For the past three years, the NGI Taler project has worked towards the goal of making Taler legally available in the EU as an online payment system for everyday use. Today we can share that Taler Operations AG is being founded in Bochum. The new German company is going to operate Taler in Euro, enabling payments with Taler first in Germany, then in the Euro-zone. The next steps towards that goal are to apply to BaFin, Germany's financial supervisory authority, for a licence as an e-money issuer.

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GNU Taler is looking for investors who:

• want a privacy-preserving, free-software payment system to become legally available in Germany and the Euro area;
• understand that this is a regulated infrastructure business with a licensing phase before revenue; and
• are able to invest at least €50,000.

"We are especially interested in investors who share the values behind Taler: privacy for buyers, transparency for taxable income, no lock-in, and payments as public-interest infrastructure."

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Sad to hear, that the GLS pulled out of the project.

Damn, 50k... that's not something the average person can invest.

Oh it's a for-profit company. Interest lost.

The thing is: investors don’t care about privacy-preserving free software. They care about money. And money is only good if you disrespect the privacy and can lock in users into a closed ecosystem. That’s why this project is never going to be popular. Also their founders are naive shitheads.

Again, only the rich can get involved to get even richer. Nothing changes, ever.

This is a gross oversimplification and wrong. There are different types of investors, and only a few make it into the news, among those are the ones you are mentioning.

Okay.