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 a guy for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated and KYCed? 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.
Your first example is tax fraud if you hide it
That may technically be true, but it’s currently very normalized. Do we actually want to denormalize it? Should the government know about every trivial transaction?
For small sum in-person payments, regular cash is still the best option and will continue to be so, GNU Taler or not.
There is a middle ground. Cash has a physical trace but it isn’t known by the government right away. We need digital cash that actually functions like cash.
not if they’re only covering the cost of parts
Which jurisdiction are you referring to? GNU Taler isn’t specific to any particular country or currency.