A French company Inria is working on an electronic payment system called GNU Taler which will enable anonymous payments for online transactions.

The system, which will provide privacy for customers and accountability for vendors, uses an exchange service to issue digital coins using blind signatures.

Taler (Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserve) has the backing of the Free Software Foundation.

FSF founder Richard Stallman said in an article that the increasing use of ad blockers was cutting the amount that publishers could earn from readers. As a result of this, some publications had started denying access to those who use ad blockers.

Taler has been developed to provide a way out of this situation. Stallman said publishers who charge for access should offer the option of paying a small amount anonymously to read a specific story.

He said the system should be "unlinkably" anonymous and one purchase should not be tied to another. If a reader pays for one story today and another story tomorrow, the publisher's site should not be able to tell that those two transactions were made by the same person.

Alternatively, Stallman wrote, sites could invite the reader to donate the amount they wish each time they read a story.

His wishlist did not end there: he wanted stories to be accessible to those using free software and not afflicted by DRM (digital rights or restrictions management).

Taler has several advantages over cash and Bitcoin:

It ensures that governments can know a citizen's total income and collect sales tax or other taxes; it is thus a currency for the mainstream economy and not the blackmarket.

A payment made through Taler does not mean one has to reveal one's identity to the vendor, government or a bank. However one can always prove one made a payment if needed.

Since Taler is free software using an open protocol, it can be implemented in any number of applications.

Taler is designed to work over http or https using the RESTful protocol and can be easily integrated with Web applications.

It uses an electronic exchange holding reserves in existing currencies. It is not a new currency as the cryptographic coins correspond to dollars, euros or even Bitcoins.

Taler is expected to be ready for rollout by Inria before the end of the year.