TALER Bullion
Infrastructure for GNU Taler Payments with non-fiat Currencies
Depending on how you design a money system, its properties can be quite different. Government-issued currencies are typically inflated, to create a good influx of money that benefits investors and yields economic growth. The downside is that prices rise, and that savings deprecate over time. If money were up to people, they would probably prefer a system with more predictable purchasing power, such as gold and silver.
GNU Taler is a well-designed system for (online) payments, and it is eminently suitable to trade (the ownership safely of) stored gold, silver and similar systems based on real value. Besides its obvious use case as a payment system for regular currencies, the system can also be used to revitalise gold and silver for storage and payment systems; they still exist today but are decoupled. The purpose of this project is to solve problems with trust relations, such as passing (the ownership of) gold or silver between vault operators, or between gold storage and payment systems so it can become practically useful money on an international scale, in service of people outside the financial industry.
This project was funded through the NGI TALER Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology. NGI TALER is part of NGI TALER, an R&D pilot programme under Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101135475. Additional funding is made available by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).
