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A Cashless, High-Value, Anonymous Currency: How?
jfruh writes "The cashless future is one of those concepts that always seems to be just around the corner, but never quite gets here. There's been a lot of hype around Sweden going almost cashless, but most transactions there use easily traceable credit and debit cards. Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value. Could an experiment called MintChip brewing in Canada finally take us to cashless nirvana?"
So ice cream for currency?
Theft, yes. Bitcoin itself ever hacked, no.
Gold:
[x] Cashless
[x] High-Value
[x] Anonymous
I have been waiting for the moment to happen, I have a large collection of Disney Dollars saved up for this moment!.
There's been a lot of hype around Sweden going almost cashless, but most transactions there use easily traceable credit and debit cards
Since when does "cashless" mean "untraceable"?
... what the best way will be, any anybody who professes omniscience on this is lying to you. We'll have to experiment to find the best solution.
If you're in the US, ask your legislators to support a short act to make such experiments legal. Right now, trying to figure this out is a good way to land in prison.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For the sake of discussion: what is wrong with cash and/or what is the benefit of doing away with it?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
How is one supposed to pay for these things with digital currency? Pimps and drug dealers love paper trails!
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Without government backing, it's difficult to find sellers of physical goods that accept the currency. Sellers of physical goods need to pay tax, and their suppliers in turn need to pay tax. Because only a government-backed currency is good for paying tax, companies choose to standardize their operations on one currency.
Why not use what it all comes down to in the end? Watts. Secondary benefits would be that there would be a huge push to make transferring and storing more efficient and people would actually be able to correlate what they're buying with the cost.
"Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value."
"...isn't backed by any government..."
Sounds good to me. Certainly true anyway.
"...has seen high-profile hacks..."
Bitcoin hasn't been hacked, some Bitcoin websites have been hacked.
"...collapses in value."
There was certainly that big bubble, but other than that it's been fairly stable. Certainly for the last many months.
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgCzm1g10zm2g25
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
Is a benefit of Bitcoin.
I can't figure out if this is a cleverly disguised Bitcoin advertisement or not....
This man disagrees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum
Palm trees and 8
Not being "backed" by any government is nothing less than the very first prerequisite of anonymity. Governments don't monopolize the business of currency and central planning (by force) for your benefit. They are in the business because it's absurdly profitable -- especially when you can print more currency out of thin air and use it to pay off your debt (something no private business could ever do without immediate financial punishment).
What can be done mathematically in an abstract environment is one thing, what can be done in the real world with competing interests and (rather importantly) physical implementations.. are often two very different things.
Yesterday, I got a cheap dinner with a friend; it came out to about $5 for each of us. I handed the cashier a credit card, since I have not been to an ATM in quite a while, and he gave me a dirty look.
That anecdote illustrates the problem. On the one hand, we have a cheap, anonymous, private way to make payments (cash), but it requires us to have physical paper or coins in our pockets. On the other hand, we have electronic methods that require a connection to an online transaction processor, which results in higher transaction costs and poor privacy protections.
That is why digital cash -- the real kind, not the Bitcoin kind -- is so useful. It allows private, electronic payments to occur online or offline (in the sense of two smartphones performing a transaction over Bluetooth), with all the advantages of cash and all the advantages of the current electronic payment system.
Palm trees and 8
The main problem with anonymous currency is that is being pressed to be outlawed all around the world. The second problem, of course, is people.
With the currency troubles in Greece and Spain, a "cashless society" is much further off. One plan for Greece is to suddenly convert the bank account of everyone in Greece from euros to drachma, then immediately devalue the drachma. Since this is well known, everyone with any money is pulling it out of Greek banks.
Keeping money in "the cloud" means someone else controls it. For a good laugh, read the EULA of WePay, a wannabe PayPal competitor. Or those of Dwolla, which is a pseudo financial institution run out of a hacker space in Iowa. The terms offered by most psuedo-banks in the "cloud" are awful.
So because the very first airplane ever made didn't fly, it was proof that powered flight is impossible?
You would be surprised at how many people don't have bank accounts or credit cards. Both can actually be pretty hard to get if you do not already have them.
"Oh! grandmother," she said, "what efficient banking you have!"
"The better to track terrorists with, my child," was the reply.
Notice the three words after "legal tender" on Federal Reserve notes: "for all debts". Technically, only businesses that extend credit have to accept legal tender. If a business never gives credit, such as a business that requires payment in full before services are rendered, it's my understanding that it need not accept legal tender.
I agree, it won't happen. What we will see is a future in cashless world reserve electronic currency to replace the US Dollar by the world Elites. As the disaster of the EURO shows, if you can get governments to give up their own currency, you can dictate what they must do to continue to receive loans. Safely out of government's control, the elites will back it by gold/silver so it will be stable in price and against inflation.
Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value
Clever wording there. Yes, you could say bitcoin "has seen high-profile hacks," but you couldn't say that bitcoin has been hacked.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
If you don't check to see that the transfer has been confirmed, sure, but that's no different than putting a bill on the counter and then snatching it away. It's not a hack, and you can't do it to someone that doesn't allow you to.
Why?
If anonymity is that important to your transaction, cash is still the way to go. If digital anonymity is what you want, then you need an escrow holder that will take cash and convert it to some form of one-shot unique digital account without any personal information involved.
If you want digital, anonymity, and convenient, well good luck with that. The combination of the 3 just screams "counterfeit". Like the old saying goes, pick two.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Really? You can buy debit/prepaid cards at pretty much any major retailer in the United States. I'll submit that a lot of people outside the first world probably have limited access to bank accounts and credit cards.
> "Could an experiment called MintChip brewing in Canada finally take us to cashless nirvana?"
When you see a headline in the form of a question, the answer is always "no".
It means the writer doesn't have enough (any?) evidence to back up a conclusion, but the conclusion will attract readers, so he posits it in the form of a question.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
"Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat!"
"But that trick never works!"
"This time for sure!"
It is an abstract representation of value that only has meaning in the context of a society.
It has no meaning or value in and of itself: can't do much with a sack of gold in the middle of the Sahara, unless you meet some tauregs, which brings us back to the point: whatever you agree is a medium of exchange has to derive meaning in terms of what other people think of as value.
Gold has ancient meaning, but ones and zeroes have to stand for something else: a sack of gold in a bank somewhere.
Which implies accountability, traceability, authority.
Without those things, no one in their right mind will accept your currency.
You have to know what currency actually means, and you can't design currency that defies those meanings, or what you have isn't really currency. Except amongst other idealistic clueless fanboys of alternacurrency, but this is a fringe group playing silly games, not actually making something that will replace real currency at large.
There is no trust in the parameters you have outlined. And with no trust, no trade.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Never happen. Having a currency out of bounds means there is no way to know what's going on with the currency. Is someone counterfeiting it? hording it?
And cash isn't really anonymous, never has been. Ask Al Capone.
How do I knw this? bcasue I was on a team that did it. Create a smart card system(first to be used by a financial entity) and you could use it to pay a shop keeper, get paid from a shop keeper, and use it for bank transaction.
So what happened, like in a day, was that people stopped using banks. Why use a bank when you have a card that can get money on and off it?
Sure, the bank had the physical currency in place, but who had what? you can't loan money that's on the consumers card, but you don't know how much is in the costumer vs. shop keeper. What's an asset? How is interest applied? How do we know the amount of currency out there matches what's ib the bank? Who do you do a currency swap?
So we quickly rolled out a patch the mad it so you needed to go to the bank to add currency.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not sure that's a bad thing anymore given what governments around the world are doing to people these days. I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bitcoin, honestly. Banks and governments can't freeze it at will.
This is misleading as all hell. Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. And pretty much every non-electronic currency collapsed in value in 2008. I'm not sure bitcoin did. It's new, but it's totally usable and stable enough.
Having used bitcoin personally for several things, I have nothing bad to say about it except that it's a little bit slow for transfers to happen. Still way faster than a bank and it operates 24/365.
Question everything
But that would make a really good YouTube video. You and David debating this in the middle of a 1 lane highway with a 18 wheeler bearing down on you at full tilt. It's the only way we'll settle this argument. With everyone dead.
/rimshot
At least my hypothetical non-sense has more of a chance of happening than BitCoin.
Gratuitous, I know
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
It's more like saying the first airplane didn't cruise at 30,000ft is proof that it is a failure. Expecting something like Bitcoin to be at a level of adoption greater than it is now is ridiculous. Sure there were some idiots that thought so an bought them up to $30 a year ago. After the hype was corrected, Bitcoin has been puttering along slow and steady above the trees.
I'm pretty sure that, in common law jurisdictions, it would be found that there is a common law right (established by tradition) to make payments using anonymous currency.
Whether the anonymous currency is metal or bits is immaterial ! :-) (to the legality of using anonymous currency)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Seriously, what kind of self-respecting website won't let you make a donation in Flooze? Dammit it's good enough for Guinan!
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I live in a "first-world" society, and bank accounts are ubiquitous here. If you have even a negligible amount of money (like, $100) you can get a bank account whenever you want. From my observation, it is extremely rare for people who receive and spend money on a regular basis to not have a bank account.
Lack of a credit card is more common, but they are also easy to get (if you don't have ridiculously bad credit). Example: my little brother who has no bills in his name and works at Walmart part-time was able to walk into his bank and get a low-limit CC with very little hassle.
Anyone who has a bank account can get a debit card anyway, which functions very similar to a CC for electronic purchases.
Oh, wait, they tried that in a movie.
Baver
once again, the sandwich heavy portfolio pays off for the hungy investor. - Z
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm personally a big supporter of using cash. I use it at every opportunity, even if that means going out of my way to go to an ATM.
I havn't heard a convincing argument for cashless yet. Cashless isn't anonymous, requires both parties to use special devices or services,, and ties us into the banking system and thus gives an already overinfluential sector more power than it deserves.
Here in the UK, banks and credit card companies charge a percentage to the retailer for using a card machine, which of course customers end up footing the bill for. Why support banks any more after all the destruction they've wrought?
It would have to be gold or silver not both. Using both however does prove you wrong about the supposed stability in price.
Kind of a ridiculous statement. Bank accounts and debit cards are trivial to get, even if you never had one before. Credit cards are also fairly easy to get when you are starting out, just don't expect the bank to give you a high limit.
Fee avoidance is also trivial, you simply keep a minimum amount of cash in the account. There are plenty of banks (particularly branch-less banks) with low minimums.
The problem that most people have these days is that they are addicted to credit, can't manage money, and aren't willing to learn how to. Either they will maintain a credit card balance and be in-hoc for their entire lives paying interest, or they will constantly border on a $0 account balance, overdraw their accounts every few months trying to juggle it, and then complain that they are too poor (here's a hint: If you can make do with your account always bordering on $0 then you can make do with your account always bordering on $1000... you aren't actually spending any less each month by maintaining a higher balance).
The whole cash/cash-less argument was dead years ago. People who have so little money that they can't make use of existing low-fee/zero-fee mechanisms are hardly going to have enough money to make effective use of a more esoteric currencies like bitcoin, let alone be smart enough to make better use of such a mechanism verses existing and more convenient government sponsored mechanisms.
Has anyone looked at the spreads for converting bitcoin to a real currency? They are insane. The people making the money are the people working the spreads, not the people trying to use bitcoin as an actual currency.
Similarly, there is absolutely no need to keep your money in $USD if you don't want to. It's a fine form of exchange, I use it every day, but these days you can invest your money anywhere... in equities, in foreign currencies, in commodities, and only keep a few months worth of 'cash' around for immediate needs. A few months burn worth of cash is essentially not subject to inflation. The currency is almost irrelevant at that point except for the fact that you have to have it in a currency you buy things with to avoid translation fees.
Of course, anyone who hasn't done this is probably going to be a bit surprised at how volatile the relative value of EVERYTHING moves around these days. Gold, USD, Euro, an equity, a piece of a mine, other commodities, whatever... everything has a relative value based on supply and demand. Nothing is immune. There is no such thing as 'intrinsic' value for anything (not even bits of 'energy' as someone tried to suggest). People who invest in gold, for example, not knowing how volatile its value is, can suddenly find their investment worth less in dollar terms while their burn rate in dollars doesn't change, over a few days or weeks or months, and quickly realize the fallacy of relying on some idiotic notion of absolute or intrinsic value.
p.s. recently drug gangs and cartels have begun using bit-coin to launder money. Lets see how long it lasts as a viable currency when the larger transactions wind up being made by criminals instead of normal users. If you want practical untraceability then cash from an ATM works just fine. Theoretically its traceable but after a couple of transactions it's effectively impossible to track. Just because something is theoretically possible doesn't mean there are government drones hiding behind every flower and bush doing it.
-Matt
The cashless future is already here. All of US dollars bills and coins account for less than 5% of dollars. The rest are digital. One professor of mine said it's as low as 2%.
Could an experiment called MintChip brewing in Canada finally take us to cashless nirvana?
Governments WANT transactions to be traceable.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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Right now a organization like MasterCard or a Federal Reserve Clearing House verifies the electronic certificates shuttling through cybersapce. i am not sure I'd trust a distributed verification like in bitcoin.
But the trouble with trusted 3rd party is that they can collect information about the transaction. Then it isnt anonymous.
Exactly, the technology for anonymous virtual currency already exists. But the Govt would never back such a complete anonymity. Taxation, the backbone of the govt, would be tough to enforce. Hawalas and scammers would enjoy. Now if somewhere to develop a semi-anonymous currency (like cash, with enough effort, you could probably trace it), then we probably can hope for Govt backing.
MintChip differs from bitcoin in one very critical aspect. Bitcoin is generated naturally. Scarcity is built into the model. MintChip works just like the Dollar (post silver standard). It's arbitrarily created by a central authority who can inflate or deflate as they see fit. So, bitcoin is proof of nothing. MintChip is just like anyother currency, but without a printing press. Bitcoin is entirely different.
This would put banks in control of ALL money. That's a Very Bad Idea. If you can't "hide it under your mattress", you essentially have ZERO privacy.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Folsom Prison had to give up on Cash ever coming back as of 2003. Now it's just cigarettes.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I just saw a rack of prepaid debit cards at 7-11. If you can't get one, you're hopeless.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
What part of the last 10 years did you miss where judges have been letting the U.S. government literally get away with murder. They sure haven't been any kind of brake on stopping the government from spying on its citizens.
Judges aren't saints, they are political appointees and they aren't any more reliable or trustworthy than the politicians who appoint them. If you put them on 3, 5 or 9 judge panels they get a little more reliable but if you manage to pack a 9 person court with 5 corrupted or partisan judges, all voting together, you are still screwed.
You should have zero confidence in letting one judge control anything important.
@de_machina
Platinum is rarer and has more uses (as a catalyst etc) so will never lose value.
I think that an anonymous cashless system will be great and is a very good idea but it would not, in any way, make me consider not carrying cash in my pocket. I would also still carry that piece of plastic that I use to pay for petrol etc. I like to have options and love this idea but cannot see why I would want a cashless system. I am still going to pay for a beer with cash or a newspaper.
I was one of the Luddites that fought to keep chequebooks... I love being able to send them through the post. I want more options, not less. Old options will die out through natural loss of interest when better ones take over but cash will stay for a long time.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Energy would make an excellent currency when we develop a suitable means of storage and transfer.
... ?").
We'd probably still want to keep it in banks, though. Easier to distribute from central locations, and you don't want it too portable ("is that a Terajoule in your pocket or
It probably can be done. But then would be explicitly undone by governments and insurance companies by reporting requirements. In effect that is the same as cash transactions. Lots of countries (notably in the Caribbean) take US dollars cash for transactions, the governments fix their exchange rates to US dollars, but when you pay your cabbie 100 USD he's certainly not declaring 100 USD on his income tax.
Prove to me that you only had 50k in income with a perfectly anonymous transaction system. Prove to me that you had 6 million dollars in expenses. Who did you pay this to, for what?
Prove to me that this money was stolen from you, and you just didn't spend it.
Prove to me that you have this much in income so that I can give you a loan. If I give you loan in Euros and you have income in dollars I have to price into that the risk of currencies changing relative to each other. If I give you a loan in Euro's and you only collect income in annonbitcoins how do I value anonbitcoins relative to euro's?
What if there aren't enough anonbitcoins in the system to support a growing population or a more productive economy? Who creates more? What control (or lack of control) do I have over the person creating more anonbitcoins? etc. etc. etc.
The simplest fully anonymous system would be one that gives everyone a unique ID, everyone connects to the central database that handles transactions (assuming perfect security to the database). The database logs no transactions, once a transaction is complete it is done and irreversibly one way, and randomly changes your unique ID after each transaction. No logging would make it fully anonymous (just like cash!), but everyone would have to explicitly trust the issuing authority (whomever controls the database) to responsibly manage it (just like the government!). If you mean a cryptographically untracably anonymous system I don't think that's realistically possible with todays maths. Every exchange that can happen *can* be logged, and since it requires unique identifiers it's possible to log the transactions and work backwords so to speak. To prevent effective logging you need to change unique identifiers unpredictably, and explicitly not log the changes.
I am guessing you do not interact with marginalized poor people then. It is actually considered a serious problem among the rural poor.
As for credit cards, it is less an issue of 'bad credit' and more 'not in the system, so you don't exist'. People under a certain level often have pretty much no footprint and work almost entirely through cash. Some are lucky to even have paperwork like a birth certificate or social security number. And yep, this is a first world problem.
Try to get a bank account with no birth certificate or driver's license.
A few weeks ago I helped a woman get a bank account, she just barely skirted the minimal amount of documentation necessary to open the account. If she had been one form of identity less she would have been denied. And once you are in that situation you get a real chicken&egg situation getting out of it.
True, the pre-paid cards are an option, though they do not really get you out of the basic pattern since (a) you generally have to buy them with cash and (b) they can not be used for identification, so they are not a gateway to other account types. So all it really does is abstract the problem by one step.
Exactly, the technology for anonymous virtual currency already exists. But the Govt would never back such a complete anonymity. Taxation, the backbone of the govt, would be tough to enforce. Hawalas and scammers would enjoy. Now if somewhere to develop a semi-anonymous currency (like cash, with enough effort, you could probably trace it), then we probably can hope for Govt backing.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes there is but one government. Why shouldn't a small nation somewhere choose to offer financial advantages in order to lure business to its locale? (Hint: Several already do.) Why shouldn't this extend potentially to anonymous currency? If there is enough benefit to the nation (infusion of capital, prestige, whatever), then it just might happen.
Yup, there they are, right next to the lotto machine :-)
Of course, pre-paid debit cards are a pretty big scam unto themselves with the fees involved in buying and reloading the cards. They cater to the stupidity of people.
A standard credit or debit card with a branch-less bank, plus ~2-3 free ATM reimbursements per month, is the best value for anyone capable of maintaining a minimum balance.
-Matt
He's right... the answer isn't "no", it's "probably not" or "very unlikely."
Lets change every instance of bitcoin to bacon in your post.
I'm not sure that's a bad thing anymore given what governments around the world are doing to people these days. I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bacon, honestly. Banks and governments can't freeze it at will.
This is misleading as all hell. Bacon itself has never been hacked. And pretty much every non-electronic currency collapsed in value in 2008. I'm not sure bacon did. It's new, but it's totally usable and stable enough.
Having used bacon personally for several things, I have nothing bad to say about it except that it's a little bit slow for transfers to happen. Still way faster than a bank and it operates 24/365.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
To disprove you, all I have to do is to write the headline:
When you see a headline in the form of a question, is the answer always "no"?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's not logical. Bitcoin doesn't give you the basic freedoms to copy, to modify, and to distribute modified versions. Indeed, it is based on a DRM scheme preventing people from copying and manipulating them!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Exactly, the technology for anonymous virtual currency already exists. But the Govt would never back such a complete anonymity. Taxation, the backbone of the govt, would be tough to enforce. Hawalas and scammers would enjoy. Now if somewhere to develop a semi-anonymous currency (like cash, with enough effort, you could probably trace it), then we probably can hope for Govt backing.
The govt already backs an anonymous currency -- it's called cash. And before you bring up serial number tracking and fingerprint testing think about the resources required to trace a single bill. For that reason I think the govt might ultimately embrace a digital (at least semi-)anonymous currency. Way easier to track on a large scale than physical cash.
The taxation argument is a farce for the same reason: people get paid under the table in cash each and every day. They can't figure out a way to tax that income, and they certainly don't put forth the expensive effort tracing individual bills to enforce it. The most the IRS ever does is keep an eye on unusual bank deposits. If you don't use a bank, problem solved.
...the finest in the galaxy. I too take all of my economics directly from Quark.
Governments have never demanded that citizens give us their private holdings of gold.
Oh wait, nevermind
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Money is the poorman's* energy exchange. (* or more accurately poor-tech)
If you had access to unlimited "Free Energy" (negating the problem of how to store it) and could convert it to matter in a form you wanted (applying E=MC^2) would money still have value?
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You "fixed" it to "but and", huh.
I wish the BitCoin people could understand this. An ideal currency is one that remains stable in relation to whatever it is you choose to buy. You don't WANT your currency to appreciate in value if you want to use it as a currency instead of an investment. A "currency" with guaranteed massive deflation (because the currency cannot scale with the size of the economy) is simply destined to never be a significant means of trade, except as an "in-between" currency useful only for money laundering.
Bitcoin is NOT anonymous, a pain to trace, but not anonymous.
The value of currency requires trust. Anonymity is a cloak that erases trust. You can push back and forth, but the two principles oppose each other.
If there really was a "high value anonymous currency" digital or otherwise, I could steal $2M (copy it easily if it's digital), trade it to you for high value goods worth $1.5M (diamonds, gold, computer chips, designer handbags, whatever), then immediately trade the goods to someone else for $1M. I have $1M of laundered cash, you're up $500K over what your goods were worth, the other guy got $1.5M worth of goods for $1M, and the guy who lost the $2M can't do anything because the cash transaction is anonymous and untraceable. The more traceable the cash is, the easier it is to get to the actual bad actor.
The real value in money is the police and court system that will come around and punish people who don't play by the rules - that's the backing of the full faith and trust bit...
Awe some. Security through obscurity. What's to go wrong?
Only available on Windows, Android and Blackberry. Well Blackberry is over. I wouldn't trust a payment system on my cell phone and I am never ever going to use Windows again. Besides as the MPAA proved with Blu-ray there is no better platform to lose you security with than Windows. Not to mention that this mean the mint is out sourcing control of the money supply to the US as there will be no Canadian companies involved.
I think you have a point here, but at the same time you are talking about an endemic problem with the very small numbers of people at the margins of society who are both poor and also completely or nearly completely undocumented AND have no wherewithal to fix the problem.
Even without documentation you can certainly get on the train, even if it comes to petitioning the courts or finding someone to counter-sign the account, but the people in those situations are there for other reasons. Fixing it won't fix their situations.
You can't base an entire society's working methodology on the needs of the people at the fringe. It's a lost cause no matter how first-rate the society is. Technology is going to move on regardless, and those people are there for more reasons than simply not having any money.
So don't try to change conversation. This isn't about the relatively few who are missing documentation, this is about the relatively MANY who don't have even the minimal sense to manage their finances properly.
-Matt
Why does it have to be convertible at any time and place? I think just being convertible is sufficient.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
You probably don't know many people living illegally then. Most of them eschew bank accounts on the assumption that if the government finds out about them, it can steal the money right out of their account, unlike the cash they have hidden under their mattress. Also, avoiding paper trails can be useful when you don't want someone tracking you.
So they live entirely on cash, which is annoying because a lot of services these days are moving away from cash when they can. For example, the toll road cuts back on tellers because most people just get the EZPasses, but if you're living in an area with lots of day laborers the tollbooth becomes a major point of congestion as all of these cash only folks have to stop and interact with the teller instead of zipping through.
I read the internet for the articles.
[P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
And
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children.
Right off his own Archives
It's a tap card originally for public transport, but now widely used in stores, parking lots, post offices, fast food outlets, etc. throughout Hong Kong. It's very popular, and just about everyone in Hong Kong uses it every day.
It's anonymous in the sense that no ID's required to buy one.
But the cards are all numbered, of course, and if the Authorities know the number blind stamped on your Octopus card, then they can -- in theory at least -- match it with the payment record kept by Octopus. (Although Octopus is run as an independent, private venture, the HK Government effectively controls it with about a 60 percent indirect shareholding.) And with a maximum loaded value of HK$1000 (US$125) it's not really a high-value payment option.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Yes, in common-law countries people are generally free to contract, and as such are free to trade on whatever "currency", barter or whatever that they like. If a contract says pay 1,000 bitcoins then 1,000 bitcoins it is.
But anonymous currency is still being outlawed - in the context that is. There's still paper money, but it's not digital. You can transfer "money", commodities or bearer-bonds digitally and yeah the "currency" itself is anonymous but the means of transfer is not. It's the means of transfer where anonymity is being outlawed.
The method and reasoning behind the outlawing is partially direct, such as money-laundering regulations requiring identity documentation to set up an account and a paper trail of transactions. The second is less direct: the legal requirements in respect of accountability. The law here may focus on obligations of the entity processing the transfer, but it nonetheless requires a audit trail that can also be used to track transferor and transferee.
Even just in practice it would be very difficult to have an anonymous form of electronic transfer of anything of value. There's always going to be some problem in practice that requires the papertrail. Maybe the transferor or transferee disputes amounts paid/received, maybe the entity processing the transfer does a reconciliation and finds the amount they've received doesn't equal the amount they've paid. The only way to resolve these problems is if there's an audit trail to follow - and really, a trail good enough to stand up in court because someone's going to have to prove a transaction to someone at some point.
Keep in mind that large cash transactions are automatically reported (by law) to the IRS; it is pretty hard to make large cash transactions without at least going through one tax-paying business (e.g. a bank), and even if you split the transaction up, there is a point beyond which you will not be able to hide what you are doing. This is actually one of the biggest difficulties that fugitives face: it is very hard to receive income off the books, pay rent off the books, buy food off the books, etc. It is also the case that most people try to pay their taxes correctly; the cheaters are in the minority (we can debate whether or not that is a result of enforcement or the fact that we give our consent to be governed).
Additionally, the government has incentives to support secure payment systems, and even incentives to support anonymous payment systems. Several classes of fraud, including (importantly) fraud against banks (the government definitely cares about their interests, even if they do not care about commoners'), are difficult to the point of impossibility. Secret operations and programs need to be paid for, and just burying the paper trail in a mountain of shell corporations is usually not enough.
Now, some of our friends on the right wing of American politics do indeed loath the idea of individuals being able to engage in transactions that cannot be recorded and analyzed without the knowledge of one or both parties. Unfortunately, we currently have a right wing majority in our government (don't be fooled -- the majority of Democrats are right-of-center at best, and only push for left wing charges on the thinnest, outer-most layer of things that matter; health care reform was the closest thing to a deviation from that behavior that we have seen in a long time, and even that fell short), and so anything that appears to hinder law enforcement will almost certainly to pass through our legislative or executive branch.
This is not a problem with "government," it is a problem with "ring wing government."
Palm trees and 8
The one option nobody installing about is allow competition in money. There rally doesn't need to be a forced standard with legal tender laws. In this at gold, silver, bit coins, clam shells, and even federal reserve notes can all exist and be used. In that way
If there wasn't enough gold to function properly as money something else would step in.
The problem with fiat money is that it can be created at no cost. That is the ultimate power and will always be abused.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Bitcoin is on the rise recently...so we needed to have another article slamming it.
Looking at the price today, this article doesn't seem to have affected it as much as usual.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The biggest problem with anonymous currency is how do you prevent corporate/goverment dark ops from using it too?
Spook: "No, I can assure the oversight committee that we had nothing to do with the drone strike on the protesters in Free Speech Zone #451."
Spook .oO (nothing you could ever trace, anyway)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Change the conversation? I think if we are talking about moving to a cashless society, mentioning the people who are still entirely cash-based is pretty relevant.
Keep in mind, we are not talking about a tiny part of the population, closer to 10% actually. They just tend to be invisible to the rather well off middle class.
This tends to be one of the problems with geek culture, people within it tend to look at the people around them and assume they are not only representative, but the only demographic that matters.
You also forget, societies are complex places, there is room for more then one way of doing things. The middle and upper class can have their cashless living just like they can have their bank accounts and land and cars and all those other things. People on the lower end of the scale can still have their cash.
Does Bitcoin solve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Casteism
We're not going to have a cashless society, until Obama's mandatory chip implant is fully implemented.. as I understand it, the law makes that 2013, so it's not far off. Then all transactions will route through your implant in (likely) your right hand between the thumb and forefinger.. Of course that means if you DONT have the chip you cant buy ort sell anything or get health care either
From a functional perspective, Bitcoin's mainly a transactional token system, not a value storage system. So while there's a bit of Ponzi / Pyramid scheme to it, that doesn't really affect most day to day use, because you're not trying to accumulate lots of Bitcoins as an investment, you're keeping a few around to buy drugs online or similar contraband, and the convenience of a hard-to-trace electronic currency is more important than losing or gaining a few percent a week on your stash. If you're the drug seller, you're going to sell your bitcoins for cash, if you're the buyer, you're going to buy a few to pay your online pharmacist.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I blame the people who also thought having a caps lock key where the Ctrl should be and ~` where the ESC belongs on a computer keyboard was a good idea. But typewriters had a lot of variation even back with manual typewriters. My mom's old manual typewriter had a cents key, but it was made for Romance languages, so it also had accent marks, cedilla-ç and N-tilde ñ, and maybe one or two others. (I don't remember if it had numerical 0 and 1 or if you had to use letters l and O, or whether there was a degree mark, but it didn't have the Scandinavian vowel marks.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The poster may consider a cashless society to be some wonderful concept. I'm perfectly happy with cash. I use it all the time, for most purposes. About the only things I use credit and/ or debit cards are for work-related expenses and buying stuff off the Internet (both of which need to be traceable, for the goods to get to me, and for me to get back at bad businesses).
And long may it continue to be just round the corner.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Energy is hard to store.
Cash isn't instructively valuable, and silver and gold aren't that intrinsically valuable. Food, water, and shelter are really the only material things instructively valuable to humans. Everything else is valuable based on weather it is an end to one of these material things or to some sort of enjoyment.