The threat of privacy

[John Young]

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%20version.pdf
>
>
>The Threat of Privacy
>By Charles M. Kahn1
>
>Like artists, we academics want to believe that 
>if one of our works doesn’t get enough 
>attention it’s because we’re ahead of our 
>time. I’d like to pretend that everything 
>I’ve 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 “Money is Privacy.” We wrote it 
>partly as a response to Narayana 
>Kocherlakota’s famous paper “Money is 
>Memory,” which could be taken as arguing that 
>cash is essentially a record‐keeping 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 
>purchaser’s 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 
>credit‐ and deposit‐account‐ based 
>payments arrangements, cash would survive. 
>Because the desire for privacy would always 
>generate demand for cash, it would be a 
>mistake—and ultimately futile—to 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).
>
>[...]
>
>
>1 Keynote address at “Financial Market 
>Infrastructure Conference II: New Thinking in a 
>New Era” at De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam, 7‐8 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 “knew” that. So the work went nowhere. Oh well.