At 9:04 AM -0800 on 12/6/00, Greg Broiles wrote:
Or am I thinking of something else?
You're thinking of something else, but you're close enough. For instance, there are laws in most jurisdictions about requiring a social security number to open a bank account, for any of a number of reasons including credit checks, and checks on how many, um, negative-funded, bank accounts you might have hanging out there before you opened this one. More to the point, since interest is taxable income for individuals, and a tax deductible expense for corporations, social security numbers are required in order to pay you interest. [And, yes, Duncan may be right, you might be able to spoof an SSN at them somehow, but I don't know anyone who's actually done it, admitted it in any public detail, and not been somehow razzed legally for it.] Kind of reminds me of TEFRA, in 1993 or so, which outlawed bearer bonds by making interest payable on them "non-tax-deductible" (taxable, for those in Palm Beach County). [The answer to this "lie to the government, don't get a bank account" problem, which any persistent cypherpunk subscriber knows, is, of course, to have payment systems which don't *need* physical identity for non-repudiation of transactions and the subsequent requirement of the force of a nation-state to make settlement risk manageable: bearer certificates based on cryptographic protocols like blind signatures, which will, frankly, only *really* be possible, soup-withdrawl to nuts-deposit, when a bearer currency issue is *itself* reserved by other digital bearer assets, instead of just a book-entry account somewhere.] Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'