Subsidiarity through inherited KYC

With the new Design Document 045 “Single-Depth Inheritance of KYC for Reserves”, we describe a mechanism that will allow to manifest the principle of subsidiarity in age-restriction: Parents should be enabled to effectively decide the age restriction for their children.

The current implementation in the GNU Taler wallet requires an interaction between parent and child, every time the child wants E-cash in its wallet, in order to proof the parent that it has set the age-restriction for the withdrawal process accordingly in the Taler wallet.

However, GNU Taler already has support to interact with Know-Your-Customer (KYC) processes, a legal requirement for GNU Taler to operate as a digital payment system in many jurisdictions. The result of such a process contains required details about an individual and is bound to a wallet-id of the customer.

The Design Document 045 describes a mechanism with which a customer with a long-term wallet-id, who underwent a KYC-process, can provide its KYC information also for another wallet-id, for example for another wallet of the customer – or one of its children. During this inherited attestation the adult can choose to change the associated birthday of the wallet-id to a more recent date.

This would allow

1. to enforce age-restriction with appropriate maximum age to be applied during withdrawal from that wallet,
2. the child to receive payments via P2P with arbitrary age-restrictions set on the sent coins and the age-restriction still be enforced during withdrawal,
3. to reduce the required interaction between child and parent to a minimum,
4. the maximum age to “grow” accordingly with the birthday until the maximum age group is reached.

The implementation of the mechanism described in the design document will follow after the review process with the GNU Taler team has been completed successfully.