Talk on GNU Taler

GNU Taler is an online payment system that uses Chaum’s blind signatures to provide robust unbreakable privacy for customers along with accountability for merchants. Taler avoids the the performance issues that plague Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus based solutions, and is developed entirely as free software, enabling groups outside the usual financial system to deploy online payments.

These two features, along with Taler being developerd 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.

Speaker Bio: Christian Grothoff is leading the Décentralisé research team at Inria, a French institute for applied computer science and mathematics research. He maintains GNUnet, an experimental 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. He is also a freelance journalist reporting on technology and national security.

This session is open to all and is free. RSVP please, so that we can do all necessary arrangements.