We must protect our ability to transact privately online (2019)

https://www.coincenter.org/we-must-protect-our-ability-to-transact-privately-online/

111 86 4 years ago

I don’t disagree with the title.

I do disagree that the current system is right in almost any way. So what think I’m seeing is “the money has stopped coming in, and we are afraid of what happens next”.

But I’m wrong all the time, so could be here too.

rootw0rm• 4 years ago

couldn't have said it better myself

jedimind• 4 years ago

Article is from 2019, so your hypothesis doesn't apply.

thesausageking• 4 years ago

When Roe V Wade was overturned, there was a lot of talk encouraging women to remove period tracking apps in case the data could be used against them in the future. But the easiest way to track women is to simply watch financial transactions for abortion bills or services at a clinic. Even if you try to obfuscate by having a friend pay, if there are no private, cash-or-crypto links, it's trivial to connect the dots.

It was a reminder to me that being able too freely and privately make financial transactions is one of the most important and fundamental rights we have.

sneak• 4 years ago

It's also impossible to hire a defense attorney with frozen bank accounts (which happens, of course, before trial).

I spoke about how uncensorable payments are a prerequisite to a society with human rights at the CCCamp back in 2011:

https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp11-4591-financing_the_revolutio...

null0pointer2• 4 years ago

This is actually a fantastic counter-argument to the “nothing to hide — nothing to fear” people. It’s a good example of how an individual can remain unwaveringly righteous, but due to environmental changes all of a sudden they do have something to hide.

dredmorbius7• 4 years ago

Hammer/nail fallacy.

I agree with the premise / problem statement. The solution has profound issues.

jrm42• 4 years ago

Sure, but what I find odd is how crypto gets a large amount of techno-pessimism (among folks like us) that most other "new tech" doesn't? Like most often, when there's a proof of concept that doesn't work exactly right, right now, it pretty much never ends with "oh, well, guess that means it's broken forever and it will never work," which appears to be a prevailing sentiment around crypto.

Beltalowda• 4 years ago

Cryptocurrencies have been around for almost 15 years now; it's not "new tech". In 2010 or even 2013 I would have agreed with you, but that's a long time ago.

ls152• 4 years ago

Propaganda. At least to some extent.

uncomputation• 4 years ago

The issue many "folks like us" have with crypto is not that it "will never work" but precisely that it works all too well facilitating scams, asset bubbles, risky lending practices, financial hacks, ransomware, and various kinds of illicit financial activity (wash trading, money laundering, etc.). With say, I don't know, quantum computing, there is an understanding that it has its own issues but that these are improving and we will eventually find good use cases for this technology. People are upfront about the costs, the risks, and the very fact that it is developing still. In the current market froth, this is not the case with cryptocurrency which - despite several major hacks in the multimillion range, rug pulling, questionable stablecoin pegs/reserves, not to mention the rather serious technical challenges - people are insisting already is the future. People are not so pessimistic about quantum computing and other developing technologies because those are not inherently harmful as cryptocurrency has proved to be.

thr0wawayf006• 4 years ago

Dumb question: why can't we just pass a law that requires all businesses to accept cash? The problem I have with articles like this is that I don't trust these coins. What are Grin and Zcash going to be worth in 5 years? Are they going to be stable enough to use as an actual currency and is the marketplace going to be confident enough to use them as currency?

I agree that cash is an important aspect of the economy that should be protected but I don't see how a couple coins that I have not heard of are going to be the panacea they purport to be.

brightball2• 4 years ago

There is some law about being required to accept any form of legal tender. I think there are some specifics to it though.

thr0wawayf006• 4 years ago

I've seen more and more fast casual restaurants in the US starting to go cashless, so there's definitely a way for businesses to get around it. But I don't know the law at all.

josephcsible5• 4 years ago

The key word is "debts". If you owe a debt to someone, e.g., in a restaurant where you eat first and then pay, they have to accept cash. But in situations where there's no debt, e.g., restaurants where you pay before they give you your food, they can refuse cash.

josephcsible5• 4 years ago

why can't we just pass a law that requires all businesses to accept cash?

Why shouldn't business owners be able to choose which forms of payments to accept?

dredmorbius7• 4 years ago

Because it is a profoundly discriminatory practice. At the extreme, it amounts to "your money's no good here", in the bad sense of that phrase.

kornhole• 4 years ago

It would be great if we could make it law, but it will be difficult. It is in government's and other's interests to eliminate cash. It is not law here in California. I recently went to a bar that would not take cash. I somewhat loudly explained to the bartendenr that my bar tab is one of the last things I want public and that my friends and I would not be returning.

dredmorbius7• 4 years ago

Cash works for in person transactions. It can work for certain delayed transactions (e.g., prepaid or post-paid remote orders, will-call, layaway), though in almost all cases those are actually transacted by some other mechanism --- vouchers, credit cards, cheques, postal mail orders, or personal / direct credit.

There is an arguable need for an anonymous remote-transaction payment mechanism.

That itself introduces numerous further concerns (none of which TFA addresses):

- Black market, criminal, ransom, or blackmail transactions.

- Refund or chargebacks initiated by the payee for nonfulfillment / fraudulent transaction / substandard product or service.

- Money laundering and tax avoidance.

(That's just off the top of my head. Financial crimes isn't my strong suit. FBI list: https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes)

barrysteve4• 4 years ago

If you're going to legislate monetary privacy, why not use an update-to-date form of electronic privacy and outlaw all the ways of breaking it?

A nation-state enforced "black box" is probably the only way to stop nation-states breaking open any privacy features in the marketplace. It's probably easier to conceive of a black box/black blockchain that can't be opened if you aren't trying to fight off the whole world and every conceivable adversary to keep the contents unknown.

thr0wawayf006• 4 years ago

I don't really understand this thinking. The government swore up and down that NSA wasn't conducting mass surveillance and it turned out that they were.

How do you trust the government enough to keep its hands out of a digital ledger system that's supposedly private when we all know how valuable that information is? The whole point of crypto to begin with was to pry control away from the government.

colordrops4• 4 years ago

As others are saying, it's an implicit goal by those holding the levers to eliminate cash. China has already effectively done it. US is edging closer, and it won't be stopped unless there is an explicit movement against it.

thr0wawayf006• 4 years ago

Right, but the US is still (theoretically) a representative democracy that's beholden to its people. China is an autocracy. Americans have the ability to speak up about this issue in a way that the Chinese don't.

thablackbull• 4 years ago

Except those are just market forces and it is more convenient to use electronic payment. I'm not sure what you mean by China, it's China's government that is forcing all merchants to accept cash [1].

The People's Bank of China (PBOC) is looking to close the widening digital divide and has warned merchants that they must accept cash or face disciplinary action,...

[1] https://www.pymnts.com/cash/2020/china-issues-edict-warning-...

ianmiers• 4 years ago

Paying in cash, in addition to being a minor inconvenience that non-the-less outweighs most people's desire for privacy, does not work in online payments. It also doesn't work in businesses that get robbed.

The better question is, why do you need a new currency to get privacy? Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? There's no technical reason, indeed several groups are building this. What remains to be seen is if there's sufficient incentives to build anything around these or for any portion of the economy to move to them. Most purchases aren't sensitive, so for private payments to work, they need to be ubiquitous for non privacy reasons and just give people who need it the option for privacy. Much like cash does. But again, cash doesn't work online or increasingly offline

genev2• 4 years ago

Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? There's no technical reason, indeed several groups are building this.

That's what Monero is, right? It doesn't really matter how stable it is, if I'm just going to convert to USD/EUR immediately after my transaction.

ETH_start• 4 years ago

>Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros?

Yes, you can utilize dollar backed and dollar pegged stablecoins, like USDC and DAI, respectively, in privacy-shielding protocols like https://zk.money and https://tornado.cash.

The problem at the moment is that Ethereum has very limited scalability, and privacy-shielded transactions are about five to ten times more compute-intensive than vanilla transactions, making them prohibitively expensive to conduct for most applications.

Ethereum layer 2 solutions that preserve the base layer's decentralization hold the promise to make such transactions viable at scale, but they are still quite immature in their feature set. For example, all of the general computation L2s still rely on a centralized coordinator.

ev1• 4 years ago

Paying in cash, in addition to being a minor inconvenience that non-the-less outweighs most people's desire for privacy, does not work in online payments

In some countries it's fairly popular and super common with kids to check out, get a barcode/receipt and pay at, for example, a 7-11 with cash for in game purchase top ups.

t_mann• 4 years ago

We could pass laws to protect cash, but in reality the opposite is happening. Harvard economists like Ken Rogoff are actively lobbying to kill cash exactly in order to remove anonymous transaction possibilities (to fight crime, purportedly), and they are playing into the hands of all the companies who profit off cashless transactions.

brightball2• 4 years ago

Ultimately, this is what cash based transactions are for. Ever since Covid started it seemed like there was an extreme push toward going cashless everywhere but cash is the only place you’ll find real privacy in a transaction.

In the mean time, there’s always privacy.com.

godmode20192• 4 years ago

I bought something online yesterday.

They following fields were mandatory

- email - phone - address ( for delivery ) - first name - last name

They created an account for some reason, and retain payment information was prechecked.

I just want the thing you are selling, here is my address. Thanks.

Another situation, paying a government fine.

They wanted me to verify my identity to give them money.

My address, Phone number DOB, middle name...

Asked me if they could save my voice profile..

Said I could not pay the fine until I verified my identity.

The lady got noticeable bothered when I said that would not be happening and I don't need to know any PII just process a payment.

Asked if I had something to hide.

What's next a biometric scan to enter government buildings?

barrysteve4• 4 years ago

If you wanted to be truly biometrically private nowadays, you'd need to wear a Darth Vader suit over a ghillie-suit and forest gump leg braces everywhere public, which includes inside your house. No face, electronic voice, no thermals or IR, no gait detection, height equalized by leg brace, gloves with fake finger prints.

Of course you'd stand out like a sore thumb and that's the point, I'm sure it's been engineered that way to capture us all in the ideal panopticon. If you ever wanted to dodge the draft to the Vietnam war 2.0 or a bill collector with access to all this information, you'd have a very hard time.

godmode20192• 4 years ago

I think we are being slowly conditioned to give up our info,

I hear people all the time saying well Facebook has been spying on you for years, so what does it matter?

Facebook is like the litmus test for normal data collection

stevebmark• 4 years ago

This is a joke right? All crypto transactions become part of the permanent public record. If you ever want to exchange your garbage commodity for a useful currency, you’ll be easily track able and outed.

gojomo• 4 years ago

Not all crypto transactions. Some blockchains effectively use advanced cryptography to obscure sender, recipient, & amount beyond any known methods of revealing them.

Zcash & Monero are the leaders here. Zcash, used with its fully ‘shielded’ addresses, is theoretically strongest; Monero probably enough against most realistic threats – but maybe a very-deep-pocketed nation-state could decode some flows.

But neither creates an ‘open Venmo’ or Bitcoin-like full public record of payers/payees/amounts for casual analysis by anyone.

[Disclosure: I’m a compensated advisor to the company, now a nonprofit, that initially launched Zcash.]

zen_1• 4 years ago

Please read about "privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies like Grin, Monero, and Zcash" and how they work.

I can assume that you already have strong opinions against cryptocurrencies, but if you're going to critique privacy-coins, it's probably a good idea to have at least some understanding of how they work.

ls152• 4 years ago

Privacy coins like Monero are not making all your transactions public and exchange to fiat gets only tracked with certain exchanges. One could as well sell it for cash on the streets.

hanklazard• 4 years ago

Some other projects / resources in addition to those mentioned by the siblings …

https://railgun.ch https://aztec.network https://dark.fi

analyst74• 4 years ago

Full surveillance state sounds scary, but reliable, private, non-traceable financial transaction scares me more.

I wished all the articles promoting those schemes talk about potential risk, i.e. increased crime, and how they can be mitigated.

Fargoan• 4 years ago

Better start by getting rid of physical currency

null0pointer2• 4 years ago

What is it that scares you about reliable, private, non-traceable financial transactions?

genev2• 4 years ago

Not the person you replied to, but I could think of something like certain countries avoiding sanctions as an example.

Or someone selling illegal weapons online. I realize that can be done in cash now, but it's easier with an untraceable digital currency.

roenxi• 4 years ago

Everyone on the planet can identify an alternate political group who would have them murdered if the situation gets dicey. The rich have been murdered by communists, the communists by fascists, the fascists by liberals, minorities by majorities, this religion by that, family against family, etc.

If political opponents are moving and have provably robust infrastructure to organise it would get very, very scary. At the moment the police/authorities do make use of the ability to disrupt such things to keep the peace. In theory.

Although I personally think the trade off would be worth it. The social downs would go lower but the ups will more than offset that.

nly3• 4 years ago

The UK tabloid media is already riddled with outrage stories where some granny is robbed of her life savings through some crypto scam and her bank won't refund her.

With untraceable non-reversible digital transactions you're very vulnerable to being robbed and completely wiped out.

pjc503• 4 years ago

A private non-traceable transaction of £10 or £100 is obviously not a threat.

Private non-traceable transactions of £100k? Enough money to move the needle on a political campaign or bribe a public official. Suddenly every cop or judge can be untraceably on the take. Law enforcement against crimes of the powerful becomes even harder.

Private non-traceable transactions of £1bn? Suddenly international sanctions don't work any more and you can't tell who's selling weapons to the Russians or funding the next 9/11.

The thing about cash is that the larger the transaction is the harder it is to hide. Digital transactions are the opposite: a micropayment and a megacrime are equally visible.

Westerners tend to forget, but corruption is real and left unchecked will destroy your society.

HidyBush2• 4 years ago

To me the question is very simple: make a digital currency that has both a completely traceable way of exchanging money and a completely anonymous one.

If you send someone money in the traceable way then the state knows exactly the motives of the transaction and can automatically calculate the taxes you ought to pay on it.

If you send someone money anonymously then you get taxed at the highest bracket possible and nobody asks questions. Are you a drug lord paying his cronies? sure, it's untraceable and safe but 40% goes to the state automatically.

Aerroon2• 4 years ago

I think governments should create a digital equivalent of cash. They should put strong safeguards in place to make it as anonymous as cash. Maybe even protect access to these records even at a constitutional level.

I think having such a digital cash system could revolutionize online commerce. Right now you need a fair bit of "capital" (know-how) to start a small online business. You can't just set up a street stall or garage sale like you can with cash. I think this makes it harder for people to get a foot in the door for entrepreneurship. A government-run digital cash system would make it possible again. It might also allow a reasonable alternative to the current ad-based economy.

anovikov• 4 years ago

Why not use simply USDT/USDC? It provides what you are asking for now.

pjc503• 4 years ago

You can't just set up a street stall or garage sale like you can with cash.

I noticed in Norway even the people selling cold water on hot days by the side of the road took Vipps. Electronic payment systems really can be that simple if people want. It is of course not anonymous, but that's far less important to most people.

TimJRobinson• 4 years ago

Many governments are working on central bank digital currencies [0]. ERC20 tokens directly issued by the government onto crypto networks (such as Ethereum). Most assume they will be traceable and accounts will be KYC'd but there's hope that some governments will be better.

This will encourage most banks to support these same crypto rails via their apps making sending the currency as easy as cash or you could hold it in your own wallet on your phone for self-custody.

Once they are out there and on-chain it should be fairly easy for anyone to use them for payments if they don't care about privacy, or switch to another more private stablecoin if they do.

Future wallets will allow seamless conversion between any of these coins and automatic bridging between any network.

0: - UK: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/digital-currencies

- Australia: https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/central-b...

fredcatis• 4 years ago

don't you think there would still be a problem with govt/corps tracing all the legit purchases?

pooper• 4 years ago

Not necessarily. It is a difficult problem but people are working on it.

This was posted here before

https://taler.net/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30514122

HidyBush2• 4 years ago

it gives you the choice.

do you think the state cares if it sees that you bought a new microwave? no, it's a very normal thing to do and there's no reason to hide it.

do you want to hide buying a house alarm system so nobody would know you have one installed, not even the state? then pay the premium and nobody will know

timbit42• 4 years ago

ZCash does this.

nly3• 4 years ago

There were workable proposals for private, cryptographically secure digital cash way back in the early 90s. The proposals didn't require blockchains, or proof of work, integrated seamlessly with the traditional fiat banking system, and would have been easy as a credit card card or mobile payment for people to use in 2022.

Government doesn't want this. Banks don't want this. Businesses don't want this. That's why it never happened.

Here's one from presentation by the NSA from 1996

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/mone...

David Chaum and Stefan Brands are 2 names to google to look at this stuff. Chaum was posting papers on this in the 80s.

Who knows, perhaps Bitcoin will be the VHS that finally makes this happen one day.

YeBanKo• 4 years ago

I was about to say the same thing, it has been suggested long time ago. In this paper on blind signatures [1] Chaum describes in simple terms untraceable digital cash in one paragraph.

[1] https://sceweb.sce.uhcl.edu/yang/teaching/csci5234WebSecurit...

nly3• 4 years ago

Ikr. The only win the cryptocurrencies of today have over these early digital cash proposals is that they are permissionless... Satoshi didn't need the cooperation or the permission of vested interests to get going. Now central banks and governments are being dragged kicking and screaming in to a world in which they could have had influence in 30 years ago.

hnbad• 4 years ago

When "crypto enthusiasts" talk about privacy some people think they just mean the usual confidentiality expectations of conventional banking. But banks are required to keep records for accountability. The goal is to prevent money laundering and tax fraud. Cash payments are generally accepted for smaller transactions but anyone accepting large amounts of cash as payment will want to keep similar records to avoid running afoul of these same money laundering laws (unless they're intentionally trying to do a crime).

Banks offer confidentiality, these people want complete secrecy. But most of them aren't insurrectionists or revolutionaries who fear political persecution while they try to overthrow the government. They just want to conduct businesses outside the reach of the government. Or to put it simply: they want to commit money laundering and tax fraud without being caught.

Don't mistake "crypto enthusiasts" (as in cryptocurrencies) talking about privacy for actual crypto punks (as in cryptography). There's a reason the people rallying for "privacy" in crypto tech are venture capitalists and sketchy wealthy people rather than organizations like the EFF.

nervuri2• 4 years ago

The ECASH act is so far my favorite initiative for private online payments. A government-issued open-source anonymous digital dollar, functional both online and offline, no blockchain involved, no transaction fees. I hope they can make it work technically. And I hope Americans support this. It would also pave the way for other countries.

Official site: https://ecashact.us/

Rohan Grey explaining the ECASH act: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BStXZH5PX1I

It would also be great for GNU Taler to take off.

We must protect our ability to transact privately online (2019)

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