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.

  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    91·
    5 months ago

    Stablecoins are the worst of crypto and central banking combined.

    • They are centralized, even more centralized than central banks since they are run by a single company not an board appointed by an elected government
    • They can rug you at any time
    • They only have value because they are “pegged” to a certain currency and the “backing” must exist to maintain that peg.
    • Their source of the backing is often “trust me bro”
    • Even if the backing was solid, market shocks and other problems can reduce the value of that backing, leading to them being insolvent and the stablecoin losing its value. And guess what, it wasn’t insured!
    • They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely, so you have no reason to trust their claims and probably can’t seek any real remedy if they are lies
    • They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation

    Several of them have already collapsed spectacularly. More will in time. Avoid stablecoins.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
      3·
      5 months ago

      Some stablecoins are centralized, but it’s not a fundamental requirement of how they operate. Stabletokens such as DAI or Liquity are run without a central company. They cannot “rug” you because they’re based on smart contracts.

      They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely

      Isn’t that kind of the point?

      so you have no reason to trust their claims

      Smart contract code can be audited by anyone and trusted to run exactly as it’s written.

      They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation

      Stablecoins aren’t required to peg to any specific measure of value (I assume you’re referring to US dollars?). There are stabletokens pegged to gold, for example, if you really want something like that.

      Since US dollars work just fine for commerce, though, using a stabletoken that’s pegged to US dollars works fine for commerce too.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.net
        41·
        5 months ago

        That’s just smoke and mirrors. If there was a “bank run” on a stable coin all of them would immediately collapse as there is nothing of real value backing them.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
          3·
          5 months ago

          Anything of value is capable of losing its value under some circumstances, since value is assigned by humans. Obviously you pick and choose based on your use cases.

          • poVoq@slrpnk.net
            5·
            5 months ago

            That’s a cop-out to avoid discussing that none of the stable coins have anywhere close to the assets they claim to have and which would be necessary to peg the value.

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
              2·
              5 months ago

              You can examine the MakerDAO contract, for example, and see all of the assets they claim to have sitting right there under its control on the blockchain. You can see the contract logic behind how those assets enter and exit its control.

              • poVoq@slrpnk.net
                3·
                5 months ago

                If you can’t see how the snake bites its own tail here I can’t really help you, but on-chain “assets” do nothing for a stable coin that needs to be secured by off-chain assets.

                • FaceDeer@fedia.io
                  2·
                  5 months ago

                  So basically you only “believe in” off-chain assets? That’s fine, but it kind of removes you from any discussion of the details of blockchains. You’ve rejected their entire premise so why bother?

                  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
                    4·
                    5 months ago

                    No, I am rejecting the notion of stable coins, which are by their own definition literal scams. But I am strongly suspecting that you are directly involved in such scams as you continue to muddle it with entirely unrelated issues just so to make it sound like this is a general problem and not a stable coin specific one.