Related, a working paper published by the Swiss National Bank on using this technology for a central bank digital currency:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260524

Thanks for this - although I think that working paper referred to a centralised payment system - whereas this one seems to be community driven.

I am the GNU Taler co-maintainer and working paper co-author. The development is community-driven. But as you see from the paper, the community is talking with central banks about deploying it. There is no contradiction.

Thanks for weighing in - I stand corrected.

Once the Payment Handler API [1] is completed and implemented in browsers and browser extensions can register themselves as payment handlers, GNU Taler could be used through the Payment Request API.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-handler/

> Richard Stallman said it is non-free

And after actually reading it he said it's okay to use for GNU projects: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/directory-discuss/2017-01...

Thanks! I also found the following one which gives a rationale [1]. The fine distinction is that the patent grant is completely separate from the copyright license and the termination of patent grant has no influence on the copyright license whatsoever. Unfortunately these messages are not in a single thread, so it is a bit hard to find them.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/directory-discuss/2017-01...

Do you even realize that these two loops are not equivalent? One of them starts at 8, then other one starts at 9 ...

Right, my bad. I tend to write loops in the former style, thinking of them as reversed(range(9)). This is another advantage of this style. I should have been more cautious when writing the second one.