Good stuff. Thanks. Reminds that cryptography has led to the loss of privacy by tagging crypto users, coders, rebels!, promoters, investors. So too cryptocurrency, the Internet, anonymizers, TOR, drop boxes, secure drops, Signal, Telegram, burst transmissions, privacy policies, pro-encryption advocates, comsec wizards, the array of promissories one by one gobbling gullible adopters urged on by lists like this and social media, MSM. financial greeders, hackers, leak sites, turncoats needing pensions. To be sure, "cash' the imaginaire of economists, is not the same as paper money which can also be tracked by human residue, transactional spoors, aggrieved victims, informers, world bank scholars under contract to finger malefactors, family members eager to payback those who fucked them, dear Mary tell what you know. At 10:38 AM 8/3/2020, you wrote:
http://www.kahnfrance.com/cmk/The%20threat%20of%20privacy%20distribution%20v...
The Threat of Privacy By Charles M. Kahn1
Like artists, we academics want to believe that if one of our works doesnât get enough attention itâs because weâre ahead of our time. Iâd like to pretend that everything Iâve written is pathbreaking, and will eventually be recognized for its true importance. But I have to admit that there are really only a couple of cases where I can say with hindsight that something I wrote has been ahead of its time.
One of them2 is a paper written with Jamie McAndrews and Will Roberds, published in 2005, and titled âMoney is Privacy.â We wrote it partly as a response to Narayana Kocherlakotaâs famous paper âMoney is Memory,â which could be taken as arguing that cash is essentially a recordâkeeping device, tracking who was a net creditor and who a net debtor to society with respect to resources provided or consumed. The implication was that if it became easy to keep credit records directly, cash could wither away. In our paper we argued instead that a key role of cash was its ability to protect the purchaserâs identity. So we predicted that, even while the reductions in costs of record keeping and increases in the speed of data transmission were expanding the usage of creditâ and depositâaccountâ based payments arrangements, cash would survive. Because the desire for privacy would always generate demand for cash, it would be a mistakeand ultimately futileto attempt to abolish it. At the te time, people were attuned to many of the problems of privacy, but there had not yet been a clear recognized link between the value of privacy and the role of payments systems. (Remember, bitcoin was only released in 2009).
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1 Keynote address at âFinancial Market Infrastructure Conference II: New Thinking in a New Eraâ at De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam, 7â8 June 2017. 2 The other was my dissertation, back in 1980. It was on liquidity and the pricing of illiquid assets. At that time, no one thought this was an important issue in finance: financial markets were liquid; everybody âknewâ that. So the work went nowhere. Oh well.