10 ms·

> place to store anonymously your illicit cash What if I just want a place to anonymously store my legally gained cash? Unfortunately, it seems the normal peo

> place to store anonymously your illicit cash What if I just want a place to anonymously store my legally gained cash? Unfortunately, it seems the normal people lost their privacy nowadays at the expense of the criminals and the "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" argument has taken a stronghold in the financial sector.

buboard 7y ago
ideally, governments only need to know how much each person spent/earned. Not where and how. But , it seems there is no way to make even tiny amounts of purchases without a bunch of people sharing your full details with each other. On the other hand, there's crypto
- unreal37 7y ago
  Which is not anonymous.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Some of it is - ZCash for example. But most of it isn't.
    - ta999999171 7y ago
      What about the last thread I read that concluded Monero was the answer here? Which one's been audited?
      - jki275 7y ago
        Zcash is more likely to be secure than Monero. Both have their issues, but the Monero system is significantly easier to de-anonymize.
karambahh 7y ago
Because the social contract of most countries is that your legally gained cash is to be taxed in one form or another and thus has to be known by the tax authorities? You can argue that your assets are to be private to the general public but some countries do not have that assumption (Norway comes to mind).
- woah 7y ago
  It was possible for many empires to tax effectively before modern bookkeeping. Property tax needs very little in the way of financial records to administer.
  - fao_ 7y ago
    > modern book-keeping Can you clarify what precisely you mean by this statement? Most empires historically-speaking have had sophisticated book-keeping methods. Chinese empires used to tax anyone who exited a city on the profits they made during their visit. The Romans when they took over Egypt, taxed the hell out of it and for that purpose kept meticulous records on all of the transactions that happened. The notion of Tax itself goes back to Mesopotamia. (I wrote that based from history books I've read over the years. But this link will do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Ancient_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Ancient_...)
    - woofcat 7y ago
      Not who you replied to, however modern taxation requires lots of information to work. For instance income tax works, because every employer is reporting how much they paid you. Then you report how much money you got paid, then factor in deductions such as specific contributions to charities etc. All of which are reporting to the Government at the same time. Before the advent of computing and auditing it would be hard to tell if a blacksmith sold 50 or 55 swords. So income tax wasn't viable and instead taxation on lands were more common.
      - aianus 7y ago
ip26 7y ago
Unfortunately financial crimes are (apparently) particularly easy to hide, and "follow the money" has proven the only way to bring some individuals to deserved justice.
appleshore 7y ago
I live next to a bank who paid an $8.9 billion fine for money laundering. Another bank, Italy’s largest, laundered money for 10-years for Iran, Cuba and Libya in the United States. They paid a $1.3 billion fine, pled to conspiracy and received deferred prosecution. One of the executives in that bank is the older brother to a star witness in the Presidential impeachment inquiry. Yet no one really cares about crimes committed by corporations.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  A great many people care about crimes committed by the corporations. But, unlike Rupert Murdoch, we have no ability to influence the prosecutors.
- thephyber 7y ago
  > Yet no one really cares about crimes committed by corporations. Lots of people do. They just don't happen to have the evidence to put those corporations in jail. The presumption of innocence is a valuable principle, but it cuts both ways. It defends you as much as it does corporations (who have A TON more resources to prevent/ mitigate a prosecution).
windexh8er 7y ago
If you read the article South Dakota is a great choice. It's a fantastic read on the history of how these states to harbor cash came to be. This part of the article sums it up in a very compelling manner: "Here is an example from one academic paper on South Dakotan trusts: after 200 years, $1m placed in trust and growing tax-free at an annual rate of 6% will have become $136bn. After 300 years, it will have grown to $50.4tn. That is more than twice the current size of the US economy, and this trust will last for ever, assuming that society doesn’t collapse altogether under the weight of this ever-swelling leach." So, yes - if you want to anonymously store your legally gained cash you have options stateside.
- jdminhbg 7y ago
  > That is more than twice the current size of the US economy, and this trust will last for ever, assuming that society doesn’t collapse altogether under the weight of this ever-swelling leach. Economically speaking, this is Not Even Wrong.
- milesskorpen 7y ago
  That example is a bit ridiculous. Yes, compounding is powerful. But there’s also inflation, and a single passively invested $1mm is never going to own the entire economy (if nothing else, returns would be distorted by scale). That said ... this is the premise of some entertaining science fiction.
  - dane-pgp 7y ago
    Perhaps you're thinking of this classic scene from Red Dwarf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEu0o62ycmg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEu0o62ycmg
  - windexh8er 7y ago
    First it's factual. By qualifying it as "ridiculous" serves what purpose exactly? The point is that $1MM is used as an example and you could swap that amount with $50MM, $100MM to showcase greater gains in exponentially less time. That is the point the article is making overall. No billionaire is going to harbor $1MM in a trust with the intent to have some heir pull it out in 200 years. But the people with those means can leverage the same monetary vehicle to do the same thing in much shorter time frames with higher initial investment. > That said ... this is the premise of some entertaining science fiction. Or not. None of it it fictional. Feel free to clarify what you mean, but the only thing fictional is the entirety of your comment.
simonh 7y ago
The problem is that our participation in the financial system affects other people. We also get benefits from that system such as auditing and regulation of our banks to protect our rights and interests, so it’s reasonable that we pay the price for this and one of those is some measure of privacy. Not all our privacy, just some of it.
mercacona 7y ago
Maybe, because you don't own your cash, your cash is a credit that society acknowledges to you, so hiding it from which makes it valuable is nuts. Can you eat your cash? Can you fly using your cash? Can you build a phone with cash? No, you can't do anything with cash without a public exchange that might be accountable. Unfortunately, people did buy the idea that ”Markets can work without accountability”, and that's what you do when laundering money in a fiscal paradise. Hopefully, crypto can drive us out of that craziness of money as a good.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  This is quite a good point. No-one is stopping you from stockpiling Oil, Gold, or whatever.
_pmf_ 7y ago
> What if I just want a place to anonymously store my legally gained cash? Anonymously storing it makes it illegal. With Europe's negative interest rates, they're currently in the process of making personal storage illegal for large amounts (you're supposed to store it in a bank to pay negative interest).
- harambaebae69 7y ago
  >Europe's negative interest rates Couldn't believe it, so I looked it up https://www.ft.com/content/74573de6-0a15-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6d84 https://www.ft.com/content/74573de6-0a15-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6... that is bizarre

buboard 7y ago

ideally, governments only need to know how much each person spent/earned. Not where and how. But , it seems there is no way to make even tiny amounts of purchases without a bunch of people sharing your full details with each other. On the other hand, there's crypto

unreal37 7y ago
Which is not anonymous.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Some of it is - ZCash for example. But most of it isn't.
  - ta999999171 7y ago
    What about the last thread I read that concluded Monero was the answer here? Which one's been audited?
    - jki275 7y ago
      Zcash is more likely to be secure than Monero. Both have their issues, but the Monero system is significantly easier to de-anonymize.

karambahh 7y ago

Because the social contract of most countries is that your legally gained cash is to be taxed in one form or another and thus has to be known by the tax authorities? You can argue that your assets are to be private to the general public but some countries do not have that assumption (Norway comes to mind).

woah 7y ago
It was possible for many empires to tax effectively before modern bookkeeping. Property tax needs very little in the way of financial records to administer.
- fao_ 7y ago
  > modern book-keeping Can you clarify what precisely you mean by this statement? Most empires historically-speaking have had sophisticated book-keeping methods. Chinese empires used to tax anyone who exited a city on the profits they made during their visit. The Romans when they took over Egypt, taxed the hell out of it and for that purpose kept meticulous records on all of the transactions that happened. The notion of Tax itself goes back to Mesopotamia. (I wrote that based from history books I've read over the years. But this link will do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Ancient_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Ancient_...)
  - woofcat 7y ago
    Not who you replied to, however modern taxation requires lots of information to work. For instance income tax works, because every employer is reporting how much they paid you. Then you report how much money you got paid, then factor in deductions such as specific contributions to charities etc. All of which are reporting to the Government at the same time. Before the advent of computing and auditing it would be hard to tell if a blacksmith sold 50 or 55 swords. So income tax wasn't viable and instead taxation on lands were more common.
    - aianus 7y ago

ip26 7y ago

Unfortunately financial crimes are (apparently) particularly easy to hide, and "follow the money" has proven the only way to bring some individuals to deserved justice.

appleshore 7y ago

I live next to a bank who paid an $8.9 billion fine for money laundering. Another bank, Italy’s largest, laundered money for 10-years for Iran, Cuba and Libya in the United States. They paid a $1.3 billion fine, pled to conspiracy and received deferred prosecution. One of the executives in that bank is the older brother to a star witness in the Presidential impeachment inquiry. Yet no one really cares about crimes committed by corporations.

squiggleblaz 7y ago
A great many people care about crimes committed by the corporations. But, unlike Rupert Murdoch, we have no ability to influence the prosecutors.
thephyber 7y ago
> Yet no one really cares about crimes committed by corporations. Lots of people do. They just don't happen to have the evidence to put those corporations in jail. The presumption of innocence is a valuable principle, but it cuts both ways. It defends you as much as it does corporations (who have A TON more resources to prevent/ mitigate a prosecution).

windexh8er 7y ago

If you read the article South Dakota is a great choice. It's a fantastic read on the history of how these states to harbor cash came to be. This part of the article sums it up in a very compelling manner: "Here is an example from one academic paper on South Dakotan trusts: after 200 years, $1m placed in trust and growing tax-free at an annual rate of 6% will have become $136bn. After 300 years, it will have grown to $50.4tn. That is more than twice the current size of the US economy, and this trust will last for ever, assuming that society doesn’t collapse altogether under the weight of this ever-swelling leach." So, yes - if you want to anonymously store your legally gained cash you have options stateside.

jdminhbg 7y ago
> That is more than twice the current size of the US economy, and this trust will last for ever, assuming that society doesn’t collapse altogether under the weight of this ever-swelling leach. Economically speaking, this is Not Even Wrong.
milesskorpen 7y ago
That example is a bit ridiculous. Yes, compounding is powerful. But there’s also inflation, and a single passively invested $1mm is never going to own the entire economy (if nothing else, returns would be distorted by scale). That said ... this is the premise of some entertaining science fiction.
- dane-pgp 7y ago
  Perhaps you're thinking of this classic scene from Red Dwarf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEu0o62ycmg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEu0o62ycmg
- windexh8er 7y ago
  First it's factual. By qualifying it as "ridiculous" serves what purpose exactly? The point is that $1MM is used as an example and you could swap that amount with $50MM, $100MM to showcase greater gains in exponentially less time. That is the point the article is making overall. No billionaire is going to harbor $1MM in a trust with the intent to have some heir pull it out in 200 years. But the people with those means can leverage the same monetary vehicle to do the same thing in much shorter time frames with higher initial investment. > That said ... this is the premise of some entertaining science fiction. Or not. None of it it fictional. Feel free to clarify what you mean, but the only thing fictional is the entirety of your comment.

simonh 7y ago

The problem is that our participation in the financial system affects other people. We also get benefits from that system such as auditing and regulation of our banks to protect our rights and interests, so it’s reasonable that we pay the price for this and one of those is some measure of privacy. Not all our privacy, just some of it.

mercacona 7y ago

Maybe, because you don't own your cash, your cash is a credit that society acknowledges to you, so hiding it from which makes it valuable is nuts. Can you eat your cash? Can you fly using your cash? Can you build a phone with cash? No, you can't do anything with cash without a public exchange that might be accountable. Unfortunately, people did buy the idea that ”Markets can work without accountability”, and that's what you do when laundering money in a fiscal paradise. Hopefully, crypto can drive us out of that craziness of money as a good.

ClumsyPilot 7y ago
This is quite a good point. No-one is stopping you from stockpiling Oil, Gold, or whatever.

_pmf_ 7y ago

> What if I just want a place to anonymously store my legally gained cash? Anonymously storing it makes it illegal. With Europe's negative interest rates, they're currently in the process of making personal storage illegal for large amounts (you're supposed to store it in a bank to pay negative interest).

harambaebae69 7y ago
>Europe's negative interest rates Couldn't believe it, so I looked it up https://www.ft.com/content/74573de6-0a15-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6d84 https://www.ft.com/content/74573de6-0a15-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6... that is bizarre