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authorChristian Grothoff <christian@grothoff.org>2015-08-03 19:33:18 +0200
committerChristian Grothoff <christian@grothoff.org>2015-08-03 19:33:18 +0200
commit918f2ac2942e8f882b60debc97e2e55fb4e045f6 (patch)
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explain transaction vs. sharing
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268 </ol> 268 </ol>
269 </p> 269 </p>
270 </div> 270 </div>
271 <!--# include file="common/footer.inc" --> 271 <div class="col-lg-12">
272 <h2 lang="en" id="taxability">Taler technology: About taxability, change and privacy</h1>
273 <h2 lang="de">Taler Technik: Steuern, Wechselgeld und Privatsph&auml;re</h1>
274 <h2 lang="fr" note="outdated"></h2>
275 <h2 lang="it" note="outdated"></h2>
276 <p lang="en">One of the key goals of Taler is to provide anonymity for
277 citizens buying goods and services, while ensuring that the state can
278 observe incoming transactions to ensure businesses engage only in
279 legal activities and do not evade taxes (such as income tax,
280 sales tax or value-added tax). However, we also want to stay
281 out of the immediate personal domain, so sharing funds within a
282 family or copying coins between devices should not be subject to
283 monitoring by the state.
284 </p>
285 <p lang="en">In Taler terminology, we distinguish between
286 <b>transactions</b> where the exclusive ownership of the value of a
287 coin is passed from one entity to another, and <b>sharing</b>
288 whereafter control over a coin is shared by multiple electronic
289 wallets (which may belong to different individuals). In Taler,
290 the receiver of a transaction is visible to the state and thus
291 can be taxed, while sharing is invisible to anyone not involved.
292 Once a coin is shared among different individuals, any one of those
293 can try to spend it, but only the first spender would succeed. Thus,
294 sharing requires a strong trust relationship among the individuals
295 involved, and thus represent interactions in the protected immediate
296 personal domain, and not commercial transactions.
297 </p>
298 <p lang="en">When Taler needs to provide change, for example because
299 a customer only has a 5 Euro coin but wants to make a 2 Euro
300 purchase, it needs to create <b>fresh</b> coins (of a total value
301 of 3 Euros) that are <b>unlinkable</b> to the original 5 Euro coin
302 to ensure privacy. To ensure that the resulting <b>refresh</b>
303 operation where the change is converted to fresh coins cannot be
304 used to <i>transfer</i> funds from one entity to another, Taler ensures
305 that any owner of an original coin that was involved in a
306 refresh operation can follow a <b>link</b> to the private
307 information of the fresh coins generated by the operation. As a
308 result of this trick, refresh operations cannot uses to create
309 <i>transfers</i>, as the linkage ensures that the fresh coins are
310 always <i>shared</i> with the owner of the original coin.
311 </p>
312 <p lang="en">As a result, Taler does not intrude into the
313 personal economic domain, offers good privacy, taxability
314 for transactions and the ability to give change.
315 </p>
316 </div>
317 <!--# include file="common/footer.inc" -->
272 </div> <!-- /container --> 318 </div> <!-- /container -->
273 </body> 319 </body>
274</html> 320</html>