While I was originally interested in the promise of bitcoin as a means of exchanging money bypassing banks, these days I'm wondering if complete secrecy is still a good idea.
Are taxes – any taxation at all – a good idea? I would say yes – funding common infrastructure and services as charities or private companies seems doomed to fail. Making all financial transactions secret would make tax evasion rampant.
What about money coming from criminal enterprises, ie. money laundering. What about extreme concentration of money, having an outsized and untraceable influence on our political system and increasing regulatory capture to the extreme.
I'm not against disruption of our financial system in principle, but it seems we'll first need to also come up with good answers on how we organize society. A society of working poor, with a small but extremely wealthy elite doesn't seem like a good deal – even for the extremely wealthy.
Are taxes – any taxation at all – a good idea? I would say yes – funding common infrastructure and services as charities or private companies seems doomed to fail. Making all financial transactions secret would make tax evasion rampant.
What about money coming from criminal enterprises, ie. money laundering. What about extreme concentration of money, having an outsized and untraceable influence on our political system and increasing regulatory capture to the extreme.
I'm not against disruption of our financial system in principle, but it seems we'll first need to also come up with good answers on how we organize society. A society of working poor, with a small but extremely wealthy elite doesn't seem like a good deal – even for the extremely wealthy.