Re: [Taler] (docs) taler-in-a-nutshell.txt

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Christian Grothoff <grothoff@gnunet.org>
() Wed, 10 Feb 2021 09:59:26 +0100

Thanks for your feedback.

   1) Your nutshell is missing the Taler auditor, very crucial
   entity -- otherwise people tend to wonder why anyone should
   'trust' the exchange.

Good point.  I've changed the document to use the term "payment
cycle" (suggested by Stefan) to better describe its scope, and

   2) Of course you can include our existing diagram(s) in any
   way you see fit. Note that it omits the auditor to keep it
   'simple'. We have others that include the auditor, but not
   the banks.

Cool.

   3) Where to put it? I guess we could add an 'introduction'
   chapter, that describes all of the components and also points
   to the various chapters that document those in detail (links
   to exchange, auditor, merchant, wallet manual chapters, Taler
   is a protocol, hence API spec chapter, Taler is Free Sofware,
   hence developer chapter, etc.).

Since it's so brief, i'm thinking of adding it to ‘frags/’, so
that it can be ‘..included:’ in various places.

Please find attached here revision 1.7:

$Id: taler-in-a-nutshell.txt,v 1.7 2021/02/20 04:22:16 ttn Exp $

The Taler payment cycle involves six parties: (a) customer, (b) exchange,
(c) merchant, (d) customer bank, (e) exchange bank, (f) merchant bank.  The
exchange is the central entity that mediates the wire transfer of real
currency between (d), (e), (f) by way of "coins", cryptographically secure
tokens passed between (a), (b), (c).

There are six steps to a Taler payment cycle.

In step 1, (a) directs (d) to make real funds available to (b).

In step 2, (d) does a wire transfer of real funds to (e), fulfilling the
request from step 1.  (b) generates coins corresponding to those real funds;
these are called the "reserve".

In step 3, (a) "withdraws" coins, either wholly or partially, from (b).  These
coins are kept in a "wallet" under control of (a).  The coins in the wallet
are anonymous.

In step 4, (a) authorizes payment of coins from the wallet to (c).  This
transfers payment coins from the wallet to (c), and change coins from (c) to
the wallet (unless the payment amount exactly matches the denomination of the
coins in the wallet).

In step 5, (c) "deposits" coins into (b).  These coins are not anonymous.

In step 6, (b) directs (e) to wire transfer real funds corresponding to the
accumulated deposited coins to (f).

NB: The Taler payment cycle is part of the Taler payment system, which
includes also an auditor component, not described here.

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen -----------------------------------------------
 (defun responsep (query)               ; (2021) Software Libero
   (pcase (context query)               ;       = Dissenso Etico
     (`(technical ,ml) (correctp ml))
     ...))                              748E A0E8 1CB8 A748 9BFA
--------------------------------------- 6CE4 6703 2224 4C80 7502

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature