Hanki.
I still have about a hundred beads tickets to go through before I'm happy enough about this that I dare to publish it. And seems like every solved task gets 2 follow-ups :)
> If you compare it with production languages, PHP looks pretty weak.
8f your comparison excludes all the vulnerabilities they come with, sure.
In practice no one using Node is using it without npm. Same for every other language that has insane transitive dependencies for any non-trivial project.
Okay but is it though? The PHP language and runtime itself has had practically no exploitable vulnerabilities for the past 10 years.
PHP applications might do suspicious things, by choice. But the runtime itself is fine. Certainly, there are less vulnerabilities in recent years in the PHP runtime than in, say, V8.
Highlights, imho:
1. aggregation of multiple sources into single posts
2. no comment sections
3. UI is pretty nice now
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