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+[GNU Taler](https://taler.net) is a new digital payment system whose
+development is currently co-funded by the RFF.  GNU Taler aims to strike a
+balance between radically decentralized technologies such as Bitcoin and
+traditional payment methods while satisfying stricter ethical requirements such
+as customer privacy, taxation of merchants and environmental consciousness
+through efficiency.  GNU Taler also address micropayments, which are infeasible
+with currently used payment systems due to high transaction costs.
+
+Addressing the problem of micropayments is urgent. The overwhelming majority of
+online journalists, bloggers and content creators currently depend on
+advertisement revenue for their income.  The recent surge of ad-blocking
+technology is threatening to destroy this primary source of income for many
+independent online journalists and bloggers.  Furthermore the existing
+advertisement industry is based on the Big Data business model, and users do
+not only pay with their attention but also with private information about their
+behavior. This threatens to move our society towards post-democracy.  Our goal
+is to empower consumers and content creators by giving the choice to opt for
+micropayments instead of advertisements.
+
+Unlike many recent developments in the field of privacy-preserving online
+payments, GNU Taler is not based on blockchain technology, but on Chaum-style
+digital payments with additional constructions based on elliptic curve
+cryptography.  Our work addresses practical problems that previous incarnations
+of Chaum-style digital payments suffered from.  The system is entirely composed
+of free software components, which facilitates adoption, standardization and
+community involvement.
+
+From the consumer's perspective, Taler's payment model comes closer to the
+expectations one has when paying with cash than with credit cards.  Customers
+do not need to authenticate themselves with personally identifying information
+to the merchant or the payment processor.  Instead, individual payments are
+authorized locally on the customer's computing device.  This rules out a number
+of security issues associated with identity theft.  We expect that this will
+also lower the barrier for online transactions due to the lower risk for the
+customer.  With current payment solutions, the risk of identity theft
+accumulates with every payment being made.  With our payment system, the only
+risk involved with each individual payment is the amount being payed for that
+single transaction.
+
+In Taler, the paying customer is only required to disclose minimal private
+information (as required by local law), while the merchant's transactions are
+completely transparent to the state and thus taxable.  Taxable merely means
+that the state can obtain the necessary information about the contract to levy
+common forms of income, sales or value-added taxes, not that the system imposes
+any particular tax code.  When customers pay, they use anonymized digital
+payment tokens to sign a contract with the merchant. The digitally signed
+contract is proposed by the merchant and is supposed to contain all the
+information required for taxation -- which typically excludes the identity of
+the customer.  Later, the state can obtain the contract by following a chain of
+cryptographic tokens, starting from a token in the wire transfer from the Taler
+payment system operator to the merchant.  The payment system operator only
+learns the total value of a contract, but no further details about the contract
+or customer.
+
+To pay with GNU Taler, customers need to install an electronic wallet on their
+computing device.  Once such a wallet is present, the fact that the user does
+not have to authenticate to pay fundamentally improves usability.  We already
+see today that electronic wallets like GooglePay are being deployed to simplify
+payments online. However, the dominant players mostly simplify credit card
+transactions without actually improving privacy or security for citizens.  GNU
+Taler is privacy-preserving free software and both technically and legally
+designed to protect the interests of its users.
+
+A demo of an online blog that uses GNU Taler is available at
+<https://demo.taler.net/>.  Documentation for developers can be found at
+<https://api.taler.net/>.
+