GNU Taler: Features
GNU Taler is a privacy-preserving payment system. Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering.
The primary use case of GNU Taler is payments; it is not meant as a store of value. Payments are always backed by an existing currency.
Payments are made after exchanging existing money into electronic money with the help of an Exchange service, that is, a payment service provider for Taler.
When making a payment, customers only need a loaded wallet. A merchant can accept payments without making their customers register on the merchant's Website.
GNU Taler is immune against many types of fraud, such as phishing of credit card information or chargeback fraud. In case of loss or theft, only the limited amount of money left in the wallet might be gone.
Paying with Taler
To pay with Taler, customers install an electronic wallet on their device. Before the first payment, the desired currency must be added to the wallet's balance by some other means of payment.
Once the wallet is loaded, payments on websites take only one click, are never falsely rejected by fraud detection and do not pose any risk of phishing or identity theft.
Receiving payments with Taler
To receive Taler payments, a merchant needs a bank account in the desired currency. We provide supporting software in various programming languages to make the integration painless. The merchant's backend for Taler transaction processing can run on the merchant's premises or be hosted by a third party.
Merchant integration is simple, and customers can pay for products without even having to register an account.
See how merchant integration works in our developer documentation!
Practical
Taler is easy to integrate with existing Web applications. Payments are cryptographically secured and are confirmed within milliseconds with extremely low transaction costs.
Stable
Taler does not introduce a new currency. Taler uses a digital wallet storing coins and payment service providers with settlement accounts in existing currencies. Thus, Taler's cryptographic coins correspond to existing currencies, such as US Dollars, Euros or even Bitcoins.
Secure
By design Taler does not suffer from many classes of security problems such as phishing or counterfeit. Thanks to its security features, Taler never rejects a legitimate customer due to a fraud-detection false positive.
Taxable
When using Taler, merchant's revenue is transparent for tax collection authorities. Unlike cash and most digital currencies, Taler helps prevent black markets. Taler is not suitable for illegal activities.
Private
When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed. Just like payments in cash, nobody else can track how you spent your electronic money. However, you obtain a legally valid proof of payment.
Libre
Taler provides protocols and reference implementations that, in principle, enable anyone to run their own payment infrastructure, whether they are individuals, organizations, or entire countries. Since the reference implementation is a GNU package, it will always remain free software.