this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Ok, can you please quote the exact part in those two sections that would allow to deanonymize the payer of a specific transaction?
I read both sections you mentioned, and 2.2.1 only seems to have one rare case where the merchant is a fake honeypot and the exchange is totally compromised, which clearly wouldn't be the case in our scenario, where the merchant is in another country and the attacker doesn't know either the merchant nor the customer in advance. And 2.2.3 talks about a hypothetical modification of GNU Taler, ~~which would be incompatible with the version the merchant in another country is using~~ (and anyways tries to deanonymize the merchant and not the customer), ~~and again afaik wouldn't work retroactively~~ Edit: would need to be done while transaction is in process, and aims to catch a merchant that forced someone to pay anonymously in a ransom case or so (meaning the payer is already known or at least suspected). And this would also be massively disruptive to all other customers of the same exchange.
This is not possible retroactively, and any exchange doing that would be quickly detected and not accepted by the merchant which is not under control of the government because they are based in another country. Edit: Basically for this to work, the exchange, the auditor and the merchant would need to be under full control of the hostile government and the system actively compromised before the transaction takes place.
We disagree on the primitives of the architecture clearly. To my (self stylized) reasonable opinion the primitives are such that I cannot recommend Taler to anyone where their spending puts their Life or Liberty at risk, such as the good Ballerina in this sad story.
I would be happy if you could point me to a way the good Ballerina could have been caught if they had used Taler for the payment, but that seems highly unlikely because GNU Taler privacy is designed around such an exact case, and if you were right the entire system would be fundamentally broken from ground up.
it is my assessment that it is fundamentally broken from the ground up in protecting people from central authorities, yes.
I'm giving the reason behind my opinion that started this discussion. Your welcome to disagree.
Asking me not to have an opinion is a bit much.
All the reasons in the thread above
I listed all the reasons that went into my assessment in the above 17 message thread