Re: [Taler] Is an exchange also a merchant?

[Christian Grothoff]

An exchange is a payment service provider, merely facilitating payments,
but not a "productive" economic entity. An exchange is expected to
always be in the regulated financial sector and hold some kind of
license from the government to issue electronic money. It may be run by
a central bank.

A merchant is like any normal shop: it can sell regular virtual or
physical goods to customers in return for electronic cash. It will most
of the time not be tightly regulated at all (except of course stuff like
consumer protection and paying taxes ;-)).

I hope this helps!

-Christian

On 1/14/22 5:02 PM, Calvin Burns via Taler wrote:
> Thank you, Sebastian.
> I have to think about it.
> Perhaps the definition of "merchant" in a GNU Taler sense differs
> from my intuition about what a merchant is and I mix them up.
> My intuition is that a merchant is some entity creating something and selling
> it. In that sense an exchange still feels like a merchant.
> 
> On Fri, 01/14/2022 12:06:24 PM, Sebastian wrote:
>> Hi Clavin,
>>
>> think the exchange as the ATM that allows you to get GNU Taler coins if
>> you wire transfer some money or it will wire transfer money back to you
>> if you deposit coins minted by it. It's not selling access, it's
>> charging fee by using it.
>>
>> To use the coins you will need a wallet that will execute the part of
>> the protocol to withdraw and deposit.
>>
>> The merchant is another participant that without withdrawing coins is
>> able to deposit and get money by wire transfer from an exchange. How? It
>> create a contract_term specifying amount (among other things), ask
>> someone else to spend the coins in the contract (signing the contract
>> with coins) and then sending the contract to the exchange.
>>
>> Does this make more sense?
>>
>>
>> On 14/1/22 11:40, Calvin Burns via Taler wrote:
>>> What is the difference between merchant and exchange?
>>> An exchange is selling access to "the" ledger system.
>>> So an exchange is also a merchant?
>>> Does an exchange also have to setup and taler merchant infrastructure for 
>>> itself?