One point of Taler's architecture is that blind signatures are used to create tokens, so the issuer doesn't know which coin was issued to which person. Then the merchant doesn't know who the coin was issued to but can redeem it with the issuer if it's valid. So if there's enough transaction volume it'll be hard for issue of coins and redemption at merchants to be correlated.
> > In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.
And also I don't think they have a privacy-preserving solution for money transfers between consumers. So if I wanted to give you 20€ I think that has to be represented as a burning of tokens and a reissue, so the central issuer learns all those transactions even though purchases at merchants are private.
The privacy properties for P2P transfers between consumers are identical to those with merchants: the exchange can require the receiver to provide information about themselves, but the payer remains anonymous just like for purchases at a merchant. And yes, it involves spending (burning, if you prefer) the old tokens (we prefer digital coins) and issuing (blindly signing) fresh coins. Afterwards, the fresh digital coins are indistinguishable from those issued during a regular withdrawal from a bank account.
Would it be technically possible to transfer tokens to another user directly, without an exchange acting as an intermediate?
My assumption is that this is possible but not supported by default, since there’s no way to guarantee (without using an exchange) that the giver has really deleted the tokens they sent to the receiver, and will not spend them before the receiver can (which would render the receiver’s copy of the tokens unusable).
But assuming someone implements this in software, would it be possible to make direct transfers like this while relying entirely on trust? Or are the tokens somehow tied to the wallet that has first received them?
You can backup tokens and restore them to another wallet (and we are in the process of making that easier). We call that sharing, and it is not a transaction as it is simply granting access to the same money to both wallets.
No, the "coins" (as we call them) are not tied to the wallet - if you trust the sender to delete them after you received them, then you can use them from your wallet as if you withdrew them, or got them via the standard P2P send protocol.
Right, because you can issue coins as a "purchase" of the coins being transferred. That makes sense, but still doesn't address the concerns around the system being designed to support negative interest rates and withdrawal rate limits.
I believe this refers to switching to high-efficiency electric heaters like reverse-cycle AC units (also known as "heat pumps"), rather than oil heaters or ducted gas heating.
The majority of UK homes are heated by gas-powered boilers that pump hot water through radiators in each room. Often hot water is heated by the same system.
Decarbonisation usually means replacing that boiler with a heat pump which uses electricity to heat water.
This is exactly what's done by Relm4 (https://relm4.org/) and vgtk (https://docs.rs/vgtk/latest/vgtk/). It's an interesting idea, but toolkits have a lot of state that's difficult to integrate perfectly with this approach.
It really is funny how you go through learning all these fantastic abstractions, and then at the end your line-of-business code ends up looking a lot like it always did. But expecting your data structures and control-flow functions to behave according to laws makes things so much more predictable and easier to wrangle.
> The "ABC" of airway, breathing, circulation they taught us may not be current advice.
The version taught in Australian first aid classes is DRSABCD: check for (D)anger, check for patient (R)esponse, (S)end for help, (A)irway, (B)reathing, (C)irculation.
Part of the reason they teach "ABC" is it is simple and easy to remember, especially in an emergency. I've reread DRSABCD a dozen times now and I guarantee I will have forgotten it in a few minutes. Case in point, you missed (D)efibrillation...
This argument applies to learning to code in general. What is your estimate of the ratio between "just shipped whatever the clanker spat out" vs "interrogated the LLM about its own output†" vs "deliberately interrogates LLMs to learn"?
†Untrustworthy, because it will either double down on its own output in its context, or will flip-flop to whatever the user said .
I don't know how many users of LLMs fall into each of these buckets but I have the sense that there these distinct buckets. I don't think it's necessarily a global thing. A single user could fall into all three buckets depending on the domain they are working in. For instance for CI/CD I tend to ship clanker, for tests I interrogate LLM about output, but for code algorithms I am more likely to interrogate to learn.
As in the Steve Jackson one where you have conspiracies and front groups and fronts for those fronts? I wanted to like it but never could get into it; too many fiddly bits placing megabucks all over the power structure and adding up modifiers. Did you play house rules with friends, or does it get better with more plays, or was I just doing something wrong?
> In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.
Well goody.
The idea of blind signatures is cool, as is the fact that the merchant doesn't need to identify the customer, as is the fact that you could deploy neat local currencies with something like this, but AFAIK you still can't give 20€ to your friend without the exchange knowing and approving, or it becoming a race to see who spends the tokens corresponding to the 20€. And that's not very privacy-preserving.
IIRC isn't part of the idea that there are multiple central banks, you can choose which one you want to use, and currencies are exchanged automatically when needed?
That somehow hurts me to hear more than anything. I remember days spent in my youth trawling through Google search for anime fandoms and homework answers. Joke used to be that beyond page 1 is the definition of desperation and in the 00s that was definitely true but I discovered a lot of cool distractions in that desperation. This feels like they killed Google Reader again.
Don't know how modern this is, but I remember being disappointed that despite Google claiming it had billions of results, you could only see a few pages' worth.
Looking now, I've just noticed they no longer give a count of results.
What worries me is the SNB whitepaper on "how to issue a digital currency" they worked on with Taler: https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r...
> > In addition, charging an exchange fee would allow the central bank to implement negative interest rates, if deemed necessary. The central bank could also impose a conversion limit per customer for AML/CFT (“cash” limits) or financial stability reasons (to prevent hoarding or bank runs), if desired.
And also I don't think they have a privacy-preserving solution for money transfers between consumers. So if I wanted to give you 20€ I think that has to be represented as a burning of tokens and a reissue, so the central issuer learns all those transactions even though purchases at merchants are private.
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