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Comment by thisisit | Hacker News Reader

A cynical way to look at this will be that Switzerland had enabled people - corrupt politicians, dictators etc, especially from third world countries, hide money. They refused to divulge bank details citing privacy concerns. But in recent years details have come to light - either through leaked data or country actions. This has led to weakening of their infamous privacy rules.

With cryptocurrency's rise, it offers Switzerland a new way to continue their privacy bs. So, obviously they are going to embrace and enable.

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> privacy bs

Privacy is always BS until the lack of it bites you personally. Privacy (i.e. 4th amendment) is to Swiss what 2nd and 4th amendment is to conservative Americans: Our insurance against government overreach.

The problem is of course that not every place is as democratic (i.e. ruled by the people as a whole) and low in crime, therefore privacy creates unwanted side effects in form of illegitimate uses. What exactly is illegitimate is up for discussion though - e.g. I consider tax hiding as simply a symptom of governments failing to create stringent market places where taxes flow automatically and fairly. As long as you don't have a world- (solar system?) wide government with total control, you'll never eliminate the availability of tax havens, they just get shifted around - currently the easiest place to hide is probably Delaware.

I see cryptocurrency as a nice opportunity to introduce a much more stringent monetary system where it's trivial to trace back the origin of money and track whether it has been earned in a legitimate way, including the deduction of taxes. People will still have the same options in general:

(a) store it in a personal offline wallet - somewhat dangerous due to potential loss and/or forgetting access codes

(b) give access codes to a trusted bank who will have an interest in tracing whether everything is in order (due to regulations)

What crypto enables is basically a clean separation of (b) and (c), which would make life easier for Swiss banks in the current landscape, i.e. allow them to once again deal freely with foreign nationals, especially Americans.

It seems it is true - you read what you believe and rest is all lost. So thank you for quoting a misused qualifier from my post for your counter.

I don't expect people who have not lived or experienced what people like me in the developing countries have to go through because of the Swiss privacy bs. Though I do expect them to hem and haw when stuff like Panama papers are revealed.

Additionally, it seems you don't really understand how cryptocurrency work. Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous and hence, it allows stuff like this:

> I see cryptocurrency as a nice opportunity to introduce a much more stringent monetary system where it's trivial to trace back the origin of money and track whether it has been earned in a legitimate way, including the deduction of taxes.

True anonymity which you want from the 4th Amendment, happens in cryptocurrencies like Monero. Those are resistant to blockchain analysis and you can't trace it back to origin.

Is it really fair to blame the Swiss for the behaviour of your politicians? I'm not convinced.

He's blaming the Swiss for their own actions

Presumably they ("the Swiss") enabled, through privacy focused banking, the politicians to safely funnel away (big) money.

You don’t seem to be interpreting what I write favorably. My main point is that there is a balance to strike between privacy and control. One of the main issues in developing nations is that opening a small business legally is overly complicated (in some cases literally years of administrative work for the applicant), so people are forced to keep everything out of the books, which prevents them from ever gaining wealth needed to reinvest. An ideal system IMO would achieve full transparency for the money of larger organisations (including governments) while giving privacy to private people and small businesses. The Swiss system is very good at achieving the latter but rather poor at at former (for which instead direct democratic processes are intended to achieve the necessary checks). I don’t have a perfect solution for this problem, but IMO it’s worth thinking about - and crypto seems to be promising. Maybe a combination of Monero and Ethereum where privacy is optional, with regulations for what kind of transactions transparence is required?

> Privacy (i.e. 4th amendment) is to Swiss what 2nd and 4th amendment is to conservative Americans: Our insurance against government overreach.

Ah, that's utter BS. Not one of the advocates of banking privacy is demanding similar privacy for wage statements. Oh no, if your income comes mainly from wages, you obviously can't be trusted like people whose income comes from investments!

I solely demand similar privacy for wage statements

The IRS and The HMRC do want to know where all your income comes from - J random buzy body or an employer should be told to GTFO

Your only defense against government overreach (ie violent aggression) is self-defense (ie genuine, well-trained militia of free people).

Reference to: The constitution of no authority by Lysander Spooner, and, The law by F.Bastiat

This is a particularly stupid comment to make in the context of Switzerland, where everyone(+) keeps their national service rifle in their house.

(+) well, a lot of people, even if it's no longer every man of relevant age

What is an example of a genuine, well-trained militia, and how does it fare against a government's military?

This question falsely presumes that the government's military is not also fractured by whatever is causing the militia to revolt. The military is made up of citizens.

But then why do you need the militia?

To protect yourself from and fight against weakened fractions of the government.

The military cannot occupy the entire space of the US so maintaining order of a tyrannical government would require a low ratio of military guards to citizens. With even 50% of the citizens potentially armed and willing to fight back, it's an untenable position for the government.

A militia could fight just as effectively as the Taliban against the government and be several orders of magnitude larger. The US military is good at eliminating identified enemies, but it's pretty terrible at nation building and that's even in its strongest state.

Because I want to a reason to own lots of guns.

Afghan militia has fared well both against US/NATO and Soviet militaries in the past 50 years.

If you are referring to the Taliban and their precursors, they have had, and continue to have significant financial and logistical backing from nation states.

Does that make them a bad example of a successful militia?

Perhaps a successful militia requires significant financial and logistical backing from nation states, in addition to being well trained.

In that case they are paramilitaries, not just militias.

In a democracy it is the role of the free press, the courts and elections to defend against government overreach.

Do you really believe that the 20,000 to 60,000 estimated [1] militia members in the US is what is defending you agains government overreach? There are more than 1.2 million people in the US army (with a $600 billion budget) and 120,000 federal police officers [2].

Another point to consider: democracies outside the US, that don't have 'well-trained militia of free people', seem to be doing just fine. In a number of metrics that you can consider as a proxy for government overreach the US is actually doing much worse than average: number of people shot by the police, number of people imprisoned, number of (innocent) people executed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_organizations_in_the_U... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_...

Does the genuine well trained militia also have genuine well-tested nuclear weapons, predator drones, recon and comm satellites, redundant infrastructure and easily access to manufacturing capabilities?

Every colonised and now forgotten group of people had what they thought was a genuine well trained militia, for all the good it did them.

Americans have fought world's most powerful army and won, this is why they wrote it in their constitution. At the same time they have managed become world's most powerful army and still not managed to win against a ragtag group of militants.

If citizens of any country get to make a claim about the effectiveness of an armed citizenry, then it is the Americans.

> not managed to win against a ragtag group of militants.

Those militants are not ragtag. They all receive state sponsorship in the form of finances, hardware, training and logistics.

Your analysis also ignores the reality of asymmetric warfare, in particular the asymmetry of the value placed on the lives of the combatants on the different sides.

Terrorist organizations are far more willing to sacrifice their combatants than the US is, and they have a pool of people who share this outlook to recruit from, which is why they persist.

In the event of an internal armed conflict within a developed country, all sides are likely to value the lives of their fighters similarly.

In my opinion as a Swiss

- Large parts of our financial sector have never truly figured out how to make money doing honest services for honest customers. As traditional revenue sources (stealing from Nazi victims, hiding dictators' money, assisting in income tax fraud, LIBOR rate fraud) have gradually dried up, the prospect of a new, extremely shady, financial sector is irresistible to bankers and their political allies.

- The lack of imagination in honest banking is going along with chasing the tail end of trends, especially US trends. The large Swiss banks were always happy to provide the dumb money, e.g. in the 2008 crash.

So small wonder that a figure like Johann Gevers will find Swiss bankers and politicians eager to cozy up to him.

FYI, The Swiss government also often freezes assets when requested by legal international means [1].

[1] https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/foreign-policy/financia...

Edit: typo

privacy BS? I find it weird that anyone would default to thinking nobody should have privacy. Why is it anyones business what anyone else does with money? Unless you are breaking the law ( which is already illegal ) why does it matter what people anywhere are doing with their money?

> Unless you are breaking the law ( which is already illegal )

I think the critique is that the privacy is being used as a mechanism for breaking the law, by hiding illegally gotten gains.

The argument for violating privacy in communications is literally that it is being used as a mechanism for breaking the law.

I'd be interested in hearing a logically consistent argument for why bad guys hiding illegally gotten gains is a legitimate reason for opposing banking privacy, but bad guys using encrypted communication platforms for planning crimes isn't a legitimate reason to oppose communications privacy.

In both cares, the information would of course only be available to the government who will only ever use it for Legitimate Good(tm).

But by that logic it should be ok to monitor everything anyone does because if you do not, a person might be able do to something illegally under the cover of privacy.

I don't understand your use of "monitor" here. Banks by their very nature "monitor" your financial details, what else are they going to be doing?

Swiss banks will routinely refuse to honour legal requests for information from international law enforcement, e.g from 3rd world countries investigating their own corrupt politicians.

So if I break US copyright law in Germany (assuming the act isn't illegal in Germany), then a German ISP should give out my data?

Are you saying embezzlement and fraud are legal in Switzerland? This analogy makes no sense.

What's even better is that crypto currencies are redefining in their own way "money" so I would rephrase what you said in "Why is it anyones business what anyone else does with their computer and internet connection? "

encryption has brought data back into our own control to an extent. cryptocurrency is doing the same with money. I think people are so steeped in the current system that they don't realize that people expected a certain degree of financial privacy up until recently. Besides paying your taxes ( which is also a recent invention in the US ) it was never any business of the government what anyone did with their money. Reading about the history of the US people seem to have forgotten why the country was founded and what people thought before about 80 years ago. Life, liberty, property. In no way does that include thugs with guns forcing you to give up your hard earned money.

There was NO income tax on individuals up until WW1 ever in the US. Through a slow process that takes years to change the Federal government has crept into our lives taking more money and control. It is extremely worrysome to me that other young people my age want more government control and not less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...

I think you're giving our politicians/finance system too much credit. Besides, after the US debacle regulators did a 180 on the topic.

If (and that's a big if) cryptocurrency ecosystems get large enough to attract significant institutional money / wealth management you can be sure that all participants will be held accountable in terms of KYC / AML / Regularization etc.

If any of the startups here think differently they will be in for a rude awakening.

Cryptocurrencies have made it easier than ever to channel large amounts of black money out of your country. And since Switzerland is the world's favorite place to hide money, it is no more than logical that it embraces this new vehicle of black money transport.

https://twitter.com/gva_watcher

> corrupt politicians, dictators etc, especially from third world countries

How is that Switzerland issue or responsibility? They can't judge people for what they do overseas.

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