Richard Stallman: Online Publishers Should Let Readers Pay Anonymously

I find it surprising that we havent already got a payment gateway that handles the entire user identity, including email forwarding.

I also hadn't realised Stallman wrote for the Guardian, but going through his historic articles shows a healthy number of articles.

It could be a really good use case for a crypto currency. But eg. Bitcoin needs too long for a finished transaction (I don't want to wait ~10 minuntes until I can read an article). And you still can track down a person who purchased (separately) two articles by his keys or analysing the block chain.

I know we've a lot of crypto currencies right now, but I really hope that there is finally a new one coming, which is just simply fast, secure and somehow helps you paying anonymously.

> Tracking, as we know, gives companies and governments dangerous power; the intimidating effect of general surveillance has been measured and is massive. The rate of visits to some Wikipedia pages – those about “al-Qaida”, “car bomb” and “Taliban” – declined by one-fifth after Edward Snowden showed us how much the US government spies on our internet activity.

That is a nice and lovely idea...

Only every government everywhere hates it.

If it is possible to pay for something anonymously, then there is no following the money of others paying anonymously for other reasons. Including paying for products or services that are illegal or even with money from such sales.

Yes, you might compare this to cash. Cash that everyone used to carry around. It the higher denominations are marked (serial numbered), at least for US currency. Still it takes a LOT of effort to track their flow. For any kind of digital currency this scheme isn't tenable or repeatable. The tracking would either be too easy to prevent abuse, or too easy to abuse (get around).

Maybe we can have this level of freedom, if we admit that being at war with our population is a bad idea. If we allow the legal and controlled use of current vices. It wouldn't be perfect, but at least in that world we could probably get by with just controlling the income phase.

Though if you wanted to tax wealth (not income) you'd also need to report a total of 'outflow'. Which makes obtaining 'gifts' from sources not clearly related to work a vector suspect as tax avoidance via temporal displacement of wealth.

I find it interesting that this article is published on a platform that makes uBlock block 27 requests and most certainly does contain non-free javascript. Richard Stallman talks a lot about how these thing inhibit freedom and that we should not support those companies. But when he publishes an article on ad blocking he does this on a platform that absolutely does not meet his standard on freedom.