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Surviving the Cashless Cataclysm
MrSeb writes "There's been a lot of noise about Sweden becoming a cashless economy, and the potential repercussions that it might cause, most notably the (apparent) annihilation of privacy. Really, though, I think this is a load of hot air. Physical money might be on the way out, but that doesn't mean the end of anonymous, untraceable cash — it'll just become digital. If Bitcoin has taught us anything, it's possible to create an irreversible, cryptographic currency — but so far it has failed because it doesn't have sovereign backing. What if the US or UK (or any other country for that matter) issued digital cash? We would suddenly have an anonymous currency that can be kept on credit chips (or smartphones) and traded, just like paper money. No longer would handling money require expensive cash registers, safes, and secure collections; your smartphone could be your point of sale. It won't be easy to get governments to pass digital cash into law, though, not with big banks and megacorps lobbying for centralized, electronic, traceable currency. Here's hoping Sweden makes the right choice when the referendum to retire physical money finally rolls around."
Imagine giving your neighborhood dealer $200 digital cash for some drugs then the cops catch him with your money, traceable to you, on his iphone. Not good.
Back in the 1990's, I was working on payment machines when the Mondex Trial started out in Swindon.
Essentially, this was just a smart card which you could load up with cash - if you lost your card, then you'd lost whatever cash was on it at the time.
At the time, I thought it was a useful idea, and it did take off to a certain extent for micropayments, particularly in newsagents, but as far as I recall, the trial fizzled out an died after a while. I do recall at one point the promoters were trying to hand out free Mondex cards loaded up with £5 but the general public just weren't ready for the concept 20 years ago.
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
I don't give a crap about who tracks what already. Cash may be one of the last bastions of anonymity and privacy left to us! If I want to pay for cash for everything I can, then I should be able to do that! What I buy at the grocery store, or what movie I go see, or what restaurant I eat at, etc. is nobody's business but mine. Aren't things already bad enough in this world? I can't say it loud enough: DO NOT WANT!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You have that a bit backwards. It's not the megacorps lobbying for traceable currency, it's the government forcing the banks to have traceable currency so that they can monitor and shut down terrorists, drug cartels, tax frauds, etc. Hint: the term "money laundering" means moving money through transactions not traceable by the government. Plenty of banks and megacorps have in the past and continue to provide essentially untraceable transactions.
You're going to need to provide some evidence for the claim that bitcoins have failed because of a lack of sovereign entity backing them. There's a whole slew of other reasons that probably contribute far more to the poor adoption rate of bitcoins.
Why would any government endorse an untraceable digital currency scheme, when the whole point of the scheme is to circumvent the government's regulatory and investigatory powers?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Bitcoin is not anonymous. Bitcoin transactions are necessarily public information.
You can't be anonymous (disconnected) while at the same time expect digital currency to remain globally consistant and secure. It's an oxymoron.
Even if it were possible it is unrealistic to assume a single government exists on the planet who would choose to implement such a system. Where is the value to the government in not being able to trace all transactions even if you ..wink wink nudge nudge don't know "who" owns what money at a point in time.
Maybe its just me, but your logic of using an illegal situation to justify why a digital economy shouldn't exist seems like a bad argument.
There's a run right now in the US on "Tide" laundry detergent. It's being stolen and traded for drugs and cash. It sells "on the street" for about half what the store charges...
First, the obvious: How do you pay someone who doesn't have the means to register your payment? Private to private money deals will become virtually impossible unless both parties have some kind of electronic device on them permanently. And it may be unbelievable to some, but there are still people who refuse to carry a smart phone around. How do I lend my buddy 10 bucks if he has no means to receive them?
Then, the criminal. Untraceable, yeah, sure, tell someone who believes you. Criminals will not use it. Instead, they will keep the cash in circulation. And why shouldn't they? The very first thing I will do as soon as it becomes a fact that this goes through is to go to the bank and withdraw as much money as I can in the lowest possible bills available. Trust me, this money will become more and more valuable as time goes by, as it is used for back alley deals and as it gets out of circulation because of busts and people returning it to their account. ANY currency that you can only spend but not collect becomes more valuable over time, as long as there are people who give it value. And that stuff WILL be valuable, and if not, I can always still hand it back to the bank and deposit it. The alternative being, of course, that some foreign currency suddenly becomes the street bill. For reference, see Cuba. You want something aside of the state-approved crap? You better have greenbacks with you.
And finally, how about people who do not get a bank account? It's not like it's possible for them to have a halfway decent life now, but then, it will become virtually impossible. Try to get a job in Europe without a bank account. Just try. No such luck. There is NO way you will be paid in cash. No company I know of will ever even consider doing it. Now on the other hand, try to open an account if you're homeless. Try it. I dare you. How the heck do you think these people will ever get back on their feet? Because then your excuse "if he really wanted, he could" doesn't work anymore. He CANNOT anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Until you realize that tons are things of illegal that shouldn't be.
:-) We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century abundance-oriented economy. We can do that in part by improving our gift economy (Linux, Wikipedia, Thingiverse, blogging), by improving our subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe LENR), by improving our planning (like by using emails and twitters to organize the economy by creating and monitoring demand and feedback), and, if we do have a currency, by having a basic income to go with it, as well as LETS-like local currency systems. It would also help to rethink the nature of most "work" so it is more inherently fun and inherently meaningful:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity". We should be able to do better in the 21st century.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+trek+money
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
giving money to bradley manning defence fund
If the cards change hands frequently enough, then the tracability of the card becomes as difficult as the tracability of the unique IDs on cash bills.
The reason that the ids of cash bills are essentially untraceable is because almost nobody currently tracks them.
The card data will be tracked by everyone, since everyone who touches it will need to process it as data and the computer will record it automatically. Unless you think people will just accept your word that "this card contains $25" and not run it through their scanner to verify the amount and validity, at which point the record is made.
The various denominations of card would never go through a card swipe machine, except to permanently denude it of its assets prior to its physical destruction.
Wow. So you really do think people will just accept your word that the cash card you hand them contains $25 just because you say so.
That 200$ card can have changed hands physically hundreds of times before then. This is the same problem as cash bills.
Cash bills are easily exchangable like that because there is some measure of trust that the bill is genuine and has not had its value stripped from it by an intermediate owner. There are also people with guns who deal with people who try to produce fake bills, and usually identifying a fake bill takes nothing more than really looking at it.
How do you deal with the person who "denudes" 100 cards that contain $1 and then transfers the contents of one $100 card to all 100 of the blanks? Or doesn't transfer anything to them. You've now got 101 cards that are valued at $100 because the guy who has them says they are $100 cards. He started with $200, he's now trading for $10,100. You can't tell just by looking, it's a piece of plastic with a magstripe on the back or a few gold contacts on the front.
Well, you deal with that by either "swiping" every card when it is used (which gives you tracability) or making cards that have strong visual authentication systems so no swiping, or even any electronic measure, is needed (and thus you have made a one-for-one replacement of "paper cash" with "plastic cash", copying all the problems of paper cash over into your "plastic" system.)
The only reason paper cash is untracable is because most people don't write the numbers down. If everyone has to write all the numbers down, and has to do it electronically because the numbers are only available via electronic means, then you've converted "paper cash" into just as tracable a system as this new "digital cash" will be.
- Hiring a consenting prostitute
- Purchasing pornography over the internet that goes beyond contemporary community standards
- Purchasing alcohol of some types/quantities/purities that may not be lawful in your state or county.
- Purchasing unpasteurized dairy products
- Person-Person transactions that are not directly taxed. If you think it should be-- fuck you, my 14 year old kid should be able to mow the neighbor's lawn without the IRS getting a cut. And I should be able to pay an allowance the same.
- Purchasing anything that I want to remain private -- legality aside. Prepaid cellphones/sims and other 'cash only' items people value for whatever reason...
- Certain 'holistic' medical practices. My body. My choice. My right.
- Bitcoin is arguably illegal in the US, as are other competing currencies.
Should I keep going with other more sensitive things?
I can give a good example of something that actually IS legal yet is interfered with because the govt dont like it. Wikileaks.
Wikileaks remains within the first ammendment (And should Assange be charged, any competent judge will throw it out based on the Elesburg precedent) yet because its extremely difficult to make real-world payments due to the internet nature of it, their ability to tell samizdat news has been wrecked by interference from governments and their bank lackeys.
If cash payments become impossible everywhere you can expect that to extend to other things where govts dont like it, particularly political parties with agendas unpopular with government, such as socialists , anarchists and stateless capitalists, or groups such as sea-shephard etc that strongly agitate governments.
Finally there are legal products that one might want off the record, such as sex products or in the US firearms.
Privacy is important dude, and there really is no such thing as anonymous online currenct. Even bitcoin (aka "comedy currency") isnt anonymous, in fact the oposite, once you know someones block address you can easily trace their transactions just by examining the record of the block-chain.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
- Person-Person transactions that are not directly taxed. If you think it should be-- fuck you, my 14 year old kid should be able to mow the neighbor's lawn without the IRS getting a cut.
I disagree, actually. If he's making enough for it to be taxable, then there's no distinction between him and a 19 year old doing the same amount of work. It's not that I think 14 year olds should be tapped for taxes, just that there's no real justification for setting an age limit. What about a 12 year old who runs a highly profitable online store?
And I should be able to pay an allowance the same.
You can, within the limits of the gift tax laws.
- Purchasing anything that I want to remain private -- legality aside.
Yes.
But---you use the apostrophe to form the plural, so you're still in. Congrats.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Failed at what exactly? Neither you nor the article define exactly what it is that it has failed at.
Linux is only 1-2% of desktops after 20 years... is that a failure? Scale isn;t great but look how many linux users there were after 3 years ... https://linuxcounter.net/charts/_stats_number_users_40years.png?1332412189
Sure bitcoin is still niche, revolutionary change doesn't happen overnight. Price discovery takes a while and often overshoots. Same with equities, and even indexes. That's all speculation driven. Beneath that there is an economy of sorts - it's small, tiny but thats how things starts.
If/when it gets outlawed, then I think we can start talking about failure. Thought technically it never failed - if anything, outlawing it suggests it was threatening to be a success.
Invaders must die
Seriously? "If you are doing nothing wrong you have noting to hide"?
The power to investigate people is always abused. No exceptions. That is why there must be a balance, a limit to what the police are allowed to do, what the government is allowed to control and know.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC