On P2P payments from their FAQ: “While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete.”
How about, no? How about me paying €50 to my friend for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated, KYCed, and blocked if they don’t approve of it or know who the recipient is? How about it’s none of the government’s business how I split the bill at dinner with friends? This level of surveillance is madness, especially coming from an app that touts “privacy” as a feature.
GNU Taler is a trojan horse to enable CBDC adoption. They are the friendly face to an absolutely terrifying level of government control in our lives funded by the same government that tries every year to implement chat control. Imagine your least favourite political party gaining power. Now imagine they can see and control every transaction you make. No thanks.
So does encryption, and peer to peer conversations, and talking to your neighbor, and trading things at the swap meet.
Requiring absolute central control removes freedom from people and removes accountability from governments.
For one Taler doesn’t enforce central control. Also it protects the identity of the person paying but not the seller. This means it is easy to hold a business accountable but hard to try and track customers. Overall this is a much healthier system that protects the consumer.