[jdfedgon]

Even though I read the GNU Taler FAQ please excuse any lack of deeper knowledge about it.

When dealing with those commercial banks what is currently the biggest challenge? Is it more the political arguments or the technical arguments of such a payment system that you need to stress? And, I couldn't find no definite answer to that: Could GNU Taler ultimately replace Bitcoin?

[sam0x17]

Given that for many larger banks, medieval things like overdraft fees and "re-ordering" same-day transactions so that deposits appear later in order to create additional overdraft fees are a huge part of their bottom-line, it doesn't surprise me that they would avoid relinquishing control to an open and fair standard they can't override.

Also, I'm sure anti-money-laundering legislation complicates things in terms of the anonymity feature, despite the fact that merchants are fully auditable, though I assume users aren't able to transfer funds to non-merchants? Still, I'm sure the laws as written complicate this in some jurisdictions.

For example, you could have a completely legitimate business registered as a merchant function as a money-laundering front that could then take in illicit funds from anonymous users working for the illicit org which actually secretly owns the merchant. I'm fine with that happening in the wild because the benefits of privacy for consumers are obvious to me and outweigh the negatives, but I bet regulators aren't so forgiving.

In the wild this often happens -- there are plenty of "DDoS protection" services that by day offer legitimate services in the open and by night actually attack potential customers who they then offer their protection services to, so it is not at all unheard of for an illegitimate org to have a legitimate front. This sort of thing is rampant in the world of high-end minecraft servers, I'm told.