GNU Taler - heard of it?
Traceable like bank accounts, and useable freely and with liberty like cash ... doesn't it sound like something more people could use.
Neither had I until just the other day. Turns out, it's based on cryptography, but it's also not a cryptocurrency ... You've seen those fake hyped blockchain 'alternatives', yet this got me for one reason. It is has been thought out by the same engineer that came up with GNU ...
Excerpt
As we spoke, it became clear that Stallman doesn’t find the decade-old technology all that appealing, for more reasons than just politics. “I have never used it myself,” he told CoinDesk. If that’s surprising, keep in mind that fine distinctions matter a great deal to Stallman. For example, he wrote a 9,000-word explainer on the difference between the terms GNU and Linux.
In 40-ish words: GNU, which Stallman proposed in 1983, is an operating system using exclusively free software. Linux, created years later by Linus Torvalds, is a kernel. Many refer to packages combining the two as “Linux,” but Stallman insists that the proper term is GNU/Linux or just GNU.
He also wrote 3,000 words on the differences between free software and open source software. Advocates of both push for the freedom to use, study, change and redistribute software, but Stallman said that those similarities conceal “a deeply important moral disagreement” centered on freedom and human rights, which the free software movement stresses.
The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not – forgive the hair-splitting – a cryptocurrency.
The Taler project’s maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a “post-blockchain” world.