\ifrennesone
\chapter*{Acknowledgements}
\else
\chapter{Acknowledgements}
\fi
%\begin{itemize}
%\item ARED, Bruno Haible, RFF, Moritz Bartl
%\item Donaukurier, Tor project (letter of support)
%\item GLS bank
%\item PEP, GNU
%\item Ashoka
%\item Ben
%\item Jean-Louie Lanet
%\item Axel
%\item Cristina
%\item Marcello
%\item Jeff
%\item ng0
%\item gabor
%\item hartmut
%\item andreas enge
%\item richard s
%\item Vaish
%\item GNU developers
%\item Inria
%\item Leon s / business team
%\item Laurent
%\item Christian
%\item shivam
%\end{itemize}


I would like to thank Moritz
Bartl for helping with the funding for this thesis.  Bruno Haible provided
generous support for the GNU Taler team to visit meetings of the W3C's Web
Payment Working Group.  I also thank Ashoka, the Tor project and the
Donaukurier for their support.

This work benefits from the financial support of the Brittany Region (ARED
9174) and the Renewable Freedom Foundation (RFF).  

I want to thank Inria and my team leader Axel Legay for hosting me during the
work on my thesis, and Jean-Louis Lanet for agreeing to co-advise my thesis.
Special thanks goes to Thomas Given-Wilson, Fabrizio Biondi, Laurent Morin and
Nisrine Jafri for their support and company.

I also thank the Bern University of Applied Sciences for providing the hardware that
was using during experiments.

Thanks to Marcello Stanisci for his work as an engineer on the GNU Taler project.

Chapter \ref{chapter:consensus} is based on work published in the EURASIP
Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking in collaboration with
Christian Grothoff.  Parts of Chapter \ref{chapter:implementation} have been
published in collaboration with Jeff Burdges, Christian Grothoff and Marcello
Stanisci at SPACE 2016.

Thanks to Cristina Onete and Jeff Burdges for their collaboration on the
provable security of GNU Taler.

I am grateful to the GNU project, in particular Richard Stallman, for their support
of this project.  I also thank all GNUnet developers and GNU Guix developers, especially
Hartmut Goebel, Nils Gillmann, Gabor Toth, Ludovic Courtès and Andreas Enge.

Thanks to the Taler Systems business team, in particular Leon Schumacher
and Michael Widmer, for their continuous faith in the project.

I thank my advisor Christian Grothoff for his advice and friendship.

Last but not least I'd like to thank my parents, my oldest friends Tom and Ben
and my fiancée Vaish for their relentless support even during the most
difficult times.
