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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

> In an of itself, mixing or trading to obfuscate your identity shouldn't be considered a crime or unreasonable in the slightest.

"Financial privacy" isn't a real thing, because you owe taxes on income and investments. Can you explain to me how your tax assessor is able, then, to properly identify your income and tax you on it as appropriate?

(Money laundering and tax evasion do not always go hand-in-hand. Many launderers pay taxes as a cost of doing business. Cryptocurrency mixers seem to treat tax evasion as a feature.)

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Privacy exists even if the government violates it due to their tax schemes. A _right_ to privacy may even exist as a natural human right. If a country decides collectively that this is the case, then what ought to change is the tax policy, not every user service.

We can argue over how easy it would be, but I would presume its possible for a government to switch over to taxing hard assets like land, machines, and shipments at ports rather than income and investment products if we decide those should be shielded by a right to privacy. Most of human history existed without a tax on income or loans (investments), an argument that a right cannot exists because of the present tax structure is like the ultimate status quo warrior-ing.

> If a country decides collectively that this is the case, then what ought to change is the tax policy,

Your post is largely meaningless because, while this line is inarguably true, this also hasn't happened and so AML and KYC are still a thing--and there's precious little to indicate that anyone really cares about it aside from starve-the-beast conservatives and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and that's not a majority.

If a country does decide so collectively, great! We haven't. So yeah, it's illegal, and the currently-fictive right to financial privacy remains so.

USA had been like this: import duties, use taxes, no income tax.

Now with USA fiat money there is no financial need to have personal income tax.

I guess we differ on what rights are. I am arguing that a right to privacy including financial privacy could be a natural right and its recognition or lack thereof alone by the _current_ tax scheme cannot inform of of its existence or not.

The legality under existing laws has nothing to do with whether the right exists or not if its a natural right.

I also fail to see how one could construct a right to privacy that would include communications but not include financial transactions especially exchanges of value done over a btc-protocol (or one of its descendants) that exchange value with pure speech.

If congress and/or the judiciary was full of privacy enthusiasts, then the tax law would be changed majority be damned.

Your employer has your salary on record, so having financial privacy in no way prevents taxes being collected. Likewise you trade stocks through a broker, who knows how much you have in your brokerage account.

Finding an irrelevant case to talk about does not eliminate the relevant cases you're changing the conversation away from.

>> Cryptocurrency mixers seem to treat tax evasion as a feature

Historically there is huge market for that.

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