If a currency can be used completely free of interference from the government, then it can and will be used for crime. In fact, if crime is easier and more profitable because the finances are safe and protected, there will be more of it. Eventually victims of all this crime will demand, rightly, that the government put a stop to it. So in come measures where government can interfere in the finances of the currency, for the purpose of preventing crime.
The power is zero-sum and it'll always be a trade-off between who has it. Total government control has problems because of potential abuses, by politicians. But a complete lack of government control also has problems of abuses, for crime. Both are bad, so it'll always be a trade-off.
Now that's an understatement. When in doubt, err on the side of limited government control.
Perhaps I'm in a stage of paranoia when I think that all democracies are on a slow inevitable slide toward a China-like fully monitored economic system. Either with or without cryptos.
I, personally, would prefer minor political abuse instead of citizen enforcement of "rights" in the absence of laws or enforcement of those laws. Because the latter quickly gives lie to the "governments have a monopoly on force" catechism.
If a currency can't be used completely free of interference from the government, then it can and will be used for crime.
Governments always want more control. More control requires trust. Governments have not shown themselves trustworthy.
The point is privacy like _cash_ -- not like digital bank transfers.
> An E-Cash device is any piece of secured hardware issued and/or authorised by the government for the purpose of receiving, holding, and transferring e-cash balances.
> In contrast to ledger-based systems (including those that use a blockchain and/or distributed-ledger rather than a centralized ledge), which prevent double-spending by verifying unspent balances against a common record of all previous transactions, e-cash devices verify funds locally via a dedicated or trusted computing environment located on the device itself.
> This allows it to facilitate both offline and genuine peer-to-peer transactions without generating transactional data or requiring the approval of third party intermediaries or network validator nodes.
I don't see how this is different from physical cash wrt civil forfeiture or court-ordered seizure.
I'm concerned about whether or not this whole thing is a sham right off the bat because any security expert will tell you that there's no such thing as guaranteed security of a device in the physical possession of a motivated attacker. The best you can do is make it "pretty hard" below some threshold of spending.
The goal sounds admirable and better than some Orwellian central database, but on the other hand it seems that it would to some extent also combine the drawbacks of both cash and hardware devices, especially in the case of something as complex as a phone:
Things that would destroy the cash in my wallet would most likely also wreck my phone, but additionally my phone is more sensitive to being dropped (on the ground and/or in water), subject to random hardware failures, bad software updates, etc. etc. which currently wouldn't affect physical cash at all.
Its been tested and its proven. It works. Its stable.
Lets focus societal change on fixing climate damage instead of gambling with our economic structure adapting to new high risk changes.