GNU Taler is a free software-based microtransaction and electronic payment software.The project is led by Christian Grothoff for Inria, the French National Institute for Information and Automation Research, and the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Taler is short for the Taxable Anonymous Libre Economic Reserve.It has vocal support from GNU Project founder Richard Stallman.Stallman has described the program as "designed to be anonymous for the payer, but payees are always identified."In a paper published in Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering, GNU Taler is described as meeting ethical considerations - the paying customer is anonymous while the merchant is identified and taxable.An implementation is provided by Taler Systems SA.

1. Taxability
Each merchant’s income is visible from the various deposits made to the exchange as well as from the exchange to the bank account. The state can then trace the various sources of income and tax that income. Although the government or any body can see the amount transacted, they would not be able to identify the nature of the transaction. It would simply show up as a withdrawal or a deposit. Once the merchant gets coins for a transaction, he would not be able to spend the coins as a customer. This forces the merchant to separate the income and the expenditure separately, thus enforcing taxation on the income.
2. Privacy
Payments can be made on Taler without revealing any personal information. Governments and Auditors can only access transaction values and not the nature of the transaction. This makes it safe for transactions which might compromise your personal information and bring you under government scrutiny. The merchants can only disclose what customers have purchased and the value of a transaction, but not who the buyer is. The customer can be required by law to reveal their identity when making sensitive transactions.
3. Ease of use
Traditional payment gateways and wallets make you jump through several hoops to authenticate your transaction. This can be frustrating for customers leading them to lose interest in the transaction. Taler is a one click payment solution once you load your wallet with the coins and all the authentication and processes happen in the background.
4. Stability
Unlike Bitcoins or other forms of digital currency, Taler does not do any conversion of currency. The amount you present to the exchange is the amount you receive in coins, after factoring in the transaction costs. Payments in other currencies are possible, through another exchange that is specifically built for foreign exchange or through the bank itself. It works with all approved currencies in the countries where regulations permit Taler.
5. Efficiency
In current systems, all money is routed through the banks and each transaction entails a transaction fee. This creates a problem for accounting when there is a large unprecedented volume of transactions. Another problem with the large volume of transactions is the rate of failure. If the systems are not optimised properly, then there would be too many transaction failures for the system to be reliable. So Taler does not really improve efficiency compared to credit cards, but it’s use of crypto is computationally cheap enough to complete with canonical electronic payment systems.
6. Transparency
The problem with existing systems is that they are mostly proprietary. They are not subject to regular audits or checks and a user cannot examine the inner workings of the system to make sure it is suitable for them. Some of the systems currently in place don’t even completely disclose the charges and fees associated with transactions

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