TALER Bullion

Depending on how you design a money system, its properties can be quite different. Regular currencies are typically steered towards (slight) inflation by the public bodies that steward them, by means of a gradual influx of money. This benefits "active money" (investors) which yields economic growth. Of course this also makes prices for consumers continually rise, and savings de-valuate over time in terms of purchasing power. The rate at which this devaluation takes place is a policy instrument, and of course one that should be used wisely. When these systems were first designed, money was backed up by physical assets such as gold and silver which offered more predictable long term purchasing power. Some users still prefer for their savings to be backed up by something of concrete value they own.

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.