this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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GNU Taler (a swiss FLOSS alternative to Visa, Mastercard and Paypal) begins operating in Switzerland as Version 1.0 releases (news.itsfoss.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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GNU Taler begins operating in Switzerland, distributed by the Taler Operations AG. Gnu Taler aims to be a “digital wallet” and has been used by the swiss national bank as well as the european national bank as a example for how a digital currency handed out by the state could work. It aims to be as privacy preserving as cash for the buyer while not allowing the seller to evade taxes.

Currently the Taler is brought out by a special organisation, the “Taler Operations AG”, and not the national bank, although both the national bank as well as the Taler Team have shown interest in a official digial currency by the national bank based on the Taler. But we need to relativate as the national council has stated that the introduction of a digital currency would probably take relatively major legislative changes and therefore take a bit of time.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Banking secrecy, alternatively known as financial privacy, banking discretion, or bank safety, is a conditional agreement between a bank and its clients that all foregoing activities remain secure, confidential, and private.

That means private, not anonymous. The bank still knows who you are, that you have a bank account (or multiple) there, how much money the bank accounts have, who transferred money to the bank account and who took it out. Bank transfers require knowledge of a name, bank number, bank account number, and sometimes even more information e.g if a transfer above 10k is made it has to be reported to the IRS (same applies in Europe) - if you were anonymous, that wouldn't be possible.

Also, that wiki page links to more pages about banking privacy in multiple countries. Nowhere does it mention anonymity.

Privacy != anonymity