Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

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This is so deceptive and dishonest.

Realtime mass surveillance of every party who receives money is isomorphic to realtime mass surveillance of everyone.

Every person who sends funds received them previously and is sending them to someone who is receiving them.

Taler's surveilling is continuous, unaccountable, and operates without any due process what so ever: No court is required to authorize surveilling your records, nor can you even detect it to fight the intrusion.

The claim that the mass surveillance is required to enable taxation is outright untrue and inconsistent with longstanding practice. Taxation, including sales taxes, existed for a long time before low privacy electronic payment networks existed.

That's just wrong. If me and 10 other people buy things for 5 bucks from a vendor with taler, there is no way to trace it to us as I understand, and no way to distinguish which of us paid which 5 bucks. How is that isomorphic to full surveillance? It's more privacy than both traditional payment Systems and most cryptocurrencies

> Realtime mass surveillance of every party who receives money is isomorphic to realtime mass surveillance of everyone.

I don't believe it is.

For instance, imagine a closed system of three people: Alice, Bob, and Carol. Initially we start off with seeding both Alice and Bob $100 via Taler. We can see that because it is public. Then, we see that Carol receives $5. That is also public. Who gave Carol the $5?

If surveillance of money received is isometric to full surveillance, you should be able to answer this question, but clearly there is insufficient information, so clearly they are not isometric. There may be special cases where sufficiently large transactions can only have come from a small pool of wealthy transactors, but I bet this would be essentially meaningless in practice, and is absolutely not the same as equating the system to full surveillance of every participant.

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