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Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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