https://www.sgtreport.com/articles/2017/8/16/governments-to-control-large-cash-transactions
The the use and abuse of fiat money, inseparable from the reigning "fractional reserve" banking system with its control of interest rates, and the "hired bully" of this banking mafia, that is, the federal government, have schemed to absorb the actual control of an ever growing portion of the nation's wealth, and the wealth of each citizen. Indeed, this "Babylonian" system is reducing an enormous portion of our population to servitude.
Controlling the money means, in the first place, controlling cash transfers, especially large cash transfers. And such control is not possible without the banks and governments' knowledge of where money is and where it goes.
That is what makes this article troubling. Part of curbing the governments' pretension of becoming our "parent" lies in curbing its comprehensive, too intimate knowledge of how we use our money and on what we spend it, and therefore, its knowledge of our personal lives, ideas and lifestyles.
This should matter to anyone who wants to continue to live life as an adult, not as a slave or ward of a state that would impose its own criteria and preferences for how we live and die. Possession of information is the necessary condition for control. Absent the relevant information, there can be no control, or impediment to personal freedom. That's why the question of the governing powers to possess information on our purchasing patterns puts at risk our personal freedom.
But the author of the article warns that this necessary discretion about our personal and family life is impossible in principle. More precisely, he writes,
The[y] [the government/big banks] need only pass a law that anyone who fails to report what they have in Bitcoin is criminal and they get to confiscate all your assets.
And by extension, this applies too all the crypto currencies.
A way must be devised by which to keep the moral and legitimate personal use of personal wealth and property away from the prying electronic/digital eyes of banks, governments, and the roving searches of their computers; so that our money stays in our own hands -- where it belongs. I do not believe that government should even have the authority to legislate or adjudicate to itself the right to possess such knowledge, much less, use it to regulate our wealth and life; not without grave reasons and only in particular cases.
What can be done to stymie governing powers' intrusions into personal privacy and its abuses?
There is the hope that crypto currencies might snatch out of the governing powers' grasp the very possibility of gaining such knowledge of the whereabouts of law abiding citizens' money. If money was earned morally and lawfully, why should the government have any knowledge or control of it, if it is indeed, private property, belonging to the law abiding citizen?
But, it will be objected, that the IRS needs to know about it to tax it!
Well, it's true that governments need to raise funds, but it does not have to be through sales taxes or income taxes. The crypto currencies may occasion a deep rethinking of how governments should fund themselves, as they may make information gathering required for these type of taxes difficult or impossible. First, however, is the appearance of this new and surprising technology of "block chains" and the reality of crypto currencies, which stand to alter the status quo on methods of taxation and government funding. The primordial question is: What new reality do the crypto currencies thrust upon us? Once established, the question of revenue raising by a government can be reasonably tackled in conformity to the new realities imposed by the cryptos. So I leave the matter of taxes to the side for now, and stick to the questions regarding the cryptos themselves.
What about mafias, which commit heinous crimes for easy profit and then launder it for use in fostering more crime? Mafias can only be reigned in by controlling their misuse of money. Who will control it?
The problem here is that the biggest and dirtiest of all mafias is the government itself. The proverbial fox guarding the hen house is a metaphor that falls short of the absurdity of putting the government in charge of protecting us from lesser syndicates populated by its associates in crime.
I would love it if the computer geeks and geniuses among us could publicly discuss and perhaps even establish clearly and definitively answers to the following questions:
Whether crypto currencies are or can be made "anonymous" (except of course for the parties involved in each particular trade). Is it possible to make these "absolutely anonymous", as an exchange of cash for a typical piece of merchandise at a small retail store, or better, as money paid to a baby sitter? If absolute anonymity is possible for crypto currency transactions, a legislature can legislate what it will: the government will never be able to penalize for wealth about which it knows nothing. It might as well legislate about a man's daydreaming of "Tinker Bell", declaring it a criminal offense. It will change nothing, and be irrelevant. (So far as I know, today's technology is incapable of such intrusiveness, at least for now.)
If the crypto currencies cannot be made to safeguard absolute anonymity for each transaction, how great an investment of capital (computers, electricity, personnel, time...) would be necessary to compromise the relative anonymity that is attainable? On the whole, the capital investment needed to compromise block chain anonymity should be much greater than the value of particular trades. (Otherwise, stealing digital currency would be profitable and trading with that currency would be an intolerable risk.) Is it possible that the relative anonymity that is technically realizable be strong enough to make abusive surveillance by the powers that be prohibitively expensive? If so, that could check the "omnipresent" surveillance of the governing powers.
Mathematicians have figured out a way to analyze "metadata" to extract the communication nodes of complex communication networks among real world entities such as businesses and governments, no less than that among individual human persons. "Metadata" does not include the content of individual messages but only the senders and receivers. Yet, this suffices to figure out hierarchies and structures of banks, governments and chains of command among these. This type of analysis has been applied to ferret out the collusion among international banks and governments, as I have read elsewhere and is of public knowledge. Would it be possible to apply this same technology to ALL internet users, and publish it worldwide? Yes, this is counter intuitive if we're looking to defend personal property and rights from encroachment by greater powers. However, the idea addresses the problem of controlling money laundering by entities smaller than governments. If national governments or an international government cannot be trusted to protect the public from mafias, who can? I propose that the metadata of all entities of a certain size or larger be gleaned by several or many international sources (the same computers that do the bitcoin mining, for example) and analyzed, and these analyses be released regularly and periodically to the public at large. The same mathematical technology could probably be fine tuned to give an estimate of a critical mass beyond which an entity becomes high risk for becoming a mafia or monopoly. For example, it might be determined mathematically that any financial entity engaging in transactions of more than 2 percent of gdp might pose such a threat. Financial entities of this size and activity would automatically be analyzed and reported to the public by the computer system operating the crypto currency. Public authorities could then keep a watch on these entities and through legitimate legislative procedures, intervene if necessary to check the power and influence wielded in society by these entities. Rare would be the private human person whose financial activity comes to public knowledge. Nor would it require us to "trust" the government, which has proved itself unworthy of trust. But this provision for public reporting would have to be written into the software governing the crypto currencies and in a code open to public inspection.
A consensus would have to be worked out within each crypto currency and possibly among the major crypto currencies to fill out this proposal into something doable.
I make no pretension of technical knowledge in computer software design. But as a layman, these are the issues that I feel should be publicly discussed by leaders in the emerging block chain technologies, as I earnestly consider taking my own leap into the exciting adventure in "crytolandia".