Thanks for the responses!
heh, ya the demo looks great. I guess I was wondering if there were some good installation instructions for a noob like me ;p
"Not sure but seems that OT is account-based and GNU Taler is token-based" ahh, good point. Thanks for pointing that out, makes sense. That may be the case.
Really exciting to hear the wallet-to-wallet is in progress.
I have an idea I want to run by you and I apologize if it completely doesn't make sense in the scope of Taler.
So, from my understanding it sounds like real world usage of Taler are semi blocked in that getting banks and the sort on board has been a challenge (of course correct me if i'm wrong, I picked that up from going through the many HN posts).
I'm wondering if one could essentially, in the mean time, do a system like the following:
We have:
* User
* Merchant (or another user in wallet-to-wallet)
* Application (which also acts as an exchange for simplicity here)
Process:
* User is using some *trusted* application that lets them buy things. User enters their credit card in the application
* Application uses Stripe (or some service) to charge their credit card
* Application then issues "tokens" to the user using Talers blind signature system
* User then spends these tokens at the Merchant (or another user in w-t-w)
* Merchant (perhaps when balance reaches a certain threshold) can go to the Application and request a payout
* Application then accepts the tokens and can use Stripe again to send money to the merchant.
* Step 3: Profit (minus Stripes fees)
Now, it may seem pointless, because you could say, why not just use Stripe directly. But you still get some extra privacy on the user side, and also have the ability to send microtransactions much smaller than is possible/feasible with Stripe currently with their pricing model. For example, sending 10c transactions with Stripe just doesn't work (from what I can tell).
The one thing I am not sure about, it sounds like in Taler the merchant is expected to exchange their tokens immediately with the exchange upon receiving the coins. But i'm not sure if that is a hard requirement or not?
Let me know if that makes any sense ;p
Again, thanks for entertaining my questions, really appreciate it!