[Taler] GNU Taler 0.5.0 released

[Florian Dold]

Dear all,

We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v0.5.0.  The main new
feature is customer tipping, which allows merchants to pay small rewards
directly into a customer's wallet.  Technical improvements include
numerous performance improvements and bug fixes, as well as a new,
simpler to use API for merchants that also enables the implementation of
GNU Taler wallets on platforms that do not support WebExtensions.

GNU Taler is a free software electronic payment system providing
anonymity for customers. Payments can in principle be made in any
existing currency, or a bank can be launched to support new currencies.
Merchants are not anonymous, and--due to income-transparency--the state
can perform effective tax audits.

This is still an alpha release of the five key components providing
logic for running an auditor, bank, exchange, merchant and wallet

Thanks to recent improvements in Firefox as well as on our side, the
wallet is now equally usable with Firefox as in other supported
browsers, and also runs on Firefox Android.

Key open issues include:
* No integration with "real" banks, so only toy currencies are
  available for now.
* Documentation, testing, error handling and performance still
  need to be improved.

We have been receiving reports that some versions of Firefox perform an
incomplete installation of the wallet if an older user profile is used.
The problem does not seem to happen with newly created user profiles.
So far we have been unable to reproduce this issue.  If you encounter
it, please get in touch with us so that we can resolve this with Mozilla.

You can download GNU Taler from:
* All GNU FTP mirrors             ftp://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnu/taler/
* Our Git repositories are at     https://www.git.taler.net/

Please report bugs to our bug tracker at       https://gnunet.org/bugs/

Documentation can be found at                  http://www.taler.net/
Additional documentation about the APIs is at  https://docs.taler.net/
A demo is running at                           https://demo.taler.net/


Happy hacking!

Christian & Florian & Jeff & Marcello