No, people will just get really good at hiding their transactions. You can see this already with bitcoin, and money laundering. You will be enabling mass surveillance with almost nothing to show for it. This is already how security theater works.
It does not happen, those who wash the coins are still tracked. All it does is create a delay so when and if authorities check it out all the leads are cold and the money has been converted and is long gone. The system proposed is not vulnerable to this attack, there is no other money.
We are rushing head first where this privacy must be given up, and probably will be willingly. You had to agree to your phones terms of service, reddit, google, etc. Right NOW, we have few options to be a truly private individual. As the power differential grows in society, you still think there will be a few small companies left offering “privacy”, when data is king? Maybe, to me, privacy is effectively a thing of the past, save the elites and companies who will be able to guard effectively their financial “private” matters.
The only people who actually benefit from transaction privacy, beyond a small "embarrassing items" fund, are criminals and the corrupt.
Mass surveillance already occurs. The NIS already track everything you do. But they do it in secret, enabling future bad actor government to monitor you without you knowing anything about them. THis is how any surveillance state would operate.
This technique actually breaks the surveillance state. By ensuring no one can hide, not the supreme leader or his cadres, you ensure everyone is held accountable. They will watch everything you do, whether you like it or not, this is the only possible way you can watch everything they do.
It is the opposite of security theatre, as no one will be able to hide any transaction. If they buy a house, a car, anything of any substance, it will be clear for all to see, and all can see all of the transactions which led up to it. If there is a mysterious huge transaction with no plausible cause, you can check where it came from, and so on, until you get to the root of any corruption or crime.
But it will never work out that way. The supreme leader and his cadre will always have an exception. Whether from the surveillance itself or from the consequences of their actions. The law will never, never be applied in such a way as to be totally impartial.
And yes US government surveillance is comprehensive, but it is far from total. Plus, you actually need a criminal element as in many cases it provides essential goods and services to folks that the existing system does not serve for whatever reason.
As long as cash is still around, and as long as there aren't cameras on every street corner, state surveillance will never be complete enough to be all encompassing. And we are lucky right now that so much of it is essentially benign
And frankly, if such a system were ever put in place, your small "embarrassing items" fund would not exist. It simply will not be allowed. You will have to buy all your dildos or whatever out in the open. Any such loophole would just become the focal point of abuse, just as I mentioned before that money laundering would be much more commonplace, and you'd have drug dealers endangering legitimate professions because suddenly all your cocaine purchases are labelled as "massage" or "groceries" (the latter is actually how I pay for drugs on venmo)
Cash is the safeguard that keeps the rest of the system legitimate. To say nothing of how badly such a system would fuck over the poor, unbanked, and a number of other classes of people you have probably forgotten about.
Yes, this is why you need radical transparency. If you don't have it, as you say, you will have a system where no one, but a select few have privacy.
Cash is going away, one way or another. That's just a technological progression. I've not used cash in over a decade. I found some recently, and it felt like monopoly money to me.
That's why we need to act soon. As our system becomes more and more digital, it will become more necessary to come up with a solution to prevent bad actors from abusing it to track our every move, while they can operate without scrutiny. This is a solution to that problem. If you have a better solution, detail it.
You guys really seem to believe in this 'radical transparency' thing. I keep telling you that it will never, ever fly. It will never be total, it will never be complete, and as long as there are physical things in this world that have value to some, it will always have competition.
I still use cash a lot, for perfectly legitimate (and some illegitimate) transactions. It is sad that one has to go out of their way to use it but it's still a superior means of payment for a lot of things. I don't see it going away, as long as there are strong advocates in place for preserving it. The moment those folks disappear or stop I agree that we will probably lose cash.
So far the only attempts to implement cashlessness have failed. China is getting awfully close but we don't like them so I am not so worried as any attempts in that direction here will be met with accusations of simping for the CCP. You can also look at the disaster that is ecuador (I think) trying to convert everything to bitcoin, or Venezuela trying to make some sort of digital currency in a futile attempt to innovate its way out of its current inflationary mess.
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u/SmashTheAtriarchy Feb 01 '24
No, people will just get really good at hiding their transactions. You can see this already with bitcoin, and money laundering. You will be enabling mass surveillance with almost nothing to show for it. This is already how security theater works.
Privacy is a fundamental right!