ALTA/DMT privacy

[Tim May]

On Dec 11, 2003, at 11:54 AM, James A. Donald wrote:

>     --
> On 10 Dec 2003 at 19:31, Tim May wrote:
>> I receive several messages a month saying I need to re-verify
>> information with an E-gold account (which I never recall
>> establishing, by the way).
>
> These are messagers from scammers.  e-gold never sends out
> email.
>
>> E-gold was never even slightly interesting to me for reasons
>> I talked about a few years ago--the notion that a bar of gold
>> moving between shelves in someone's hotel room in Barbados or
>> Guyana or wherever is equivalent to untraceability is silly
>> Randroid idol-worship raised to the fourth power.
>
> Every atom of gold is identical to every other atom of gold.
> There is only one stable isotope.
>
> E-gold does not provide untraceability -- but gold does.

Where tax authorities get people is in the transfer _in to_ and _out 
of_ certain kinds of accounts, be they Cayman Island or Swiss bank 
accounts, whatever. The issue with opening a Swiss bank account and 
wiring money into it, or depositing Federal Reserve Notes into it has 
NOTHING to do with FRNs having serial numbers and hence being 
traceable. The issue is with their own reporting to the IRS (these 
days) and to stops in place to stop the wiring of said money or the 
transport of said FRNs.

What *form* the "item of value" is inside the bank, be it gold bars or 
Spanish doubloons or stacks of $20 bills or diamonds, is unimportant. 
In fact, for all intents and purposes the "item of value" inside the 
bank can be marks in a ledger book, which is effectively the situation 
today.

(It is true that what is stored inside a bank, be it gold coins or 
Federal Reserve Notes, becomes important if and when enough depositors 
ask for their money in that particular form. But this is an issue of 
believing the bank does in fact store gold dust or doubloons or FRNs, 
not anything about the intrinsic untraceability of such things!)

In other words, any bank except for "U-Stor-It-Yourself" safe deposit 
systems, is basically a black box with beliefs by I/O users about how 
likely it is to behave according to its specifications.

That some of the gold fetishists here keep perpetuating this deep 
misunderstanding of the issues is...unsurprising.


--Tim May