This is a proposal to operate a regulated payments processor, supervised by BaFin. All the usual, necessary regulations and consumer protections will apply under German law.

>What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled?

It's basicially david chaum's blind-signature money idea. It's centralized but the central issuer can't connect the outputs to the inputs. (but unique inputs signed by the issuer correspond to unique outputs)

>Also are transactions final and irreversible?

I think so unless you are able to reveal the secrets of the transaction. Hmm, however revealing the secret to someone is basicially same as spending it to them (analgous to releasing a signed and finalized transaction into the mempool in cryptocurrency). It's finalized by the issuer signing it.

Like you basicially send the vendor the secret, and then they hand it in to the coin issuer and wait for the issuer to sign a new input, before giving you the merchandise. So idk how it would work reversing the transactions

This is a surveillance oriented alternative to cryptocurrencies which uses the distraction complicated cryptography to obfscuate the fact that by design it intentionally undermines the privacy of its users: it attaches the receivers identity to every payment they receive, along with the amount and makes it non-private-- potentially opening the door to abuse by kidnappers, extortionists, plaintiffs attorneys, and other such scoundrel.

The claim that is is privacy preserving are deceptive, and in my option constitute an act of intentional fraud on the part of its creators.

Its existence is justified under a fairytale model of how the world works-- a false believe that actually anonymous payments are unlawful and that their compromised alternative is the best possible. In the path of doing so, they not only falsely sell a system with compromised privacy as private, but they also help bring about a dystopia where privacy is unlawful.

> I don't see how EU regulators would allow payment privacy in any meaningful way.

The wording on the Taler website is a bit wishy-washy, but I THINK the TL;DR is:

1. They tried to do be a payments processor with assistance from a German bank.

2. That didn't work out for what Taler claims are "unrelated reasons" but I suspect we all can agree it was due to KYC/AML hurdles.

3. The Taler plan now appears to not be a payments processor but rather merely an issuer.

And in that respect, there is plenty of precedent for that passing in the EU, i.e. there are are already many places you can go swap your Euro for Bitcoin legally.

So, yes, there will still be KYC/AML. You will still need to provide your ID to swap your Euro for your Taler. But after that, Taler has nothing to do with transaction processing, you go spend your Taler balance elsewhere and somebody else's server processes the transaction. Taler knows who bought how much, when and how but not when and where they spent it.

At least that's my interpretation of the word-soup on their website.