Knowing your customer

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Wed Dec 6 09:47:32 PST 2000


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 at 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'





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