> We believe that privacy strengthens social ties and social institutions, protects societies against their enemies, and helps societies to be more peaceful and more prosperous. It's time to have a serious conversation about whether this is actually true when it comes to financial privacy. Our society is governed by money. Money governs our production directly, and it governs our regulations indirectly since votes ca…
However, an unbeatable and untraceable cryptographic money scheme effectively would make bribery of power brokers undetectable, or at the very least, untraceable to it's source.
What we gain in personal privacy, we will trade off for increased government corruption, and it is corruption and its abuses I'd argue are a greater danger than government snooping. If you look at many nations that are struggling, even those with ample revenues, the failure to improve the standard of living can often be traced to corruption and just blatant theft and embezzling.
Government or large organizational snooping is a serious problem in countries without adequate protection of individuals and where discrimination goes unpunished. If I live in North Korea, I want maximum privacy. The threat model in OECD countries is different. While having say, the government of Sweden read my emails is disconcerting, the repercussions and threat from that are far smaller.
The world is full of corruption and cronyism at all levels, both in government, and in large organizations. To what extent are we increasing their power to harm by assuming that maximum privacy effectively disarms their power against us?
This is a truism accepted in the cypherpunks movement that's never really been tested, and it is deeply intertwined with libertarian thinking, that cryptoanarchy or laissez-faire regulation, imposed by technology, leads to a situation where big power brokers can do less damage. But we've also seen that when such organizations are opaque and unwatched, they often become more dangerous.