Of course, once these techniques were in place, they conclusively destroyed the ability of governments to control the flow of electronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened, this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all over the modern electronic economy. By the time people figured out that raging nonlinear anarchy was not exactly to the advantage of anyone concerned, the process was simply too far gone to stop. All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air. Even physically tearing up the fiber optics couldn't stop it; governments that tried to just found that the whole encryption mess oozed swiftly into voice mail and even fax machines.
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Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triads and the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their own cash. He simply accepted it: electronic, private cash, unbacked by any government, untraceable, completely anonymous, global in reach, lightninglike in speed, ubiquitous, fungible, and usually highly volatile. Of course, such funds didn't boldly say "Sicilian Mafia" right on the transaction screen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as "Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira," but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers.
Just like the rest of the cyberlibertarian blue-skying that went on back in the '90s, it was a nice dream, seriously! But in reality it turns out that governments can just send some armed men around to beat up the people with the encrypted faxes, email, and digital cash, and that'll largely put an end to it. The extent to which a government is helpless to stop that behavior is purely the extent to which it is reluctant to send, or incapable of sending, the armed men.
Except for the fact that this hasn't happened at all. Even with Bitcoin, which isn't as anonymous as zcash claims to be, people making illicit purchases have had very little difficulty evading police or government capture. There are a few notable cases of high-profile Bitcoin users (like DPR) being arrested, but I don't know of any cases where Bitcoin was at fault.
There a lot of cases where Bitcoin transsctions are traced back to some crime. The justice system does not make a big deal about this as educating criminals only makes there job harder.
I'm not sure how much (if any) of the investigation into the Carl Force and Shaun Bridges cases used Bitcoin transaction data, but I suspect it played some role:
It turns out that there's a pretty easy fix for this. People have to start caring how the money they're accepting has flowed through the economy. You don't need a government to sanction bad actors. The people can do it on their own.
Money is power. Anonymous money prevents you from choosing which power you'd like to submit to. Decentralized money prevents governments from restricting power. Let's keep the decentralization and remove the anonymity so you can reject power you find undesirable.
The first application of this mechanism will probably be restoring our democracies by rejecting the power of money to influence them. It won't be the last application—I think we'll use it to enforce any rule that has a broad consensus behind it. The boundaries of the enforcement will be the same as the boundaries of our economy: there aren't any. We'll have global governance without a global government.
I appreciate the cynicism. I've never been called a pessimist, so I might have a rosy view of things. I think it's not that hard, though. Technologically, it's very straightforward. Convincing people that they should sacrifice financial privacy is the hard part. That's why I've already started it.
This is an interesting idea, and seems worth considering.
What would you think of a system that instead tracked materials and manufacturing process?
So, each step in the manufacturing process would use proofs received from previous steps that the amount they claim to have produced is not more than they could make with only the materials that previous steps have said they supplied?
So, e.g., if there is a place that makes good(?) grain, they would include some cryptographic signature that they provided the amount of grain, and then a baker receiving it would be able to produce a signed claim that they made so many breads with only grain from there, and they wouldn't be able to fake making more by adding grain from elsewhere, because the total of all their claims of how much of the grain is used in each bread could not total more than the grain which was signed as provided?
Or something like that.
I don't remember the specifics.
Would it be better to track who owned the money before you, or to track how the product was made? Or both?
I think there are probably some advantages of anonymous money, but I don't know that they outweigh the costs that you mention. (I suspect non-anonymous money makes auctions and things more difficult, and might reduce effeciency, but that might just be the acceptable cost of influencing the world against people doing harm)
This would also be an excellent way to trace recalls based on defective or otherwise harmful products; though the lot numbers involved would need to be in the transactions.
> It turns out that there's a pretty easy fix for this. People have to start caring how the money they're accepting has flowed through the economy.
I don't understand how this is "easy". Money doesn't become evil because of how it was earned, that's just an overly emotional way of looking at a system of transactions.
> Money is power. Anonymous money prevents you from choosing which power you'd like to submit to. Decentralized money prevents governments from restricting power. Let's keep the decentralization and remove the anonymity so you can reject power you find undesirable.
That's ridiculous FUD. Consider people donating to WikiLeaks or similar, where the sender might not want a record of where they sent their money. If the source of the money is anonymous, there's no "power" involved. Nobody can force you to do something under the pretext of "but that's what I paid you for".
Money's power relies on its transitivity. Bob accepts Alice's payment because he can use it to pay Charlie. Charlie's decision to accept that money is what gives Alice power. If Alice runs a violent cartel in Mexico, Charlie can reject Alice's power. If he uses anonymous money like dollars or Zcash, Charlie is forced to submit to Alice's power because her power is invisible.
There are many evil ways to acquire money, and anonymous money makes us all supporters of that evil. We should stop it.
> Consider people donating to WikiLeaks or similar, where the sender might not want a record of where they sent their money.
The government knows who's donating to WikiLeaks. To state actors, money is already identifiable. People like you and me are powerless when it comes to money, so we can't stop the people who have purchased our government. Let's fix that.
It works both ways, anonymous money prevents people from choosing not to accept your own money as much as it does the other way around. It makes the transaction purely about the money, I don't think that's powerless, just reduces people's ability to mind other people's business.
Didn't you read the dystopian prophecy above? It's caused by the inability of anyone to mind other people's business. Most people find that to be an undesirable world.
Today, your business is minded by the government and large corporations. As a result, the rules that they want enforced are the ones that actually get enforced. Anonymous money is why you have no ability to prevent people from buying your government: no one with the power to mind people's business actually wants to enforce such a rule. If you give everyone the power to mind people's business, then rules that the people want enforced can actually be enforced.
There is no way to regain the ability to sanction bad behavior unless you can mind other people's business. Financial privacy feels nice, but it gives the wealthy the ability to rule over us with little recourse. Are the benefits worth the cost?
Crimes with a victim often have a witness, and thus are easy to sanction. Only victimless crime needs financial privacy eliminated in order to sanction, since all parties to such crimes are mutually consenting and thus not likely to come forward.
The destruction of individual rights for the sake of preventing individual crime either ends in extreme centralisation of power, with the party given the exclusive privilege of surveiling the population gaining power over the masses through its informational superiority, which makes institutional abuse by the political elite and the organs of the state more likely, or a morass of gridlock where no one can act without the permission of everyone else in society.
The cartels in Mexico murder lots of people. They're so difficult to stop because they have money.
The solution to gridlock is to enforce fewer laws. I'm not out to increase the number of arbitrary laws. I'm out to eliminate the tyranny of the wealthy: they manipulate our politics and buy their way out of justice.
They're difficult to stop because they kill people who try to investigate and arrest their members. Creating a law requiring them to report their financial activity will not stop them. They sell tons of cocaine, despite cocaine being illegal. They will ignore financial disclosure laws just as they ignore laws prohibiting them from operating large scale drug and murder operations.
Anonymous digital currency like bitcoin could be used to reward informants without requiring them to physically meet anyone or reveal their identity, which is extremely valuable when cartels have countless people inside law enforcement agencies.
>I'm out to eliminate the tyranny of the wealthy: they manipulate our politics and buy their way out of justice.
Destroying money (money only works when it affords its user with privacy) to stop abuse by the economically powerful is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Money does far more good than bad. The solution to abuse by the wealthy is to fix the political system, so that money cannot buy political influence, not eliminate wealth and privacy.
> They will ignore financial disclosure laws just as they ignore laws prohibiting them from operating large scale drug and murder operations.
I am not suggesting financial disclosure laws. I'm suggesting that everyone stop accepting anonymous money, then stop accepting money that funded murders because doing so would empower the murderers.
> They're difficult to stop because they kill people who try to investigate and arrest their members.
The killers are paid to do the killing. If they could no longer buy things with the proceeds, they would stop killing.
> (money only works when it affords its user with privacy)
I disagree with this. Can you explain how money would stop working without privacy?
> The solution to abuse by the wealthy is to fix the political system, so that money cannot buy political influence, not eliminate wealth and privacy.
The political system cannot be fixed unless everyone becomes a single-issue voter on campaign finance. Otherwise, those votes will be purchased away, and we can't outspend the wealthy. We should try to fix the political system, but I expect those efforts to fail.
I have no desire to eliminate wealth. I do want to eliminate financial privacy because it seems clear that it hurts us more than it helps.
>I'm suggesting that everyone stop accepting anonymous money, then stop accepting money that funded murders because doing so would empower the murderers.
Not gonna happen and should not happen.
>The killers are paid to do the killing.
This is so ridiculous. Money is not the only way to compensate someone or otherwise move them to act. The cartels would still have plenty of soldiers without people voluntarily accepting cash-like (anonymous) money.
If money was not private, armed gangs would know everything about everyone, making everyone less safe. Private money is privacy. If you eliminate private money you eliminate privacy. If you eliminate privacy you reduce human autonomy and security, not just from the armed criminal, but also from the masses.
>Otherwise, those votes will be purchased away, and we can't outspend the wealthy.
The political system needs to be fixed so that money cannot buy votes. You're focusing on the ocean instead of the leaky boat.
I didn't see anything dystopian about it. Bad behaviour just like the rest of morality is relative if it exists at all. I certainly don't think the ability to sanction behaviour is a boon.
You can buy goods with it, but you've sacrificed liberty to do so. Governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. Since our society is governed by money, accepting anonymous money is consenting to everyone's power, which few people actually want to do. They do it today because it's the default.
> but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers
With bitcoin and other Nakamoto-consensus based crypto-currencies, the "solvency of the issuer" is irrelevant, because these currencies aren't debt based.
Government-issued money being "debt based" is a fiction used to make the accounting equations look pretty. It has been since the gold/silver/whatever standard fell into disuse.
Or are you talking about fractional-reserve banking? If so, there's nothing that prevents implementing that on top of crypto-currencies and more than it can't be implemented on top of physical currency.
Obviously there is nothing technically stopping it, but setting up the rules for a fully distributed fractional reserve system would be non-trivial. For example, if anyone can create money by lending it, then they can set up 100 wallets and lend money from one to the next to the next, amplifying their debt each time. Then once you have enough money, you spend it and abandon those wallets.
The fractional reserve system works precisely because only a few well known actors are allowed to create money -- which is a bit of antithesis for this kind of crypto currency.
However, I have to say that one of the things that bothered me (economically) about bitcoin is the lack of debt. This limits the availability of currency to either mining (which requires a large investment of hardware) or buying the currency on a market (which requires using a different currency and essentially relying on the same banking industry that you were trying to avoid). I would be very interested in seeing someone attempt some kind of monetary creation through debt in a cryto-currency.
For example, if anyone can create money by lending it
That's... not quite how it works.
I can lend $20 or $2000 to a friend, and no money is created.
Money is created by aggregating a large number of relatively small accounts into a shared pot, and pretending that pot is larger than it really is (which you generally do by making loans out of that pot without telling any of the individual accounts that their available balance has gone down). Money is created by the possibility of bank runs.
If the borrowers all run off with the money, someone will be left holding the bag (or the empty pot). If you borrowed from yourself, that someone will be you.
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Bitcoin allows for debt exactly as much as cash allows for debt. There has to be something to make sure the borrower will (usually) pay back what's owed -- some concept of personal honor, risk of damaged friendships, legal liability and positive real-world identification, whatever. That mechanism is distinct from the currency used. That mechanism also probably can't allow for anonymity.
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setting up the rules for a fully distributed fractional reserve system would be non-trivial
There needs to be something at stake, which (1) the borrower can lose if they don't pay back the loan, and (2) is worth at least as much (to the borrower) as what was borrowed. There needs to be a reason to believe that a rational or mostly-rational borrower will pay back the loan.
There also needs to be some reason to believe that the borrower can pay back the loan.
Both of these are ties to external systems.
...getting back to the required shared pot, what does "distributed" mean here? Lack of central control over who can create the shared pots? A "marketplace" interface for finding shared pots to contribute to / borrow from? Automated selection of the "best" shared pot given your choice of criteria? A standard API for shared pots?
>The fractional reserve system works precisely because only a few well known actors are allowed to create money -- which is a bit of antithesis for this kind of crypto currency.
"Technically" there's nothing that would prevent it except the inability of a national central bank to control/dictate the interest rate on a global, gold-like currency.
Oh, and the actual inability of the said central bank to bail out comercial banks by printing bitcoins.
Oh, and also the inability of a global superpower to manage its tremendous debt by playing with interest rates.
It's not that clear-cut, perhaps the text is referring to the support of the currency, I.e. Some measure of how likely other people will accept the currency, and how secure is its base (will the miners decide to issue new coins and fleece everyone). Both would impact its reliability as a store of value.
I was thinking to myself in the shower a few days ago, it must be incredibly boring to be Bruce Sterling. Where most of us can open HN and see something new and shiny and even sometimes unexpected, he saw it all clearly 20 years ago.
On the contrary, how can he be bored if he's constantly roaming his imagination 20yrs ahead of where we are now, just as vividly as he was in 1994 writing about cryptocurrency, laptops made from straw, and reconfigurable chairs governed by topological expressions.
Bruce Sterling has a whole bunch of futurist notes you can read: http://www.viridiandesign.org/NotesIndex.htm - some of it is spot on, some of it was obvious even at the time to clued in people, and some of it is way out there still.
It's cute but it's speculative fiction that hasn't remotely come to pass. I don't get why anyone is saying this is spot on. People love good dystopian nonsense.
I moved to Denmark a few months ago, and have been asking a few people whether they'd prefer cash.
Street food vendor: no, he preferred a card.
Taxi driver: no, but he didn't want to take a card either, only a bank transfer from my phone. My account isn't set up for that yet, so he took the cash, then didn't have the 5kr change.
Supermarket, exact change for a single item: I delayed people behind me, the machine used to count coins didn't accept mine.
Café, for a single soft drink with exact change: I didn't ask, but the man dropped the exact change into the empty coin tray.
So the result is I still have most of the coins which a foreign friend left behind after visiting in December.
...
Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triads and the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their own cash. He simply accepted it: electronic, private cash, unbacked by any government, untraceable, completely anonymous, global in reach, lightninglike in speed, ubiquitous, fungible, and usually highly volatile. Of course, such funds didn't boldly say "Sicilian Mafia" right on the transaction screen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as "Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira," but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers.
- Heavy Weather