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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I find his attack on CryptoCurrency largely terrifying as well "If government can't access phones, 'everybody is walking around with a Swiss Bank account in their pocket'"

God forbid we lived in a world where people had privacy and THEIR own money?

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Are you an anarchist? Because a Swiss Bank account is associated with circumventing taxes and money laundering, which I think is what he was getting at when he made the reference; not that you can't have your own money. If there is no effective way to tax or enforce that taxation then no Government could exist.

Prior to prohibition 1.0 where Congress banned alcohol sales in the country the US Federal government derived it's tax revenue from the sale of alcohol. The prohibitionists got Congress to enact an income tax to bring about the end of alcohol. It didn't quite work out well though, neither has prohibition 2.0 (our era).

> If there is no effective way to tax or enforce that taxation then no Government could exist.

From your lips to God's ears.

The Last Trumpet Project, by Kevin MacArdry

https://anarplex.net/hosted/files/last_trumpet/LTP.pdf

I've seen this argument against crypto currencies before and I alway found it bizarre. Do you honestly believe that the government's ability to tax you is predicated on it's ability to see how much money you have in your bank account and the ability to take that money? Taxes existed long before electronic records of money.

One of the first income tax evasion prosecutions, follow the passing of the 16th amendment (making income tax permanent), relied almost entirely on bank deposit records. Centralized reporting requirements are pretty important to the IRS. I couldn't find the specific case, but this paper [0] covers the topic pretty thoroughly. If you are incredibly bored and end up reading it, you'll notice that in their investigations the IRS commonly skips a lot of things that would be labor intensive (like finding property held under a different name), and sticks to the prewrapped financial records from the banks.

So yeah, taxes existed before the internet - they used paper deposit slips.

[0] http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

It started as an argument about terrorists (very few and rare) and now it comes out that it's about money and taxes (all US citizens) - thanks Obama!

There are other things that can be taxed that can't be stored on an iphone, like real estate.

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