Not talking about the specific implementation but the question is: Privacy for whom?
Do we need the „innovation“ of untraceable money?
For instance, we decided to get rid of untraceable cell phone numbers (at least in Germany you can’t get a cell without ID) and - nothing changed for the worse, but arguably some things changed for the better.
Why would we introduce that for money/payment flows?
>>Do we need the „innovation“ of untraceable money?
Yes. We need untraceable money. Controlling how people use money is tantamount to controlling all of their economic interactions. Surveilling how people use their money means becoming privy to their most intimate interactions. This is mass-surveillance, of everything (because money touches everything), being snuck through the backdoor.
With the transition from physical to digital currencies, we've created surveillance systems the likes of which the world has never seen. The information collection being done on the population is being done by a tiny proportion of the population, and disproportionately benefiting the political elite. Hyper-centralization exacerbates income and power disparities, and I would bet any money it leads to a more fragile social order.
>>In the last 20 years of available data, real median household income of Washington, D.C.’s residents has increased by 66.11%. For the entire country, the 20-yr increase is only 5.23%. This trend of widening disparity has accelerated dramatically since the Great Recession’s onset.
We need the more distributed configuration of power that historically existed, and that can only happen if the privacy that is characteristic of physical currencies is imparted upon digital currencies.
Untraceable money is far more likely to lead to centralization of power, because it allows the already wealthy to act unaccountably.
>>In the last 20 years of available data, real median household income of Washington, D.C.’s residents has increased by 66.11%. For the entire country, the 20-yr increase is only 5.23%.
With untraceable money you'd never know this. Or you'd have to limit yourself to "declared income", which would be effectively voluntary.
You observe that the political class benefits disproportionately from their political power. Next you conclude the solution is to grant them more power via regulation.
I would assert the already powerful gain more power from the absence of regulation; forcing them to set rules — imperfect a process as that is — is less bad than anarchy, which seems to often degenerate into handing all the power very quickly to the worst people.
I’m not “free” to go on a machine gun rampage, this lack of freedom isn’t “being oppressed”, and as it applies to everyone it stops other people doing it to me.
So I know you’re being sarcastic, but yes, for some things more freedom directly causes oppression.
I assert that letting power-hungry tax evaders get away with it is in that category.
I'll allow that my characterization was mildly hyperbolic. However there's some truth there. You're stretching when you compare people voluntarily consuming products or services with violence. If this is the comparison you need to make, I think it is illustrative of where the argument is going. The clincher is that regulations, taxes or outright prohibitions of cryptocurrencies will be enforced with violence.
More directly, if some villainousentrepreneur manages to protect his wealth from government confiscation, that is freedom. Confiscation under the threat of violence can hardly be construed as "freedom".
Consider the origins of freedom. Are freedoms granted by government? Where does it stem from? Who is entitled to the value you add to a marketplace? Is a market a zero sum game?
> The clincher is that regulations, taxes or outright prohibitions of cryptocurrencies will be enforced with violence.
Hence my references to anarchy. All governments are the definers of legitimate force and to whom their local monopoly of it can be deputised.
> Are freedoms granted by government?
Yes.
> Where does it stem from?
Game theory, economics, and the occasional threat of other people doing violence against the stuff they (the powerful) like.
> Who is entitled to the value you add to a marketplace?
Nobody, including the creator of that value. The creators of value are only rewarded with it because a system vastly bigger than any single human has temporarily settled on a local equilibrium where that is the motivation.
Entitlements only exists with respect to legal frameworks and with enforcement mechanisms, not by themselves.
> Is a market a zero sum game?
They can be, they can also be negative or positive sum games. Messing with currencies is often a negative, because it creates opportunities to defect that otherwise don’t exist.
I own a flat. It’s collecting rent. If the economy goes up and all else is equal, I collect more rent (more money in the system for fixed supply); if home construction increases, I collect less (more supply for fixed money in the system). This income is entirely due to what the government in charge of the area decides to motivate, not how much I put into maintaining the place. Similarly: the profitability of Nissan in the UK is determined by what sort of trade deal the UK and the EU have; Facebook, GDPR-style and safe harbour laws; SpaceX, national security laws; Saudi Aramco, global oil policy; and so on.
None of us stands alone (assuming nobody here has a von Neumann probe), and tax evasion is Nash-defection.
Like most, I find the former are the ones who most wrankle, but I don’t actually know which is worse. I have heard that one of Greece’s big economic problems is too many ordinary people think tax is for suckers (and absent full automation we can’t all live on a beach, sale of doge or otherwise). I don’t even know if that’s an accurate depiction of Greece, but it’s certainly compatible with human nature, and the tragedy of the commons comes in many forms.
>>Untraceable money is far more likely to lead to centralization of power, because it allows the already wealthy to act unaccountably.
How do you keep the people collecting all of this information accountable? Information asymmetries that this kind of mass-surveillance creates ultimately leads to power disparities, and there is no way to police the information collectors to prevent them from profiting off of it.
Just look at the Snowden revelations. He speaks of LOVEINT, where agents would on intimate partners. It was a practice so common it had its own term coined for it. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have no idea how this information is being used, and how it's contributing to all sorts of social, economic and political disparities.
And unlike the business world, where individuals begin to face diseconomies of scale as the size of their portolio of businesses/investments grows beyond their ability to actively manage them, and the number of investment targets that can absorb their wealth diminishes [1], growing concentrations of political power begets even more political power, as the state's monopoly on violence requires no sophistication to scale up.
>>With untraceable money you'd never know this. Or you'd have to limit yourself to "declared income", which would be effectively voluntary.
Untraceable money does not mean an income tax can't be collected. The act of earning income doesn't become untraceable by virtue of the government not being able to swoop in and monitor every transaction without a warrant. And frankly, if an income tax did require warrantless mass-surveillance of the population's financial interactions, to effectively collect, then it would be better to replace it with another form of taxation which didn't.
Do we need the „innovation“ of untraceable money?
For instance, we decided to get rid of untraceable cell phone numbers (at least in Germany you can’t get a cell without ID) and - nothing changed for the worse, but arguably some things changed for the better.
Why would we introduce that for money/payment flows?