In light of this - I think it's rational to remove paper currency from circulation and to move to a digital system where every transaction is tracked to a real person. This could be as simple as using existing banking structures, or maybe some sort of cryptographically-secure, immutable ledger of some sort, tying every transaction back to a real person. Almost like a centralized, managed "block chain".
/s
Kidding aside, I have zero clue what the actual adoption rate is for Monero in the seedy underworld of common criminality, so I can't really challenge anyone on this argument.
I can say if I were a criminal, I'd want to keep it as low tech as possible. Given how sophisticated computer forensics is, I don't think I'd be able to keep everything "clean", digitally speaking.
For example, many professional bartenders commit tax fraud every day by not reporting cash tips. This is directly facilitated by paper currencies.
If tips were given in Monero, the tax fraud would be even easier.
EU (or Germany, sorry I forgot) just passed laws that production of all goods should be traceable from beginning to end.
They are working on it. Nobody shall be able to opt out of the system.
There is a certain balance of downsides and upsides of limitations on freedom. If you move the "safety" knob all the way to maximum, you will get a high security prison with creature comforts. Indeed, being watched and tracked at all times, and limited in what you do and where you go, you can definitely be kept out of the harm's way. If you like the motion towards this, welcome to mainland China. (If you want an antidote, re-read the Brave New World.)
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, that is, liberty is a somehow unsafe condition, else vigilance won't be needed. Some people prefer certain upsides of liberty more than certain upsides of safety. Such people founded the U.S., and it still shows here and there. (Not much, of course.)
Yes, I think an effectively anonymized digital value exchange is problematic. I prefer physical currency for anonymized transactions because it provides certain physical barriers that make a non-consensual exchange of goods and services difficult, while perfectly facilitating, though often de-anonymizing large exchanges of value.
Something that's perfectly sensible in a state that values both privacy and rule of law. We don't put cameras in your home, we do put cameras in airports and nuclear energy facilities.
So you're saying 99.9% of the population shouldn't benefit from this because there will be a tiny percentage misusing it?
I take it you're against privacy, encryption and gun ownership too then right?
I think your love letters should be private from the gov't, I don't think your income should be private from the gov't.
I think nearly everyone should be able to own a rifle, but I don't think any private citizen should be able to own a tank.
There are many aspects of life where I think the costs outweigh the benefits for citizen in society. Since there are trivial numbers of alternatives, I see a highly anonymized digital store of value as bad for the public welfare. The limit is typically where public access to the good is necessary to prevent tyranny, but universal access causing a tyranny of the minority is typically the where things should be illegal.
I think the conditions in which Monero would benefit society existed, the legality of Monero would be irrelevant.
I'm not saying Monero shouldn't exist, I'm saying those of us in a free society should want it to be illegal in our free society. Again, it's legality in an unfree society is essentially irrelevant to it's practicality.
>Monero seems much better suited as a weapon against real totalitarian regimes. If it is illegal in both a free and unfree society, then it will only have a practical purpose in the unfree society, whereas the free society will have plentiful alternatives.
From another thread. I think the something like Monero can exist, but also be illegal, and that would facilitate making it's practical use only valuable in truly unfree societies.
Monero is light years easier for law enforcement to find kidnappers (exchanges, honeypots, network access) than cold hard cash.
Was there a plague of kidnappers when the world used 'absurdly dangerous means of value exchange' like paper currency and gold?
edit: my reply was before you edited to discuss physical currency. $1M in $100 bills is 22lbs. Hardly a deterrent.
https://lb-aps-frontend.statista.com/statistics/275545/kidna...
The idea that an email asking for a blockchain currency is somehow more difficult than a dead drop of physical currency is absurd. While there are some merits, this type of value exchange is a dangerous vehicle for facilitating human exploitation. We need to start talking about that fact more, instead of the fever dreams that those of us in the free world somehow live in some faux-totalitarian state, simply because you can't legally purchase MDMA or cocaine.
Evil people use neutral tools for evil purposes. They have been since the beginning of tools.
So stop trying to slow the advance of technology just because some evil people can use it too.
Monero seems much better suited as a weapon against real totalitarian regimes. If it is illegal in both a free and unfree society, then it will only have a practical purpose in the unfree society, whereas the free society will have plentiful alternatives.
And if you receive that $10k in cash, how do you deposit it without the same risk?
You shouldn't be surprised when Americans value privacy over institutions. Our institutions are more criminal than our criminals.
>stealing from us without due process via civil forfeiture
Yea, this is exactly the type of faux-totalitarian nonsense i was talking about in the other thread. If we live in a free society, we can change the types of laws we don't like, and in the case of civil forfeiture, we should, and are, but pretending like one bad law justifies something with these consequences is ridiculous.
So I'll tell you what. You can work on fixing those institutions if you want. I'll take the privacy while we wait.
The narrative that this type of value exchange will protect people is as easily argued that it will put others at risk. We have institutions for a reason, and nobody living in a free country should desire such an absurdly dangerous means of value exchange.
At least when you exchange physical currency, it's actually physically difficult for a kidnapper or bank robber to handle the actually physical volume of $1M.