HN user
Not necessarily true in the USA. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act#Affected_tran... for example. I can only imagine how suspiciously any normal bank would generally treat a customer that walks in and tries to withdraw, say $50,000 in cash, for example.
Without making a comment on the crypto/tether aspect, I just want to express that it seems to me that the "cause of keeping track of 'who owns what'", as you put it, is precisely the singular technological achievement which has enabled the "human condition" to evolve to its current state. Money is literally the decentralized, asynchronous, dynamic, and continuous computation that has evolved to process the combinatorial coordination of signals/information on resources between 7+ billion unfathomably complex and independent agents. To me, the staggering thing wouldn't be that "70% of our resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense", but rather that the technology known as money is so incredibly efficient that it leaves 30% surplus (in this example) for society to further grow.
Same. Just found:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ctrl-shift-q-...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-... (not yet reviewed)