On September 16, together with ODIA, we welcomed Christian Grothoff to Buenos Aires. He is one of the creators of GNU Taler, and he came to discuss a question that runs through everyday life: does paying with digital means have to mean leaving a record of everything we do?
The talk was in English, with the slides translated into Spanish and audience questions translated live. It was recorded: you can watch the full talk on YouTube. ODIA published its own chronicle of the event; this note is written from Numis, the cooperative that has spent years working to bring Taler to Argentina.
Paying also produces data
For years the surveillance debate focused on cameras, facial recognition, and tracking on the internet. We look less at the infrastructure that almost everything passes through: payment.
When we pay by card or digital wallet we don’t just move money. We leave behind our name, place, time, and frequency. Those records are kept for six to ten years, and combined they build a profile that says much more than each purchase on its own. Grothoff recalled Edward Snowden’s words at the IETF: the card payment system is “one of the worst things to happen to the user” when it comes to separating their access from their identity.
The problem is not just seeing: it’s also the power to block. Grothoff showed a video of Agustín Carstens, of the Bank for International Settlements, saying that with a central bank digital currency the State would have “absolute control” and the technology to enforce it. And he gave a recent example: judges of the International Criminal Court, sanctioned by the US, were cut off from the card networks and couldn’t pay their bills in Europe.
That’s control as in you don’t eat tomorrow.
Taler: privacy for the payer, transparency for the payee
GNU Taler is free software payment infrastructure. It’s not a new currency or a cryptocurrency: it works with existing currencies —in Argentina, pesos— and without blockchain, proof of work, or proof of stake.
Its bet separates two things usually taken as rivals. On one side, privacy for the payer: only the buyer knows where their money was spent. On the other, transparency for the payee: the shop’s income is recorded and can be audited, like any invoice.
The key piece is blind signatures. When you withdraw digital money, the operator knows how much left your account, but not which coins ended up in your hands. When you pay, the shop deposits those coins right away: that’s how double spending is detected and the income is identified on the side of whoever gets paid. Privacy is not a promise not to use the data: it’s the design of the system.
Data is a toxic asset, not something you’d like to have if you can avoid having it.
For merchants there are also concrete advantages: transaction costs of fractions of a cent against the 2 or 3% of cards, instant settlement, and no PCI-style security certification. And for the payer, it’s prepaid: you can’t overspend or go into debt without meaning to. The name says it all: it’s an acronym for Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Resources, and the order of its priorities is free software first, buyer privacy next, income transparency last.
Sovereignty: free software can’t be sold
In the discussion about sovereignty, Grothoff was direct: the closed systems of central banks will never interoperate, and the data they concentrate is an asset that doesn’t come back easily when the government changes. He cited Skype, European until Microsoft bought it, and Pix, efficient but under Brazilian control.
Who’s to say that company won’t be bought in two years? A free software solution can’t be bought: it can’t be turned foreign.
Closed systems can’t be audited either. With free software, society can study how the infrastructure it pays with works and propose changes without depending on a company’s goodwill.
The system should serve everyone
Another theme was inclusion. Grothoff works with My Oral Village on tools for people who can’t read numbers: in Myanmar, 45% can’t read a four- or five-digit number and up to 20% can’t reliably read a single digit. In a field test with 21 women, 6 languages, and 8 tasks, 16 completed everything without errors.
They also talked about the limits of offline payments. Taler works with the merchant offline and the buyer online; if both are out of signal, the answer was simple:
If both are offline, stick with cash. Maybe let’s keep a bit of it.
What about Argentina?
At Numis we’ve been working for Taler to operate in the country. Under local regulations a bank is needed to back the operation: today we have the documentation and the knowledge, and that partner is what’s missing.
The next step already has a date: in November, together with the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, we’re going to try Taler at a local fair where a paper community currency already circulates. The idea is simple: what today is written down on paper can scale with the cryptographic security of a bank.
You can watch the full talk and the original announcement on Instagram.