grothoff

You can backup tokens and restore them to another wallet (and we are in the process of making that easier). We call that sharing, and it is not a transaction as it is simply granting access to the same money to both wallets.

There is no backdoor. There may be bugs (point those out, we'll fix!), and there is the very clear and documented statement that the receiver of funds is subject to legitimization based on the legal requirements under which the exchange operates. That is not a backdoor. Backdoor implies secrecy, we have no secrets other than our private keys. ;-)

"permanently" is overstating it. Usually this is configured to be like once per year or even every couple of years.

The privacy properties for P2P transfers between consumers are identical to those with merchants: the exchange can require the receiver to provide information about themselves, but the payer remains anonymous just like for purchases at a merchant. And yes, it involves spending (burning, if you prefer) the old tokens (we prefer digital coins) and issuing (blindly signing) fresh coins. Afterwards, the fresh digital coins are indistinguishable from those issued during a regular withdrawal from a bank account.

I should stress that GLS has been very helpful, and continues to be helpful.

Wero, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Twint. The usual GNU story: FLOSS competes against AT&T, SCO, SGI, IBM, Sun, HP, ...

You need to read more carefully. "Cash-like tokens in your wallet under self-custody." would be correct. Taler has no accounts.

"It's maybe private in that the Vintner does not need to know who you are, but you can bet the control freak tyrants in the government will know that you bought that wine." -- actually no. Because the digital cash you "extracted" from the exchange was blindly signed, the exchange/central bank would NOT learn that you bought wine. Only that someone (anyone who previously withdrew a sufficient amount of digital cash) bought wine. Please do read up on cryptography, how to do this is known since 1989.

It's only partially open source. Some server-side code remains proprietary, and the client-side will depend on proprietary code of Google and Apple and they do not plan to support platforms that are actually Free Software. The law overall is badly written. For example, articles 12 and 26 effectively say that "The source is shared with public, except if it is proprietary or insecure." Or take Article 4: "The government may operate systems that protect the privacy of the identity subjects."