We must protect our ability to transact privately online (2019)

There are two elements to that question: the legal and the moral.

Legally the premise is shaky as it's a short walk from "use a specific payment method" (a financial instrument, a device, a service, a company) to what are protected classes: age, race, national origin, religious beliefs, gender, disability, pregnancy, and veteran status in the United States.[1] As such, strictly as a business decision there's a considerable risk involved that such practices would be found to be de facto discimination against one or more protected classes.

(Keep in mind that there are religions which consider interest on money to be against their beliefs, which would then transfer to use of revolving credit instruments. I've no idea whether this has been tested in US courts.)

On a moral basis, even that which is not strictly illegal may be against principles of greater justice, and gatekeeping access to goods or services can easily work against those with limited means (unable to buy the latest mobile smartphone or desktop/laptop computer), unabile to maintain broadband comms access, owning a working but end-of-lifed device (for Android as little as 2--3 years, somewhat better for Apple), living in regions without high-speed broadband (most of the US), excluded from access to credit by low credit scores, or forced by circumstances to accept massive invasions of privacy or exposure to manipulation (propaganda, advertising, targeted manipulation) simply to participate minimally in the everyday business of life.

Note that remote-commerce can be a force for inclusion and against oppression. The Sears Roebuck Catalogue was the subject of recent commentary on that point, see for example:

"How Sears Catalog Fought White Supremacists" https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_all-about-america_how-sears-ca...

The major operative factor to me seems to be whether a technology constrains or expands opportunities. Reducing payment options quite clearly constrains them.

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Notes:

1. https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/protected-cla...

Because unlike those secret R&D projects, they don't benefit from not being able to access the data they're storing in your scenario. There's absolutely no way you could trust with absolute certainty that a private blockchain run by the US government, one of the largest acquirers of zero-day vulns, would build such a system and not have some sort of backdoor. They've been caught so many times playing this game, thinking to the clipper chip and beyond.

It would be so much simpler and more private to just require everyone to accept cash. The more I think about it, the idea of a private government blockchain that they're not looking at is fundamentally antithetical to the existence of that institution.

In the case of people paying via WeChat though, it is legitimately market forces. If you don’t use WeChat, people around you will urge you to use it because it is so much easier than cash. No more going to the bank. No more handling change. You just open your phone, scan, and pay. Small businesses you frequent where you get to know the proprietor will tell you they think it’s a little funny you’re paying in cash and even offer to help you set up your WeChat Pay because it is “so easy.”

I honestly don’t know anyone other than me who pays for things in cash. Everybody else is on WeChat. Nobody forced them to; it was just rapid, collective adoption, analogous to what happened when smart phones hit the market. You can still buy dumb phones that work great, but nobody does.

One of my bank accounts has been blocked for the last 6 months over this, despite hours on the phone beforehand and countless assurances that this wouldn't happen. It reminds me of traveling to Canada with a credit card in the mid 00s.

>> It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.

-- DOBBS, STATE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, ET AL. v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION ET AL

The ECHR does enumerate a right to privacy, but with a big law enforcement caveat.

And the political argument is an extremely difficult one to make: the police must in no circumstances be able to trace transactions?

> this only works if the powers that be sanction what you're doing

Well, yes. But protections are only useful against power if there's broad support for the process. Both policing and anti-terrorism, and the handing of vast powers to those bodies, are very politically popular.

Cryptocurrency faces neither. The systems used to create, store, and transfer them are widely available. The network on which they can be transacted is ubiquitous. Cashing in/out is easy.

What's holding the concept back is its fundamental and intrinsic costs (imposed by the algorith / concept itself, rather than economic limitations), opacity, inferiority to trust-based systems (e.g., credit payments or ordinary cash currency), inherent risks (both economic and criminal), and lack of safeguards (individual / transactional, systemic / institutional).