[Taler] A hybrid approach to allow Taler payments at an EMV payment terminal

[Jaap-Henk Hoepman]

L.S.,

New payment schemes like Taler have to deal with the fact that payment 
is a two-sided market: for merchants to accept a new form of payment 
there must be enough customers that would like to pay with it, while 
customers will only join a new payment scheme if enough merchants accept 
it.

A year ago or so I thought about an hybrid approach that integrates a 
privacy friendly payment scheme like Taler into the existing EMV based 
card payment infrastructure, making the overall scheme privacy friendly. 
This was triggered by recent proposals by the European Central Bank for 
a digital euro, and the observation that (at least in the Netherlands) 
more and more people use their NFC enabled smartphone to pay in stores.

The core of the idea is to use a scheme like Taler to store anonymous 
coins within a wallet on a smartphone, and to use these coins to buy a 
one time EMV payment token at the time of purchase to pay in a shop (or 
onlie). Details are here:

https://blog.xot.nl/2023/03/03/a-proposal-for-a-privacy-friendly-digital-euro-using-the-existing-payment-infrastructure/index.html

Because payments are handled using the already existing EMV based 
payment infrastructure, the hybrid scheme is accepted by all merchants 
that accept traditional card or smartphone base payments. This breaks 
the vicious cycle described above, make the transition to a (Taler 
based) privacy friendly payment scheme much smoother. Of course, as more 
 and more users migrate to the new payment scheme, at some point 
merchants could be convinced to accept Taler directly (at a fraction of 
the cost).

I'm sharing this here to see if there is interest within the Taler 
community to furter explore opportunities in this direction.

Looking forward to any responses.

Best,
Jaap-Henk

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