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We are developing Taler, a privacy-preserving payment solution.
Taler is safe and convenient for customers and stores. It is easy to deduct
taxes from Taler payments, so it will be favored by governments and beneficial
to society.
You should think of Taler as Cash for the digital world. Let's see how it
would work.
# Dold: We said we're doing the computer purchase story,
# Dold: but I think the pregnancy story grabs more attention.
# Dold: The refund is included later.
# Dold: We really need a nice graphical representation for the Taler wallet.
# -- customer story --
Sarah needs to buy a pregnancy test. A few days ago, she topped up her Taler
wallet with 200EUR, by going to an ATM that allows her to withdraw Talers
instead of bank notes.
Instead of her old leather wallet, she uses an NFC token as her digital wallet.
We call this NFC token her Taler wallet, but there are also other ways to store
your Talers, for example on your smart phone.
# Dold: Do we need this?
If there hadn't been any ATM for Talers close to Sarah, she would've used
online banking to top up her digital wallet.
But back to her situation; she's a bit embarassed about it, so she goes to a
store in another part of town and grabs a pregnancy test there. On checkout,
she holds her Taler wallet against a Taler checkout terminal and presses a
button on her wallet. This authorizes the payment.
She does not need to identify herself, and the wallet will not give out any
information about Sarah, it'll just authorize the spending of digital cash
tokens stored inside the wallet. That's one of the things that make Taler
different from most other digital payment systems.
# Dold: Okay, maybe too much detail,
# but it's a transition to the next part.
After using the test in the next public bathroom, she is very
relieved that it is negative.
Sarah is more relaxed on her way home, and when she sees a pair of earrings that
her friend could really like, she buys them with her Taler wallet.
Sarah doesn't have to worry about the receipt, if her friend doesn't like the
earrings, she can always go back and use her Taler wallet to prove to the store
that she bought the earrings.
# Dold: Necessary?
The store doesn't need to worry either, because Taler uses strong
cryptography to prove this.
# -- journalist story --
So we've seen that Taler is really useful for customers. But what
about the other side of the story?
Sam is a journalist. He was recently fired from his
ad-supported online publisher, since more and more people
are using adblock, and the publisher had to downsize.
Sam hears about Taler. He installs a plugin for his Wordpress website.
(Wordpress is a really popular software to manage blogs.).
Now Sam's previous readers can go to Sam's blog and make a small payment
directly to Sam, let's say 5ct, for every article they want to read.
When Sam writes about sensitive topics, his readers don't have to worry about
his Blog showing up in their credit card payment history, since the payments
are anonymous.
# Dold: Maybe we should leave out the usual terminology
# with mint/merchant in the talk, it'd take time to
# explain and isn't common.
At the end of the month, Sam gets the accumulated payments from the Taler
payment processor. The fees he has to pay are small, since the micropayments
are accumulated.
Sam is so happy about his experience with Taler that he writes a blogpost about
it, and some of his reader also try Taler.
# -- summary, potential and plans --
These stories gave you an idea of why the world really needs Taler.
Let's see how our team wants to make this happen, and how far we are along the way.
The theory and cryptography behind Taler is worked out. Our team
has members at well-known research institutions in France and Germany.
All protocols are documented as an open standard.
# Dold: Yes, stallman would hate 'open source' here ... not
# sure if they know who Richard is ...
The open source community knows about our project, and we are endorsed by the
Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software foundation.
# Dold: Is this true?
We have prototypes of the core components of the systems, and we have been
offered partnerships by hardware manifacturers for the NFC token.
# Dold: We should mention a more detailed timeline, when
# we want to have all the non-hardware technical stuff done.
# Dold: We should mention nana here.
Our connections to activists and journalists, who desperately need something
like Taler, will help us to gain the critical mass for wide adoption.
Our business would live from fees for operating components of the
system, as well as the integration into online/offline stores.
We want to start with online payments, and later expand
to offline solutions with hardware tokens.
# Dold: Anything else we need from them?
However, we still need help on the legal, regulatory and operational aspects,
this is something where we believe UBS could help us lot.
[end slide with names, institution logos]
# Dold: If it fits in here, maybe some VERY short summary of why Taler is
# awesome?
# ------
# Dold: Mention how many people have worked on taler?
# Dold: We HAVE to mention bitcoin somewhere, I'm not sure where it fits in.
# Ben: I like the pregnancy story line.
# Ben: Should you indeed mention bitcoin? if there is room for questions, this will surely be raised as one of them
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