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Comment by sxp | Hacker News Reader

This was an awesome concept at the time. It was one of the reasons I became pro-Bitcoin along with Cryptonomicon. Unfortunately, Stross became anti-crypto afterwards: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-w...

The technolibertarian ideology that was in some of his earlier writing were replaced with more authoritarian & leftist views so he said "BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions." as if it was a bad thing.

P.S, what's the basis of your username? Any relation to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross ?

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> as if it was a bad thing.

Future generations may look back on mandatory financial surveillance the same way we look back on general warrants.

Especially because the claims don't match the requirements. If you want to make sure someone is paying their income tax, you don't need to know who the buyer is. But the same is true of sales tax, which is likewise collected by the seller.

And it's the buyer who most needs privacy. The mosque or synagogue or gay bar or abortion clinic or adult book store may not be hiding what it is from the government, but their patrons shouldn't have to reveal that they're patrons.

Yet if you try to activate a prepaid credit card, they want your name. For what?

What they want to track with prepaid cards is money laundering. And this is not money laundering of the corner drug dealer, it is the laundering of the wealth of entire nations by transnational crime syndicate masquerading as governments (e.g., see RUS, VNZ), and transnational gangs which are large enough to warrant military attention, which is currently driving geopolitics. And yes, your tiny prepaid card is probably an irrelevant bit of collateral damage in that picture, but that is why they'll ask your name.

And, no, FINCEN DGAF if you spend it at any of those places. They DO care if it turns out some of those places are laundering a lot of crime money, and they DO care if you get dozens of those cards and spend 90% of it at one of the launderer's places. they will also care if you are working in a scam organization that convinces marks to send payment as prepaid card codes, and you are cashing those cards...

If it is untraceable and at all scaleable, you can guarantee that organized crime is using it to launder money, and that there will be real efforts to make it traceable.

> And this is not money laundering of the corner drug dealer, it is the laundering of the wealth of entire nations by transnational crime syndicate masquerading as governments (e.g., see RUS, VNZ), and transnational gangs which are large enough to warrant military attention, which is currently driving geopolitics.

The problem is that it doesn't actually work for organizations with that level of resources.

A multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise doesn't need prepaid cards to launder their money. They can buy arbitrary amounts of soybeans or crude oil or laundry detergent. There is nothing suspicious or even illegal about a shipping container full of soybeans. Anybody can cook up some books that say that Alice paid Bob a billion dollars for soybeans and Bob paid Alice a billion dollars for licensing intellectual property netting to zero, when it was really a billion dollars under the table and the intellectual property was worthless. Then the commodity goes to whatever country, get sold on the commodity market there and turns back into money.

That's assuming they don't just use Bitcoin.

That's assuming they don't just keep doing this:

https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...

Anti-money laundering laws are a failed experiment. They don't work. They cost far more than they're worth.

>>The problem is that it doesn't actually work for organizations with that level of resources.

Obviously, this is not their sole means of laundering, and your other examples are some likely ploys at other scales. But any large scale organized crime venture is fractal, it goes from the global scale, all the way down to the entry-level neighborhood crooks, and your shipping or IP ploy doesn't work for a wide range of scams, but $billions in small-scale cards do. Same for BTC, where you can transfer billions, but how do you smurf out $1billion into $USD? it's got to be 101K++ transactions under $10K, and widely distributed.

What your article proves is that your last line is completely wrong. The criminal breaking the law again means that the applied penalty was an insufficient deterrent. The prosecutors and judges did not apply sufficient penalties. Cutting the profits of HBSC is insufficient, they need to apply the tracking and *jail* the mgt/execs that allow it.

The Anti-money laundering laws work *to the extent that they are enforced*. Lack of enforcement does not mean the law doesn't work.

Your small desire to evade a nonexistent and ineffective scrutiny about where you spend your VISA gift card does not outweigh the need for the still-democratic countries to attempt to survive an onslaught of transnational organized crime attempting to implement autocracies to enable their crime.

> But any large scale organized crime venture is fractal, it goes from the global scale, all the way down to the entry-level neighborhood crooks, and your shipping or IP ploy doesn't work for a wide range of scams, but $billions in small-scale cards do.

But there are thousands of other methods, arbitrarily many, for doing the same thing at any scale.

> Same for BTC, where you can transfer billions, but how do you smurf out $1billion into $USD? it's got to be 101K++ transactions under $10K, and widely distributed.

I'm not really seeing the difference.

Option one, the dealers make $9000 in cash, go buy $9000 worth of some non-perishable commodity and put it in a shipping container. Repeat until the shipping container is full, then ship it to the place they want the money to end up.

Option two, do the same thing with Bitcoin. All they need is someone willing to sell Bitcoin for cash.

> The prosecutors and judges did not apply sufficient penalties.

The War on Drugs fallacy. "The problem isn't that the entire thing is an exercise in futility, it's that the penalty isn't high enough."

The criminals discount the penalty regardless of what it is because they don't expect to get caught. They're often right.

> Your small desire to evade a nonexistent and ineffective scrutiny about where you spend your VISA gift card

You've being overly flippant about the legitimate concerns and chilling effects of surveillance on vulnerable populations who have to worry about not only what the data is used for today, but what will happen to them if the winds change and the data on what they do today is still in the database five years from now.

> the need for the still-democratic countries to attempt to survive an onslaught of transnational organized crime attempting to implement autocracies to enable their crime.

Or you could just decriminalize drugs and put them all out of business.

Totally agree on decriminalizing drugs.

However, if you think that will put them out of biz, think again.

Start with the RUS govt which is a straight-up kleptocracy, a trans-national crime syndicate, which has literally stolen 90%+ of the nations wealth into the hands of a few dozen oligarchs (start reading up a bit on Simeon Mogilevich). Their biggest problem is laundering money, and they are exporting authoritarianism. We are currently under Asymmetric Warfare attack, and it is on all fronts.

Meanwhile, there is no govt agency FINCEN, NSA, or otherwise that is authorized or even GAF in the slightest about any marginal person. Your propposed threat model is just silly in the real world. What, some agent with terabytes of data streaming in is going to do what, find some trans person buying a dildo and send a local cop out to bust their taillight? Seriously, they've all got better stuff to do.

None of us are that important, unless we start using those cards to smurf funds for terrorists or foreign powers -- THEN we WANT them to notice.

BTW, if you think it is bad here, go check out the rights marginalized people have in RUS or similar authoritarian regimes. What is being fought for is the right to NOT have such an authoritarian govt here.

"If you want to make sure someone is paying their income tax, you don't need to know who the buyer is."

Quite the contrary, the way you fight against untaxed money is exactly by monitoring who the buyer is - you fight against the "dark economy" on the edges where it interfaces with the legitimate one, relying on the fact that most of the things one might want to buy come from the legitimate sellers, so you put up limits so that one can't buy anything for large amounts of cash or equivalent without identifying themselves and (indirectly) their sources of income. The gay bar or abortion clinic would be out of scope simply because the amounts spent there are relatively tiny, but for all the large spending (e.g purchasing property, Teslas, etc) the tax verification definitely wants to identify the buyers.

Except that nobody charges a house to their credit card.

I'm anti-bitcoin, and pro-crypto. I think the only thing that should be taxed is wealth, regardless of debt, and not work or transactions; so state don't need to monitor financial transaction at all. BUT bitcoin is not a smart crypto: its inefficient, POW is not a good idea and is worse when the algorithm can be optimized with specialized processor. It gives too much power to state actors (like most computational activities tbh) . If the US, China or Russia wanted to do a 51% attack, it realistically could with some investments.

> the only thing that should be taxed is wealth

How would you value non-monetary assets? And let's say I hated someone, could I get a group of assessors to overvalue their house and put them into bankruptcy?

> How would you value non-monetary assets?

One cool idea I've seen proposed is mandatory sales. So maybe once a year, you have to specify a value for everything you own, and people can buy it from you for that value. So you can set your sentimental value as high as you like, and make it impossible for anyone to buy your valued property. But then taxes are calculated off that value...

That's one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. I'm sincerely astounded how bad it is and it gets worse the more I think about it.

To start, it shows a complete lack of respect for the right of ownership. Under this system you wouldn't own anything and would be subjected to compensated theft regularly. This system would simultaneously represent the worst ideas of what Socialist and capitalistic life can be.

To an anti-socialist, socialism represents theft. The problem is the forcible reappropriation of assets. The justification for this is twofold: property being theft in itself & it being immoral to deprive the in-need of assets you don't need. Private property represents theft since claims must begin somewhere and that somewhere is the state of nature, the commons. In our imagined socialist commonwealth, goods ought to be for the benefit of all. The problem with this is that some goods are exclusive by nature. Only I can wear the clothes on my back, it's more hygienic if we have a toothbrush each and frankly we should have enough goods that, in general, we don't need to argue over use. For this socialists make a distinction between private and personal property. This distinction diminishes possession but at least it comes from a place of wanting help for others. Mandatory sales mean your rights are trumped by capital, or more accurately those holding it.

If mandatory sales apply literally to all goods then go ahead and take the clothes off my back. There's little room for dignity when those richer than you can take even the most sentimental of belongings. Why don't we go a step further? Apply the concept the any service a person may provide, recognise that sex work is real work and you've just legalised rape.

This may seem a disproportionate response but I'm sick of people being so detached that they think reengineering society is something to be taken lightly. Reminds me of a sketch which had the line

> Have you tried 'raise VAT' and 'kill all the poor'?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg

I'm sure any objection I have could be rebutted with something which amounts to 'there are loopholes'.

> Apply the concept the any service a person may provide, recognise that sex work is real work and you've just legalised rape.

Yo I see your point but that simply logically doesn't work. You can't get taxed for a service that you don't provide, so just set your rate to infinity.

If you can set the price of everything to infinity then the entire concept is useless. The point is to make transactions mandatory otherwise all you've done is created a sales tax. That was my point about loopholes. (I'm not saying I like sales taxes either.)

There's a difference between taxing property and taxing the capability to do a service - and it's that nobody is interested in doing the latter, because it's nonsensical.

This would make sense in a world where skills themselves were commodities that could be straightforwardly bought and sold...? But I think such a world would have a very different take on prostitution.

Disagree. Taxing wealth is purely about stealing savings. The only thing that should be taxed is non-essential consumption.

So if I want to learn more about crypto as a beginner, what non-BTC coins should I check out?

From what I've read, it's not a political/ideology shift in Stross but more a shift in how you (don't) read the books. Stross has been very critical and antagonist against runaway effects ("anti-crypto") since his first book Accelerando. While a lot of the "cool stuff" and many of the characters, including some of the protagonists, are very "technolibertarian" most of Stross' plots are generally Very Bad Things happening to them, including various sorts of cascade failures in the "cool stuff" domains (up to and including Lovecraftian apocalyptic doom in the Laundry universe). Generally the moral arc in a lot of Stross' (as such exists) from meta/high-level usually seems to be wary of the "cool stuff" as Very Bad Things Can Happen. He's a great writer because those moral arcs are left subtle and to the reader rather than tagged on the end like Aesop's Fables.

(Sometimes I wish they were blandly tagged at the end like Aesop's Fables to avoid some of these conversations, because we're living in a post-Poe's Law Singularity and subtlety is all too often easily overlooked.)

Yeah, it's hard to see Stross as libertarian at all.

Pertinently, he just wrote about Neptune's Brood and medium money recently:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central...

> MuskCoin is required in payment for cargo capacity on Earth-to-Mars shipping, or for purchasing real estate on Mars. It has a floating terrestrial exchange rate: the idea is that it's used for mediating interplanetary exchanges.

That sounds like the currency in Artemis by Andy Weir (of The Martian fame) which used "slugs" as a currency on Luna:

> “It’s short for soft-landed grams. S-L-G. Slug. One slug gets one gram of cargo delivered from Earth to Artemis, courtesy of KSC.” “It’s technically not a currency,” Trond said from the credenza. “We’re not a country; we can’t have a currency. Slugs are pre-purchased service credit from KSC. You pay dollars, euros, yen, whatever, and in exchange you get a mass allowance for shipment to Artemis. You don’t have to use it all at once, so they keep track of your balance.” ... “It ended up being a handy unit for trade. So KSC is functioning as a bank. You’d never get away with that on Earth, but this isn’t Earth.”

cstross's books were formative for me. I read accelerando when I was 16. He convinced me that making new technology (and avoiding others) was a task worthy of my life's focus. So, in part, blame him for me :sweat-smile:

Have you been sitting on this username for nearly five years just waiting to be able to make this comment?

Yes.

Yes! Accelerando was the first Singularitarian novel I ever read and I read it in college around the time I read Vinge's original essay so it had a strong influence on my career path.

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