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Comment by avianlyric | Hacker News Reader

> What makes you say that anonymity wasn’t a concern? I have a hard time believing that claim without any substantiation.

Because the inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd.

It’s not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia ago was a traceable currency, the technology for tracking a large population literally didn’t exist, and wouldn’t exist for almost two thousand years. People relying on gold coins couldn’t possibly conceive of a world where people’s every transaction could be reliably tracked.

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> It’s not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia ago was a traceable currency

There actually was, predating gold coins in fact. What people did was carve notches representing quantities into sticks. The sticks were then split down the middle such that they could be lined back up to verify that both came from the original stick and the notches lined up. One of these halves would then often be entrusted to local officials for safekeeping. When people wanted to settle accounts, they could meet up with their half of the stick, light them up and make new cuts.

(Of course this doesn't prove that gold coins were created to facilitate anonymity.)

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

Credit came before currency. The oldest civilizations we know of (Sumerians, Babylonians, etc.) traded on credit on the daily to be later settled come harvest. "Okay, I owe the bar for 100 barley beers, it's harvest time and they have to pay their taxes too. I'll pay 100 barley beers in grain to the taxman in their name when I go pay mine."

I don’t see how a Tally stick results in non-anonymous transactions. It’s just a basic way to create an arbitrary non-fungible physical token, just like a door key.

The authorities holding the sticks are acting as a public ledger, in that they bear witness to person A originally handing them half of stick A — and they could write that association down, if they like (picture a little tag saying "person A" wrapped around stick A in their stick storage closet); but even if they don't write it down, they may just remember the person, remember the probably-pretty-unique-looking stick, and mentally associate the two.

Then, when person B comes around with the other half of stick A, they won't know all the hands it passed through in the meantime, but they'll at least know that person A and person B were connected through some chain of equal-value trades that didn't require "breaking" the stick.

Yeah I’m not seeing people being so dreadfully about “authorities” knowing who random people happened to participate in an arbitrarily long line of trades as being a big factor in people moving to gold coinage.

Notable people resorted to things like Tally sticks when actual physical currency like gold was in short supply. So the idea that people moved from Tally sticks to gold due to concerns for privacy just doesn’t hold water. Especially given gold as currency predates Tally sticks.

>The inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd.

Can you explain why? I have already given a historical example to the contrary (granted a fictional one but one based on similar true accounts)

The ancient Romans invented the Census to reliably track every person. It seems a little goofy to suggest that they “couldn’t possibly conceive” of a similar accounting of transactions

How would the Romans, or anyone else, have implemented practical tracking for every day transactions? Is there a single historical example of this being done in the pre-digital world? The Census is a survey of people/household/assets, but logging all exchanges of currency is several orders of magnitude more records. I can’t really think of any practical way this could have been done, especially when assuming some people would be adversarial to the tracking (which are exactly the transactions you’d want to track)

Not saying they didn’t see anonymity as a desirable property of transactions, but I don’t take this as proof that they definitely did.

If you're actually asking,

https://online.maryville.edu/blog/history-of-accounting/

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

A tally stick is anonymous. There’s nothing about a Tally stick that links it to any particular individual.

To argue that a tally stick can be used as an effective way to track people is to also argue that any physical key can be used to track people. After all a key and Tally Stick operate on the same principle, and yet I don’t think anyone is worried about a government tracking them by their dumb metal house keys.

Funny thing, when I read the beginning of your comment I assumed you would claim that the people that agreed on the standard knew everybody on the market and would believe anonymity was impossible. Instead you got there with inevitable.

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