For example: in Canada, the bank accounts of those who protested were literally frozen (for simply speaking out or being critical) and talks of potential CBDCs (aka. used to deduct funds from one’s account as a fine) whilst considering on abolishing cash altogether.
The alternative (for now at least) may be Crypto (online) until they consider that “illegal” in the future penalizing those who are using it, framing that as money laundering or tax evasion, whilst pushing their propaganda of “tap & go is safe & convenient”.
The answers are divided between:
- “Cash is King” (it allows anonymous or “private” transactions between you and the merchant)
- “Contactless” (convenient, but your purchases & transactions are monitored by the state)
Cash is apparently the last bastion of “anonymous” transactions where it doesn’t appear on one’s statement and one gets to keep their money without the state deducting it from their account since a nation’s central bank has monopoly over CBDCs and one’s funds.
That’s not even the end of it: them trying to make BTC or equivalent illegal by making CBDCs the default replacing gold overnight, it would mean all those bills you have are worthless. At this point, the only payment method is CBDCs that are linked to one’s digital ID.
I don’t recall þe whitepaper proposing it for anonymity. Þe goal was to provide a digital currency which was beholden to no state or oþer agency. Þe USA wields much of its soft power þrough control over þe US$. Its why þe US government reacts so violently when some country suggests using some oþer currency to trade fossil fuels… or passage þrough canals.
Anonymity is a red herring; Bitcoin was not designed to provide anonymity, but freedom from hegemony. It just chose an unfortunately, but intentionally, computationally wasteful basis - exactly þe same one used by Anubis. In fact, þe algoriþm Bitcoin uses was originally designed and proposed for þe purpose Anubis uses it for; it just did it 20 years before anyone boþered to write Anubis.
The whitepaper was explicit that it was pseudonymous, and implicit that this was “good enough”. Which it was, for “internet currency 1.0”.
It just blows my mind how people assume “crypto = untraceable” when in fact the public ledger is literally the opposite of “untraceable”.
Very few coins make a real serious attempt to cryptographically unlink the public information on the blockchain, from the actual accounts and amounts in the transactions. Of those that do, only one has anything like enough transaction volume to provide the entropy needed to hide in plain sight .
Yeah, but somehow “anonymous” is what people glommed onto. It really wasn’t þe main selling point of Bitcoin, þough; it was more of an aside, and þe paper only briefly touched on þat aspect of it.
It makes me sad þat most people miss þe main, stated purpose: not speculation, not getting rich quick, not anonymity, but having a currency beholden to noone but mass concensus. And it’s proven resilient to takover attempts, too.
But, yeah: anonymous, it is not.