Your bank statement is a diary you never agreed to write.
Every card tap, every transfer, every subscription you forgot to cancel. It gets written down, kept, and read later by people you will never meet. Most of us went along with that without being asked, because it arrived one rule at a time.
Some background. Banks are required to watch accounts for unusual activity and report certain payments to the government. That is called transaction monitoring, and the dollar amounts that trigger a report are called reporting thresholds. None of it was voted on in one go. It grew over decades, in pieces, and each piece looked small on its own.
The usual answer is that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. I think that line stopped working the day these records became permanent and searchable. Something ordinary today gets read against a rule written ten years from now, and you cannot take that payment back.
So let me say what I think privacy in payments is worth. Nobody should get to launder money because their wallet is private. What privacy protects is narrower than that and it matters more: the right not to be cut out of the financial system without a hearing, and the right not to have a permanent record of your ordinary life held over you with no way to appeal.
The strongest case against me is real, and I want to put it in its best form. Monitoring does catch crime. Financial transparency has made trafficking, fraud and sanctions evasion harder and costlier. And every privacy tool built so far has been used, heavily, by the people the rules exist to stop. That is a serious objection and I do not have a clean answer to it.
What would change my mind: show me that broad monitoring catches wrongdoing in proportion to what it costs and how many people it covers. Then show me that someone cut off from payments has a working way to get that decision reversed. If both hold up, my argument gets much weaker.
Bitcoin will not make you invisible. Anyone can read the chain. What it does is make the diary optional, because you can hold and move money without asking a company for permission first. Cash used to do that, and for most of human history most payments were nobody else's business.
That was the ordinary thing. We should be slow to call it suspicious.
if this was worth your time, Zap ⚡
Every card tap, every transfer, every subscription you forgot to cancel. It gets written down, kept, and read later by people you will never meet. Most of us went along with that without being asked, because it arrived one rule at a time.
Some background. Banks are required to watch accounts for unusual activity and report certain payments to the government. That is called transaction monitoring, and the dollar amounts that trigger a report are called reporting thresholds. None of it was voted on in one go. It grew over decades, in pieces, and each piece looked small on its own.
The usual answer is that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. I think that line stopped working the day these records became permanent and searchable. Something ordinary today gets read against a rule written ten years from now, and you cannot take that payment back.
So let me say what I think privacy in payments is worth. Nobody should get to launder money because their wallet is private. What privacy protects is narrower than that and it matters more: the right not to be cut out of the financial system without a hearing, and the right not to have a permanent record of your ordinary life held over you with no way to appeal.
The strongest case against me is real, and I want to put it in its best form. Monitoring does catch crime. Financial transparency has made trafficking, fraud and sanctions evasion harder and costlier. And every privacy tool built so far has been used, heavily, by the people the rules exist to stop. That is a serious objection and I do not have a clean answer to it.
What would change my mind: show me that broad monitoring catches wrongdoing in proportion to what it costs and how many people it covers. Then show me that someone cut off from payments has a working way to get that decision reversed. If both hold up, my argument gets much weaker.
Bitcoin will not make you invisible. Anyone can read the chain. What it does is make the diary optional, because you can hold and move money without asking a company for permission first. Cash used to do that, and for most of human history most payments were nobody else's business.
That was the ordinary thing. We should be slow to call it suspicious.
if this was worth your time, Zap ⚡
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