So basically one big honeypot.

wrong assumption

Taler is _not_ a fully anonymous payment system nor does it claims so.

It solves two specific problems:

- merchants get way more personal information about you then they actually need (merchants as e.g. your grocery store)

- alternative payments system implementations not owned by visa

non of this points include, or pretend to include, that your transactions are anonymous to auditors. Taler is in it's documentation pretty clear about that. It's a improvement to existing payment systems in the framework and limitations of existing payment transactions.

For being a honeypot you normally discrepancy between disclosed information and actual situation or other way to try to trick people to disclose things they don't want to disclose.

Just because some improvement to existing payment systems isn't hitting some legally impossible ideal doesn't make it a honeypot or any other way malicious.

that may become clear from deeper reading, but from a cursory glance at the home page they claim

> privacy-friendly online transactions

so I believe any reasonable user, without digging more deeply, would not come to the conclusion that they are complying with KYC laws.

That claim is meaningless without digging deeper. It's not the fault of any project that different people interpret terms like "privacy-friendly" differently. They don't say "anonymous".

be that as it may, a general reader will consider a lack of anonymity to not be privacy-friendly - so it appears as deceptive marketing

projects cannot control what people think, but they can control what they say, and attempt to word things in the best way possible

Even I, as a non "general reader" consider this service to be non-private.

I disagree. Plenty of privacy friendly things are not totally anonymous. The average reader has no such expectation, and if you think they do you really need to expand your social circle beyond a subset of tech workers.

I definitely read that the same way Apple means it with ApplePay - they are improving your privacy with respect to the merchant you are purchasing from, by them not learning anything unnecessary about you.

Any government-approved payment system is obviously going to be auditable under existing legal frameworks.

doesn't Apple require a name and a zip code? I would call that unnecessary, even if they wouldn't.

> Any government-approved payment system is ... auditable

Sure, I don't dispute that. Which is also why I wouldn't really call a government-approved system private (unless there are some shenanigans going on).

GLS is also part of a larger banking group that decided to back https://wero-wallet.eu/ ...

Ah yes. Network effects of course.

Must have been quite a curveball for Taler. Good luck on new venture!