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Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

(www.economist.com)
667 points jcartw | 1 comments | 4/8/2025, 10:59:00 AM | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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sephalon ◴[4/8/2025, 8:46:00 PM] No.43626285[source]▶

I wish more of these government-baked payment systems would just use GNU Taler [1] instead of implementing their own walled gardens.

GNU Taler ensures that the paying customer is anonymous while the merchant is identified and taxable. This is great for privacy, but not very attractive for commercial companies as your revenue has to be fully based on fees instead of making extra money by selling your customers data. The Swiss National Bank showed interest in adopting it some years ago, but I haven't heard much anymore since…

[1] https://www.taler.net

replies(2): >>43626831 #>>43637191 #
1. matheusmoreira ◴[4/9/2025, 8:05:00 PM] No.43637191[source]▶

Governments all over the world generally want more surveillance, not less. Brazil in particular will never use it: anonymity is literally unconstitutional in Brazil.

There was a fun period where the brazilian government mandated the use of free and open source software in its computers. I remember lots of people who complained about the quality of OpenOffice. Microsoft managed to put an end to that at some point. After former president Dilma's impeachment, I think.