Your wallet stores digital coins and thus ultimately your computer holds your balance. The exchange keeps funds matching all unspent coins in an escrow bank account.
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In case of a compromise of one of your devices, an attacker can spend coins from your wallet. Checking your balance might reveal to you thatwhether your device has eventually been compromised. If a coin has been spent, this coin cannot be spent a second time. The Exchange examines every coin whether it has been spent and thus makes double spending impossible.
In case of a compromise of one of your devices, an attacker can spend coins from your wallet. Checking your balance might reveal to you whether your device has eventually been compromised. If a coin has been spent, this coin cannot be spent a second time. The Exchange examines every coin whether it has been spent and thus makes double spending impossible.
Taler supports push and pull payments between wallets (also known as peer-to-peer payments). 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.
Your wallet stores digital coins that are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature">blindly signed</a> by an exchange. The use of a blind signature protects your privacy as it prevents the exchange from knowing which coin it signed for which customer.
The Taler protocol allows any exchange to set its own fee structure, allowing operators to set fees for withdrawing, depositing, refreshing or refunding coins. Operators can also charge fees for closing reserves and for (aggregated) wire transfers to merchants. Merchants may choose to cover some of the fees customers incur. Actual transaction costs are estimated around 0.001 cent/transaction (at high transaction rates, amortized over billions of transactions, excluding migration costs). Note that this is an early estimate, details may depend on hosting and backup requirements from the regulator and could thus easily be 10x higher.
Taler's wallet supports multiple currencies, but the system currently does not support conversion between currencies. However, in principle an entity that accepts deposits in one currency and allows withdrawals in another currency could be created. Still, the regulatory hurdles in this case tend to be particularly complex. The focus for Taler is on day-to-day payments, so we have no plans to support currency conversion in the near future.
We believe the European Electronic Money Directive provides part of the regulatory framework a Taler exchange with coins denominated in Euros would have to follow.
The exchange would be operated by a bank or in cooperation with a bank, and that bank would hold the funds in escrow. Note that this bank could be a regular bank or a central bank for a centrally banked electronic currency. Regardless, the bank would fall under the respective banking regulations establishing a reason why consumers would have faith in the conversion from Taler coins into regular bank money.
From a technical point of view, any exchange is audited by one or more independent auditors. Merchants and consumer wallets will report certain issues automatically to the auditors, but auditors may also provide a method for manual submission of issues. The auditors are expected to make their reports available to the respective regulatory authorities, or even the general public. </p> <p> From a legal point of view, users can always turn to their national authority responsible for settling disputes concerning the management of exchange services. For exchange services conducting business in Germany, this would be the general authority in charge of disputes (<a href="https://www.verbraucher-schlichter.de">Universalschlichtungsstelle des Bundes</a>). In addition to this, the European Online Dispute Resolution (see <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/odr">ODR</a>) as a platform provided by the European Commission can be called for the settlement of disputes concerning exchange services headquartered in member states of the European Union.
We are aware of several businesses running exploratory projects or having developed working prototypes. We are also in discussions with several regular banks as well as several central banks about the project. That said, there are currently no products in the market yet, and we believe this would be premature given the state of the project (see also <a href="https://gnunet.org/bugs/">our bugtracker</a> for a list of open issues).
