the anonymity of payment is between customer and merchant,

and much much less so wrt. (customer,merchent)-> auditor aspect.

It's also more German laws you have to worry about then EU regulators, as the German laws based on the regulation are noticeable more strict then what the EU requires.

And while this laws do apply to all transactions, they don't require the customer to be identified in every transaction. Instead it's a risk based model. E.g. you local grocery store doesn't check you identity when you buy some groceries with cash. Even if you buy with card no one checks if that is your card and the information the card transaction shared does not fulfill the data collection requirements for the highest risk transaction.

This is why Taler can work, _it_ has enough information to do risk and fraud detection for many "daily" low risk transaction. And for very high risk transactions the merchant anyway has to identify you out of band and can't rely on the card transaction information. Through I guess somewhere in between is still a gray area not sure how Taler handles that.