GNU Taler is an unprecedented mass surveillance system.

> pervasive always-on surveillance

What is surveilled, except for the amount an anonymous entity has paid you?

> I stopped supporting FSF over their backing of this.

So this was six years ago?

The system is a simple chauvinism digital cash with integrated surveillance. All transactions in the system must be cleared by a centralized server that checks against double spends and validates that each transaction contains the required key-escrowed surveillance data.

> All the descriptions of GNU Taler calls it decentralized.

Unethical actors like the creators of GNU Taler are willing to lie. Surprise.

> So this was six years ago?

In 2016, I believe, yes.

I appreciate your concern that income transparency enables (some) surveillance. However, are you willing to acknowledge that without it, you will have significantly more criminal activity in the system and will never be legal in most jurisdictions? And that this would force most people to effectively use account-based systems without any privacy? (Or staying with physical cash, which we also advocate for, btw.).

That is a false comparison. A compulsory integrated surveillance system is not equivalent to "allowing the government to see your income". I file taxes, if my activity gives the government reason to suspect I'm engaged in fraud it can seek access to my records through due process. My computer reporting on me in real time wouldn't be a necessary or even useful part of that process, since its data will necessarily lack the context needed to correctly establish levels of taxation.

Not having my computers spy on me and report back is already completely legal, and in fact for the moment it would be unlawful for my government to require me to use spyware like Taler, though I don't think it would be too objectionable for me to argue that it is the objective of the creators of taler that laws are changed to deny me that freedom (since opt-in surveillance systems will never be particular successful).

And sure there is likely some more of some kinds of crime in a world where we don't have government cameras in our bedrooms, government microphones in our pockets, and government reporting integrated into our computer software. At the same time, it's reasonable to expect a world with pervasive state surveillance also have a multitude of other more heinous crimes: after all authoritarian governments like Maoist china have been responsible for mass murder on scales unimaginable by any set of conventional criminals.

It's one thing to argue that inviting invasive state surveillance into our lives would be a good thing, that we should give up more essential liberty to obtain some more temporary safety-- I wouldn't agree, but it's something people could debate. The extraordinary unethical behavior of Taler is that it pretends that it's doing anything but: that it's preserving the status quo instead of introducing new survailance. That it's promoters maliciously and dishonestly characterizes its critics as being pro-crime or anti-taxation (e.g. as we see kube-system doing in this very thread!), that it pretends that its massive increase in surveillance isn't something new, or even that it's something legally required. It's not.

We have taxation today. It doesn't require mass surveillance. Systems that don't embed mass surveillance aren't inherently anti-taxation for not doing so, though surely opponents of taxation also prefer less government surveillance.