Taler is a new electronic payment system under development at Inria. Today, this website only presents the advantages our system is expected to provide. We expect to make the payment system available to the general public in 2016.

Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.

So these are big problems with traditional law. Agreements are ambiguous. And enforcement is hard.

Ethereum solves both these problems. It does this with the marriage of two special ingredients: a digital currency, and a complete programming language. Let's look at both.

This is a simple Bellman-Ford bot that uses the negative cycle detection feature of the algorithm to find favorable currency trades to make in forex markets (in this case we are targeting bitcoin/fiat/scryptcoin markets on btc-e and other exchanges).

Typically the trades the bot finds are less than 0.5% profit, will take 3 steps, and must be filled quickly to be profitable.

GetDotBit.com is a domain name platform for registering .bit (dot-bit) URLs that recently launched. Users can now register a domain name for free. Additional names cost one dollar each.

Zero Click is a dead easy payment protocol that will allow users to pay for resources online in the simplest way using Bitcoin. We came up with the idea when we noticed that the HTTP 402 payment required status code was unimplemented. We used Bitcoin because it allows us to transfer money with no registration and no lengthy approval for the person receiving the money.

The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom asserts that the protocol is incentive-compatible and secure against colluding minority groups, i.e., it incentivizes miners to follow the protocol as prescribed.

We show that the Bitcoin protocol is not incentive-compatible. We present an attack with which colluding miners obtain a revenue larger than their fair share. This attack can have signi cant consequences for Bitcoin: Rational miners will prefer to join the sel sh miners, and the colluding group will increase in size until it becomes a majority. At this point, the Bitcoin system ceases to be a decentralized currency.