Re: [Taler] Business model and banking license

[Jeff Burdges]

On Tue, 2016-11-08 at 23:52 +0100, Changaco wrote:
> I am more worried about how the exchange is supposed to comply with
> financial regulations on the prevention of money laundering and
> terrorism financing since the system is designed to be anonymous.

Anonymity in Taler is extremely strong, but also quite specific :  

An exchange already knows all its customers and merchants because it
receives and sends them SEPA payments.  Afaik, terrorism cases involve
one side being forbidden, so the exchange should avoid having any
relationship with that party anyways.  If that sounds hard to achieve
via conventional means, then we could exclude whole countries.

A merchant and/or exchange cannot identify which of its customer made a
particular Taler payment  If otoh a customer provides the exchange with
a spent coin, then the exchange can determine exactly where it went.  We
expect this one direction suffices for many police investigations.  In
particular, I believe this suffices for crimes with easily identifiable
victims, like extortion. 

I've discussed more complex money laundering scenarios with financial
people before.  I believe large repeated payments are subject to
correlation attacks in any anonymous payment system, simply because they
diverge excessively from what normal people do, so honestly your real
drug lord is probably better off just hiring HSBC to do his money
laundering. 

Jeff

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part