5 ms·

As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-to-person payments, but for person-to-service-provider payments. The idea of taxability is that the pers

by dbrgn 5y ago

As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-to-person payments, but for person-to-service-provider payments. The idea of taxability is that the person sending the money (the customer) is anonymous, while the recipient of the money (the webshop, for example) is not anonymous. This allows taxing the companies, while giving more privacy to the customers than with the current system. While this is a very different idea than decentralized cryptocurrencies, what it would give us as consumers is a much more privacy-preserving alternative to credit cards, Apple Pay and PayPal when buying things online (or in a store). At the same time, it is controllable enough for governments and banks that they could consider introducing such a system.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-to-person payments, but for person-to-service-provider payments. As far as I'm concerned, this is an arbitrary distinction to rationalize depriving some class of interactions between individuals of the right to privacy. >>At the same time, it is controllable enough for governments and banks that they could consider introducing such a system. I find this very defeatist, and this attitude becoming pervasive would guarantee that the trend toward mass-surveillance of all private interactions would continue unabated. Perhaps it's true that this is the type of system that governments and banks might be willing to introduce today. Afterall, privacy in financial interaction is not acceptable to the mainstream institutions. Over the last century, and especially since the early 1990s, the Overton window has shifted toward greater state control and less privacy. The proof of this is in the fact if cash were introduced today, it would be made illegal. And instead of pushing back against this trend toward mass-surveillance, Taler cows to it, with ideological rationalizations to boot. Cryptocurrency has a real potential to reverse the trend towards a dystopian surveillance state controlled by a handful of governments and payment processors, and the people behind Taler are too enamoured with their left-wing political ideology, and visions of taxing every one, to support it.
usrusr 5y ago
I've been imagining a taxation system where any bank account is actually two bank accounts, one pre-tax and one post, with an obvious identification difference (like odd/even ID numbers). Then you could pay e.g. your plumber knowing that your payment will be properly taxed, and all deductibility games your tax system might like to have would simply be dealt with by paying from the pre-tax account. IRS equivalents would have access to the pre-tax transactions, done. That would be all the tax bureaucracy you could ever need. Perhaps pre-tax purchases could even be public? Not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing, I'd like to hope that it might shift public perception of tax loopholes from "something clever" to "something to be ashamed of". Taler sounds like it could eventually lead to a setup like that.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  So cash becomes illegal? Cryptocurrency becomes illegal? What do you do if this totally surveilled financial system comes under the control of an abusive state, or the surveillance powers are regularly abused by the state's employees? Have you heard of Snowden's revelations about LOVEINT? Justice Douglas, in his dissenting opinion on the 1974 California Bankers Association v Shultz case that upheld the constitutionality of the Bank Secrecy Act, provided an excellent argument against warrantless mass-surveillance of monetary transactions: It is estimated that a minimum of 20 billion checks - and perhaps 30 billion - will have to be photocopied and that the weight of these little pieces of paper will approximate 166 million pounds a year. 6 It would be highly useful to governmental espionage to have like reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware [416 U.S. 21, 85] and retail stores, all our drugstores. These records too might be "useful" in criminal investigations. One's reading habits furnish telltale clues to those who are bent on bending us to one point of view. What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals. A mandatory recording of all telephone conversations would be better than the recording of checks under the Bank Secrecy Act, if Big Brother is to have his way. The records of checks - now available to the investigators - are highly useful. In a sense a person is defined by the checks he writes. By examining them the agents get to know his doctors, lawyers, creditors, political allies, social connections, religious affiliation, educational interests, the papers and magazines he reads, and so on ad infinitum. These are all tied to one's social security number; and now that we have the data banks, these other items will enrich that storehouse and make it possible for a bureaucrat - by pushing one button - to get in an instant the names of the 190 million Americans who are subversives or potential and likely candidates. It is, I submit, sheer nonsense to agree with the Secretary that all bank records of every citizen "have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory investigations or proceedings." That is unadulterated nonsense unless we are to assume that every citizen is a crook, an assumption I cannot make. Since the banking transactions of an individual give a fairly accurate account of his religion, ideology, opinions, and interests, a regulation impounding them and making them automatically available to all federal investigative agencies is a sledge-hammer approach to a problem that only a delicate scalpel can manage. Where fundamental personal rights are involved - as is true when as here the [416 U.S. 21, 86] Government gets large access to one's beliefs, ideas, politics, religion, cultural concerns, and the like - the Act should be "narrowly drawn" (Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 307 ) to meet the precise evil. 7 Bank accounts at times harbor criminal plans. But we only rush with the crowd when we vent on our banks and their customers the devastating and leveling requirements of the present Act. I am not yet ready to agree that America is so possessed with evil that we must level all constitutional barriers to give our civil authorities the tools to catch criminals. Instituting mass surveillance of monetary transactions creates extreme centralizations of power, and the kind of all-powerful government you're advocating creating is a giant magnet for rent-seeking behaviour.

by dbrgn 5y ago

CryptoPunk 5y ago

>>As far as I understand it, Taler is not made for person-to-person payments, but for person-to-service-provider payments. As far as I'm concerned, this is an arbitrary distinction to rationalize depriving some class of interactions between individuals of the right to privacy. >>At the same time, it is controllable enough for governments and banks that they could consider introducing such a system. I find this very defeatist, and this attitude becoming pervasive would guarantee that the trend toward mass-surveillance of all private interactions would continue unabated. Perhaps it's true that this is the type of system that governments and banks might be willing to introduce today. Afterall, privacy in financial interaction is not acceptable to the mainstream institutions. Over the last century, and especially since the early 1990s, the Overton window has shifted toward greater state control and less privacy. The proof of this is in the fact if cash were introduced today, it would be made illegal. And instead of pushing back against this trend toward mass-surveillance, Taler cows to it, with ideological rationalizations to boot. Cryptocurrency has a real potential to reverse the trend towards a dystopian surveillance state controlled by a handful of governments and payment processors, and the people behind Taler are too enamoured with their left-wing political ideology, and visions of taxing every one, to support it.

usrusr 5y ago

I've been imagining a taxation system where any bank account is actually two bank accounts, one pre-tax and one post, with an obvious identification difference (like odd/even ID numbers). Then you could pay e.g. your plumber knowing that your payment will be properly taxed, and all deductibility games your tax system might like to have would simply be dealt with by paying from the pre-tax account. IRS equivalents would have access to the pre-tax transactions, done. That would be all the tax bureaucracy you could ever need. Perhaps pre-tax purchases could even be public? Not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing, I'd like to hope that it might shift public perception of tax loopholes from "something clever" to "something to be ashamed of". Taler sounds like it could eventually lead to a setup like that.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
So cash becomes illegal? Cryptocurrency becomes illegal? What do you do if this totally surveilled financial system comes under the control of an abusive state, or the surveillance powers are regularly abused by the state's employees? Have you heard of Snowden's revelations about LOVEINT? Justice Douglas, in his dissenting opinion on the 1974 California Bankers Association v Shultz case that upheld the constitutionality of the Bank Secrecy Act, provided an excellent argument against warrantless mass-surveillance of monetary transactions: It is estimated that a minimum of 20 billion checks - and perhaps 30 billion - will have to be photocopied and that the weight of these little pieces of paper will approximate 166 million pounds a year. 6 It would be highly useful to governmental espionage to have like reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware [416 U.S. 21, 85] and retail stores, all our drugstores. These records too might be "useful" in criminal investigations. One's reading habits furnish telltale clues to those who are bent on bending us to one point of view. What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals. A mandatory recording of all telephone conversations would be better than the recording of checks under the Bank Secrecy Act, if Big Brother is to have his way. The records of checks - now available to the investigators - are highly useful. In a sense a person is defined by the checks he writes. By examining them the agents get to know his doctors, lawyers, creditors, political allies, social connections, religious affiliation, educational interests, the papers and magazines he reads, and so on ad infinitum. These are all tied to one's social security number; and now that we have the data banks, these other items will enrich that storehouse and make it possible for a bureaucrat - by pushing one button - to get in an instant the names of the 190 million Americans who are subversives or potential and likely candidates. It is, I submit, sheer nonsense to agree with the Secretary that all bank records of every citizen "have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory investigations or proceedings." That is unadulterated nonsense unless we are to assume that every citizen is a crook, an assumption I cannot make. Since the banking transactions of an individual give a fairly accurate account of his religion, ideology, opinions, and interests, a regulation impounding them and making them automatically available to all federal investigative agencies is a sledge-hammer approach to a problem that only a delicate scalpel can manage. Where fundamental personal rights are involved - as is true when as here the [416 U.S. 21, 86] Government gets large access to one's beliefs, ideas, politics, religion, cultural concerns, and the like - the Act should be "narrowly drawn" (Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 307 ) to meet the precise evil. 7 Bank accounts at times harbor criminal plans. But we only rush with the crowd when we vent on our banks and their customers the devastating and leveling requirements of the present Act. I am not yet ready to agree that America is so possessed with evil that we must level all constitutional barriers to give our civil authorities the tools to catch criminals. Instituting mass surveillance of monetary transactions creates extreme centralizations of power, and the kind of all-powerful government you're advocating creating is a giant magnet for rent-seeking behaviour.