I enjoy the "how I almost became a millionaire because of Bitcoin" stories. I've read a lot of them online and I know surprisingly many people personally that have such a story to share.

Those stories tell you a lot about the person in question. How it didn't work out and how they cope with that "loss".

Yours is the first where someone coped out because not being satisfied with the kind of privacy Bitcoin provides.

Sometimes having principles and sticking to them puts me in unfavorable situations like that, but to be honest I still feel the same way about bitcoin. Because of missing out though I never really got back into the coin scene, but I do like monero/zcash for their privacy features, but I have a hard time buying the idea that any coin based off wasting compute cycles and energy on arbitrary math is going to be a real coin of the future.

A coin that uses all that compute to work on protein folding or other big problems that also has privacy would be something I would really like to see.

What is your opinion of GNU Taler?

Not who you asked this from, but in my opinion it has a huge problem of any mistakes being unfixable - either you mistransact or get scammed - taler provides no way to fix that.

I don’t get it – if you could just take it back whenever, it wouldn’t be “money”, now would it?

It would be money, but not cash. I can absolutely take back a Paypal transaction with buyer protection.

And, just like money is a layer built on top of cash, I assume that one could build a third-party escrow service on top of GNU Taler which has this “buyer protection” feature, with the added bonus of not one actor having a monopoly on it – whereas if Paypal stops liking you, you are out of luck.

There are other alternatives to Paypal as well. This feature should be built into the currency instead of just forcing everyone to reinvent the wheel for zero benefit.

If you mean ChexSystems or TeleCheck, they’re regulated as credit reporting agencies so all of the “usual” measures for dealing with wayward CRAs work great even though they take a little longer because both of those companies are slow jerks.

Check out creditboards.com for lots of ways to get those companies to straighten up.

This might be a different list but it has a similar effect, if you[1] or your country are on it then even your ability to buy things online is reduced:

https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads

[1] or someone with the same name and similar residential history