GNU Taler

GNU Taler is an online payment system that uses Chaum’s blind signatures to provide robust anonymity for customers along with accountability for merchants who commit crimes such as extortion. Taler avoids the the performance issues that plague Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus-based solutions.

These two features, along with Taler being developer entirely as free software, allow Taler to provide far cheaper transactions than the existing financial system, or block-chain based alternatives. In particular, Taler can realistically be deployed by groups outside the usual financial system.

We will give a demonstration of Taler and a discussion of integrating the merchant software into existing websites. We shall outline the Taler protocol, explaining how it accomplishes goals such as partial spending, and anonymous refunds. We shall also describe some cryptographic concerns we encountered around the security and anonymity properties of blind signatures.

Christian Grothoff
Christian Grothoff is leading the Décentralisé team at Inria Rennes. He maintains GNUnet, a network designed with the goal to provide privacy and security without the need for trusted third parties. He earned his PhD in computer science from UCLA, an M.S. in computer science from Purdue University, and a Diplom in mathematics from the University of Wuppertal.

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