but at the moment - until further support - GNU Taler is for tech savvy people whereas WERO is in the middle of a broader rollout even at merchants.

I fear that without more Bank adoption and dog-fooding of GNU Taler, it may not ever get that additional support, as it is diverted in favor of the ‘good enough’ solution of Wero. I can’t say I’d mind having Wero in addition to Taler as an option.

For exchanges, yes. For merchants, no.

After looking around a bit more, I found this link here, which seems to suggest a KYC implementation is still in progress, since existing services don’t meet their criteria.

Merchants can’t take possession of the funds, the exchange determines when the money is sent.

The Wire deadline as you mentioned later limits how long they can keep the money, and if they are purposefully delaying, they could be investigated by an oversight body or go unused compared to an exchange that does not.

but given that shortening it makes the refund UX worse I’m not sure it’s ideal. It’s weird to have this be a tradeoff anyway.

I can’t say I disagree entirely, and I would hope that such oddities would be improved in the future.

Fees differ per country […]

Cheers for the info and link, that does make it quite cheap, I must say.

Based on that, Wero is objectively an improvement over the credit card monopoly or paypal. However I fear that if it wins out this payment war, it will end up being the only option, and I very much doubt that it will ever implement the privacy features from GNU Taler that I consider absolutely paramount for a future digital payment system to not be abused in the future. We’re already seeing how governments are pushing for less online privacy with the constant Chat Control legislation, which we’re only narrowly avoiding, and with far right parties across Europe gaining more and more of the vote, I very much think it prudent to advocate for privacy respecting technologies wherever possible, even at the expensive of some convenience.

the anonymous aspect might sound nice but KYC laws prevent merchants from accepting it

GNU Taler’s documentation already covers KYC laws.

This means a store has to wait 2 weeks at minimum before they get their money (modern payment methods are instant or next-day, 2 weeks is exceptionally long). That’s a massive dealbreaker.

They would only need to wait 2 weeks if they specifically want to be able to reverse a charge, but AFAIK a merchant can take possession of the money much earlier, and can still send a refund to a buyer’s Taler wallet at any time as a separate transaction.

It also means exchanges can make tons of money by keeping the transferred funds in their account and collecting interest on it.

I’m not sure how that’s a problem specifically? Why does it matter if they gain a little interest on it on the time that they have it until the merchant exchanges their tokens for the money? Is that worse than the fees associated with Wero?

The European Payments Initiative (EPI), which developed Wero, has indeed promised that the new payment method will not be more expensive than iDEAL for the first two years. However, it’s unclear what exactly this means. In any case, the rate will increase after two years, creating uncertainty about what the exact costs will be. And even if the per-transaction fee remains the same, the extra procedures around chargebacks will still cause a significant cost increase for businesses.

I’m assuming that source is financially biased against Wero’s success, but I couldn’t find anything else about Wero’s fees except from Wero themselves, which was very vague:

Our pricing is clear and merchant-friendly: a small percentage fee with built-in caps, so you stay in control of costs - whether you’re processing €5 or €5,000. One model that works for businesses of all sizes.

If you have a more clear source, let me know.

It’s also quite funny to me that Taler claims to be immune to chargeback fraud, when it doesn’t offer chargebacks in the first place. Makes it easy, don’t it?

That is a legitimate downside of Taler. Personally I think the trade-off is worth it for the increased privacy, since corporations and states will inevitably use your purchase history against you at some point in the future if fascists take power once again.

GNU Taler does the same job that Wero is attempting (replacing Paypal, Mastercard, etc), only better and anonymous. We should be pushing for a long-term solution that can’t be abused, and GNU Taler is that solution.

You‘re missing the point that Android and iOS are still the predominant platforms and realistically won’t go away anytime soon.

Android and iOS have both made it clear that they will only become further enshittified and consumer hostile. We should be advocating for non-corporate opensource replacements for them as well to truly take back our computing freedom and privacy, in same way that we should advocate for GNU Taler to free us from any corporate control over our payment systems, and give us a genuine cash-like anonymity that cannot be abused by states or corporations.

Per wikipedia:

Wero is managed by banks via their mobile apps. This creates a dependency on iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) systems. Consequently, Wero exchanges its reliance on payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, for a reliance on two Big Tech giants—Apple and Google, with the new dependency focusing on online availability and distribution through their application stores.

Needing to rely on two pro-fascist tech companies seems like a particularly bad idea. Wero also does not appear to be anonymous.

A better alternative to Wero is GNU Taler, which is a properly open standard that is a true anonymous digital cash, and offers real independence from tech-bro corporations.

We have a community that discusses GNU Taler over at !money@slrpnk.net

Also @PracticalFail@feddit.org