He had told the 100% fact thing.

http://www.creditmenow.info

I definitely do have privacy concerns. If the author doesn’t, he’s welcome to live an open life and remove his curtains. But he doesn’t speak for me, or a fairly large part of the country. The charge that people like myself use it as an excuse not to pay taxes is a downright insult and lie. Perhaps those kind exist, but all privacy conscious people I know have no issues paying taxes, and don’t complain about them – many want more taxes and have socialist tendencies. Desire for privacy does not equate to libertarianism, folks!

Tell you what – you get that up and running and I and the rest of the tin-foil hat crowd will reconsider ditching paper money. :)

Until then…

- Jeff @ DreamHost

I believe that ultimately all those things come down to paper money being too tedious. Why do you think people can’t store money at home securely? Why do you think banks have higher fees for processing money?

The fact that you can’t use paper money to conduct online transactions is another example of how paper money is not suited for a modern economy. Of course, you could conduct the transaction and mail the money – but that would be too tedious.

The fact that you can’t carry all your paper money on you securely at all times is another example of how paper money is too tedious and thus not suited for a modern economy.

>> I’m all *for* progress, but sometimes the price is just too much… And the point about the government is not even about the politicians – would you want some clerk knowing all your financial details?

Indeed I would not. But some clerk already knows all my financial details. He’s employed at the bank and I have very little insight into what he does with my information. If he were employed by the government, he would be employed by me, and I would play a greater role. I could for example say that my transactions should be kept encrypted or out of sight unless I personally gave my okay to open them for some purpose. The people could vote to have all transaction records erased after some amount of time. Or we could have a system where you can choose to make certain transactions unlogged.

All this of course depends on having a fully transparent government under control of the people. That’s something we should be working towards either way.

Even today, if the government wished to truly turn on us, they could easily force control over private banks and extract all our information. The Bush administration has already done things like that. Thus I think that it makes little difference if they control it directly or not, what matters is how much insight and control the people have over how the government functions.

If you truly wish to make transactions out of sight, then there are alternative forms of payment.