The real question is how to design a system that is resilient to these things. So far, humanity has never had a system that was actually durably resilient to this. We've had brief respites, of varying length, from varying systems, usually only locally. There is work on how to be durable against such things but I'd start by saying it has to be fully distributed and every person has to independently choose to join together using habit patterns that are resilient to this, instead of relying on an external system to join them together in a way they don't have to think about. There are solid ideas about how to pull that off, but again, it has never held up to attack once, with any system design. If you have a philosophy that says otherwise, then it may have good ideas, but it's overestimating how ready they are to hold up to the onslaught of powerseeking people.
we have had systems that partially worked in some ways, while committing atrocities. so the next question is, what network of behaviors of a diverse population would actually make that population durably resilient to all strategies to rule them or commit further atrocities? and how would you get that resilience to last between generations, after peace has occurred and made it not obvious why such intense redundancy is needed?
It's actually very simple, you just have to remove all financial privacy.
All transactions, all wealth, etc, is public knowledge. Barring maybe a small spending fund for peoples embarassing purchases, everything else is public knowledge. Any bribed, payoffs, convenient funding can be seen by everyone. Everyone can see everyones wages, encouraging worker solidarity. People can't pretend to be wealthy, further encouraging solidarity. People can't hide large wealth or overindulge in wasteful purchases, while others obviously starve, without serious social consequences. Everyone holds everyone else accountable. Corruption requires shadows, unaccountable corners it can hide in and do its business.
Getting people to agree to this, or overcoming the existing power structures is just way too hard though.
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.
84
u/lahwran_ Jan 31 '24 edited Jan 31 '24
The real question is how to design a system that is resilient to these things. So far, humanity has never had a system that was actually durably resilient to this. We've had brief respites, of varying length, from varying systems, usually only locally. There is work on how to be durable against such things but I'd start by saying it has to be fully distributed and every person has to independently choose to join together using habit patterns that are resilient to this, instead of relying on an external system to join them together in a way they don't have to think about. There are solid ideas about how to pull that off, but again, it has never held up to attack once, with any system design. If you have a philosophy that says otherwise, then it may have good ideas, but it's overestimating how ready they are to hold up to the onslaught of powerseeking people.
we have had systems that partially worked in some ways, while committing atrocities. so the next question is, what network of behaviors of a diverse population would actually make that population durably resilient to all strategies to rule them or commit further atrocities? and how would you get that resilience to last between generations, after peace has occurred and made it not obvious why such intense redundancy is needed?