Re: [Taler] Mutual credit on GNU Taler

[b]

Hi Christian,
Thank you for the quick answer. I'll give a try at the regional currency setup. 
Do you know of regional currencies using this currently? If not, what are the blockers?

Another question I have: is it possible to have exchange-to-exchange transactions? What I'm specifically looking (cf. Credit Commons protocol) is for users in different mutual credit networks to trade together (a network would be a special account on an exchange, and the exchanges would relay the transactions to the users, if that makes sense). It would be a kind of federation of exchanges (mesh), but it could also be organized in trees, making global transactions possible, even if 2 users are many exchanges away. I have too little knowledge about GNU Taler right now to understand if this is something that could be done with Taler or if that's too much of an edge case to bother.

Many thanks!

Billy

On Tue Mar 19 17:34:34 GMT+01:00 2024, Christian Grothoff <grothoff@gnunet.org> wrote:

Dear Billy,

Taler (specifically: libeufin) includes a bank suitable for setting up 
*regional* currencies, and in such a bank you can fully control money 
creation and also support credit/debt. The libeufin-bank can thus be 
used to set up a mutual credit network, and then Taler can be used for 
payments in a regional currency on top of such a bank.  Note that the 
KUDOS used at https://demo.taler.net/ is also such a "regional" setup 
with its own stand-alone currency and a, eh, peculiar way of creating 
the initial money supply.

git.taler.net/deployment.git/regional-currency/ includes some scripts to 
simplify creating such a setup.  There is also the documentation at 
https://docs.taler.net/libeufin/index.html

I hope this helps!

Happy hacking!

Christian

On 3/19/24 16:55, Billy Utermann wrote:
> Hi there,
> I've been following the development of GNU Taler these last years and I really like what you all are doing!
> 
> I'm researching protocols for creating and administrating mutual credit networks and I wanted to ask if somebody here has any plans on trying that with GNU Taler.
> Taler seems to be working mostly with existing banks, which a mutual credit network does not have. Is it possible and wishful to use it without a bank?
> 
> For my recently submitted bachelor's thesis, I researched the Credit Commons protocol, which "supports independent entities to keep track of their exchange on a ledger which they control. Ledgers can be recursively nested, allowing trading blocs of all scales to exchange with each other without using money." (creditcommons.net)
> The current reference implementation is somewhat lacking in terms of privacy and security primitives, so that's why I landed here :)
> 
> I'm thinking mutual credit (meaning the system must track negative and positive limits per user) is contrary to a value-based / token-based system, but maybe I'm wrong and they can be combined.
> 
> Let me know if this list is the wrong place to ask, or if there is information that I missed somewhere else.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Billy
>