this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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For exchanges, yes. For merchants, no.
Merchants can't take possession of the funds, the exchange determines when the money is sent. After that, according to the docs a refund will trigger a 410 Gone status code.
https://docs.taler.net/core/api-merchant.html#obtaining-refunds
It seems there is a template to offer a refund, but the customer would have to go and "accept" the refund manually, which is poor UX compared to every other payment method out there where this happens automatically.
It means exchanges are financially incentivised to keep hold of the funds for as long as possible, delaying payments. In a world that's rapidly moving towards instant payments (like Wero), this means transferring money will happen at a snails pace. You can configure the wire deadline, but given that shortening it makes the refund UX worse I'm not sure it's ideal. It's weird to have this be a tradeoff anyway.
Fees differ per country, it's based on what the previous most popular payment method offered. In NL it's cheaper because iDEAL is fairly cheap. But here's a source on BE costs: https://www.ing.be/en/business/payments/wero/wero
Basically you pay a percentage, but it's capped at a maximum transaction amount. Far cheaper than creditcards at least.
After looking around a bit more, I found this link here, which seems to suggest a KYC implementation is still in progress, since existing services don't meet their criteria.
The Wire deadline as you mentioned later limits how long they can keep the money, and if they are purposefully delaying, they could be investigated by an oversight body or go unused compared to an exchange that does not.
I can't say I disagree entirely, and I would hope that such oddities would be improved in the future.
Cheers for the info and link, that does make it quite cheap, I must say.
Based on that, Wero is objectively an improvement over the credit card monopoly or paypal. However I fear that if it wins out this payment war, it will end up being the only option, and I very much doubt that it will ever implement the privacy features from GNU Taler that I consider absolutely paramount for a future digital payment system to not be abused in the future. We're already seeing how governments are pushing for less online privacy with the constant Chat Control legislation, which we're only narrowly avoiding, and with far right parties across Europe gaining more and more of the vote, I very much think it prudent to advocate for privacy respecting technologies wherever possible, even at the expensive of some convenience.
Guys. With all the infos and the talks at 29c3 and all available articles, maybe feature/explain GNU taler in a separate post to the nice people of buyFromEU? Maybe with an outlook towards adoption and usability from your perspective?