What are the options for increased privacy in how you pay for things where you live?

Cash is the obvious answer, but what about buying stuff online?

UK here. Thinking of ditching cards/contactless for good old cash. No idea about online payments - not doing anything illegal so might persevere with cards for now. Zero experience with crypto.

  • notarobot@lemmy.zip
    1·
    1 day ago

    I have questions. I’ve known about taker for a long while now and always thought it would get nowhere not because its bad, but because people likely don’t care. However since the steam adult games sensorship, I seen it mentioned in Lemmy like 6 times. Even before crypto.

    Has something changed? And I missing something? Do they have some actual big users? Do people now care? Or is allt his just a Lemmy bubble kind of thing?

    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1·
      23 hours ago

      Since Taler isn’t operating in the same way as the wild-west of crypto, and needs to secure the adoption of existing banking institutions, its rollout is going to be much slower.

      It hasn’t been widely adopted yet, but the big change that occured is it only just recently released a stable 1.0 version that makes wider adoption possible, and passed some essential security audits, including for iOS.

      In addition to recently being approved and available in Switzerland, it is also planned to be added to a Ko-fi-like payment/donation system thanks to a grant by the NLnet foundation, which will hopefully enable it to gain wider adoption by creators or youtubers, as an example. In the future, it could become a replacement for Zelle if more banks adopt it (I suspect credit unions would be more likely to give it a try, if they became aware of it by their membership, and it was requested a lot).

      There’s a bit more discussion of it over at !money@slrpnk.net, if you’re interested.

      It likely does have more representation and mind-share here on lemmy since it aligns with the ideals of many users here in particular, we’re going to be more tuned into alternatives like that compared to the wider population.