GNU Taler Documentation¶

We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.

Cryptography is used to ensure that none of the participants can defraud the others without being detected immediately; however, in practice a fraudulent Exchange might go bankrupt instead of paying the Merchants and thus the Exchange will need to be audited regularly like any other banking institution.

The system will be based on free software and open protocols.

In this document, we describe the REST-based APIs between the various components, internal architecture of key components, and how to get them installed. In addition to this documentation, we have source-level documentation which you can find converted to HTML at these pages:

Documentation Overview¶

1. Core Protocol Specification