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Quintus
@quintus
I don't know if many in the crypto space have really thought through the tension at the heart of permissionless money There are real downsides to permissionless, private money. Perhaps (I believe) they are outweighed by the upsides, but most of us don't really think about the downsides. I'm from South Africa, but live in NYC. When I sit in NYC, it makes complete sense that you'd want to build a financial system to which access cannot be denied and surveillance of which is not possible. Canadian truckers, Navalny and Operation Chokepoint are motivating examples. Headlines telling about dirty russian money or iranians using crypto payment rails to avoid sanctions feel like vague points at best and boogiemen from power hungry governments with hammer-nail-like regulatory appetites. Currently I'm in SA. Here the biggest problem is corruption by far. I happen to know some people who are involved in the investigations that go after corrupt state officials... 1/2
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Quintus
@quintus
Almost every time, successful investigations rely on bank accounts being pulled. Not just of politicians, but of service providers for the government and those they interact with, trying to find a kickback payment. A guy in our neighbourhood is selling his house. Two cars with tinted windows pulled up and a big man offered him 15% more for the house if he was willing to take cash right there and then. He declined (out of principle one would hope), but also because its really hard to meaningfully spend that kind of cash. Its hard to get it into the banking system without suspicion My point is that there are real benefits to being able to relegate certain actors to only using physical cash and for digital transactions being trackable. I realise there are people working on middle paths like mixers in which you can prove the origin of funds is not from a blacklisted address, but I'm never really part of any discussions which take the downsides of naive digital cash seriously and think about mitigating them
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Quintus
@quintus
I'd love if someone could point me to some writing/data on the topic. There's definitely more to be said about export controls and taxes, but I'm not sure I'm qualified
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