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authorChristian Grothoff <christian@grothoff.org>2015-08-03 19:33:18 +0200
committerChristian Grothoff <christian@grothoff.org>2015-08-03 19:33:18 +0200
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explain transaction vs. sharing
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- <!--# include file="common/footer.inc" -->
+ <div class="col-lg-12">
+ <h2 lang="en" id="taxability">Taler technology: About taxability, change and privacy</h1>
+ <h2 lang="de">Taler Technik: Steuern, Wechselgeld und Privatsph&auml;re</h1>
+ <h2 lang="fr" note="outdated"></h2>
+ <h2 lang="it" note="outdated"></h2>
+ <p lang="en">One of the key goals of Taler is to provide anonymity for
+ citizens buying goods and services, while ensuring that the state can
+ observe incoming transactions to ensure businesses engage only in
+ legal activities and do not evade taxes (such as income tax,
+ sales tax or value-added tax). However, we also want to stay
+ out of the immediate personal domain, so sharing funds within a
+ family or copying coins between devices should not be subject to
+ monitoring by the state.
+ </p>
+ <p lang="en">In Taler terminology, we distinguish between
+ <b>transactions</b> where the exclusive ownership of the value of a
+ coin is passed from one entity to another, and <b>sharing</b>
+ whereafter control over a coin is shared by multiple electronic
+ wallets (which may belong to different individuals). In Taler,
+ the receiver of a transaction is visible to the state and thus
+ can be taxed, while sharing is invisible to anyone not involved.
+ Once a coin is shared among different individuals, any one of those
+ can try to spend it, but only the first spender would succeed. Thus,
+ sharing requires a strong trust relationship among the individuals
+ involved, and thus represent interactions in the protected immediate
+ personal domain, and not commercial transactions.
+ </p>
+ <p lang="en">When Taler needs to provide change, for example because
+ a customer only has a 5 Euro coin but wants to make a 2 Euro
+ purchase, it needs to create <b>fresh</b> coins (of a total value
+ of 3 Euros) that are <b>unlinkable</b> to the original 5 Euro coin
+ to ensure privacy. To ensure that the resulting <b>refresh</b>
+ operation where the change is converted to fresh coins cannot be
+ used to <i>transfer</i> funds from one entity to another, Taler ensures
+ that any owner of an original coin that was involved in a
+ refresh operation can follow a <b>link</b> to the private
+ information of the fresh coins generated by the operation. As a
+ result of this trick, refresh operations cannot uses to create
+ <i>transfers</i>, as the linkage ensures that the fresh coins are
+ always <i>shared</i> with the owner of the original coin.
+ </p>
+ <p lang="en">As a result, Taler does not intrude into the
+ personal economic domain, offers good privacy, taxability
+ for transactions and the ability to give change.
+ </p>
+ </div>
+ <!--# include file="common/footer.inc" -->
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