• 21 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • By default, I doubt that Firefox is better at privacy than Chrome. Actually even worse than Chrome I’d say. But you can customize Firefox to be much more privacy friendlier than Chrome. That is the functionality Chrome lacks. The last time I tried out Ungoogled chromium, it sucked ass. Websites actually loaded slower than on Firefox for me. And both had uBlock Origin installed. I tried those fancy GPU stuff as well, almost nothing changed.


  • Yeah. Technically that should be possible. But why would you do that is the real question. Afaik you won’t be able to use GNU Taler without an existing backend. Your backend would be a bank and why not just withdraw coins from there. I don’t know whether you can self host the backend. There would be no reason to be afraid of the bank knowing where you send the coins to as that is pretty much hidden from the bank. I explained GNU Taler to my best abilities in this comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/10414943




  • As the website states, it’s not a new cryptocurrency coin. It works only if the bank wants to support it since GNU Taler is more like a plugin. When you want to pay a merchant, it directly withdraws money from your bank account and converts it to coins for your wallet to deposit. The bank knows where this coin is sent. However after depositing, the wallet tries to pay the shop. At this point, afaik the wallet makes a cryptographic proof with details like the amount of coins, sends it to the bank and the bank blindly signs it with their private key. Blind signatures are signatures where the signer does not know what the contents of what they are signing are. So the other bank or the shop can know that it came from that bank without the bank knowing from where it came. The bank however knows where the coins are going, so you can hold them accountable in case something happens. But you of course must reveal your identity for those things. Since cryptography is used, you can prove payments to merchants. GNU Taler can also be used offline, but I don’t know how that works.

    (there might be misconceptions in here so don’t take my words blindly)

    Here’s a nice image I found online: