Dr. Richard M. Stallman (RMS) Explains Why So-called 'Cryptocurrencies' Suck and Why GNU Taler is Better
LAST month RMS gave a talk in Berlin, Germany. We have a full transcript of it (includes questions and answers) and here's the part about making anonymous payments using Taler: (similar to what he said about it in prior talks)
What about payments? I've never used cryptocurrency. There were things I found disappointing and worrisome when I learned about BitCoin. And it's not clear to me that others are much better. One thing is that BitCoin tries to make the payer and payee, both of them, anonymous. Now it may not do a very good job of them. Basically it's the wallet doesn't have to be identified with anyone but since all the transactions can be tracked, the money can be tracked around from one person to another and unless you are a miner how did you get it? That's one reason why I prefer GNU Taler. GNU Taler is an anonymous payment system developed in the GNU Project. You can get more information at taler.net It's not a currency. It's for payments denominated in currencies that people use. So if it were implemented here in Germany it would probably be trading with Euros. But it's not an investment vehicle. It's not meant for currency speculation because it's not a currency. If you get say a hundred Euros in Taler tokens well the only fluctuation in their value will be the fluctuation of the Euro which is much less than the fluctuation of a cryptocurrency. I don't want to do currency speculation myself at all. I'm not a fan of risk. I don't gamble. Now with Taler the payer is anonymous but the payee is always identified, which means that Taler does not help millionaires hide lots of money from taxation. The world has a tremendous problem with wealth that is hidden and cannot be taxed. It's part of the way that billionaires have been transferring more and more of the world's wealth to them leaving less and less for everyone else. And this change is on the order of twenty percent of the world's wealth. It's an enormous change that impoverishes people who are not rich but even worse it gives the rich people the power of oligarchy, the power to buy governments and that threatens democracy. That threatens the rights of all of us but if we insist on payment systems that don't permit the hiding of large amounts of wealth, that problem will get less instead of more. Taler is not designed for paying a million dollars or a million Euros. It's designed for buying things every day.So, I went to an event in October and saw somebody wearing a shirt that said tax me if you can. His reason to advocate cryptocurrencies was essentially to try to exclude his money from contributing a share to the needs of having a good society. Their states have very important responsibilities and in order to carry those out they need taxes. Letting the rich get out of the taxes and dump those on the non-rich leads to disaster. So I'm happy that GNU Taler will not have that flaw.
RMS is the person who started the GNU/Linux operating system (some people just call it "Linux"), so despite a vicious defamation campaign many people still listen to what he has to say about technology. █