this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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sorry but banning anonymous payments is pretty good for fighting corruption...
Corrupt politicians can simply ignore the law. If they didn't ignore it, they wouldn't be very corrupt.
Yes, but now there's an explicit law over which they can be prosecuted
Good point. My statement was a bit reductive, I just worry when it comes to creating the kind of blanket ban on stuff that people can work around if they're powerful enough.
This is not true in France. Politicians that have proven fraud are arrested and charged. In France we have Sarkozy, Cahuzac, Fillon that were all charged with crimes.
They were president, minister and presidential candidate respectively. I'd be surprised if it was different in the USA. I'm seeing that trump is also being charged, the system seems to be working.
Consumers payments deserves their privacy, but business ones needs absolutely to be fully traceable.
Could it be possible to use two different yet identical interchangeable currencies, one traceable for making business only, and one untraceable for consumers retail transactions?
loosely i.e.
... I don't know there is probably still a loophole
I am pretty sure the lesser part of corruption is cash. Probably more stuff like exchanging a lucrative contract for political support.
They are not stupid. Afterall cash needs to be explained, a good contract gives you cash and the explanation.
Can't say in terms of proportion cash vs. non-cash but one might want to watch the Qatargate recent documentary on Arte which shows that somehow a 700k EUR luggage was found in the house of a MEP. Piles of cash sound outdated yet clearly still exist nowadays.
Geoblocked
Video, audio and subtitles via yt-dlp at https://fabien.benetou.fr/pub/home/ytdl/
I'll leave that for few days.
Thanks!
Cash is mostly traceable at point of contact unless you keep it in a money bin and don't spend it, though..
Not necessarily, it's only traceable if you generate receipts on both sides. I don't know about EU law, but in the US, you only need to report cash deposits if they're over $10k, and if your deposits are always over $10k (e.g. you're a big retailer or something), another $10k here and there won't raise any eyebrows.
Cash is still king when it comes to corruption since it's easy to exchange it for favors w/o generating a receipt at all.
The 500€ bill was removed from circulation because it was used almost exclusively for corruption and illegal trade.
After the Panama Papers and everything like it I've experienced in my life, I truly believe it doesn't matter if very wealthy or powerful people are exposed on anything they do unless it involves what Epstein did. Financial crime is not generally of interest, regardless of how interesting it might be to you and me. Sure this can be used to fight corruption, but why is the system corrupt in the first place? Is this really going to be used against those corrupting influences or is it going to be used as another of the many tools in the drug war?
The solution isn't to do nothing. This post reads like it's not in good faith. Like it's trying to promote giving up.
Of course. By suggesting that I don't think this will do anything about corruption and will if anything be a tool used for corrupt purposes, I don't mean to suggest that there is nothing to do about corruption. Even though I think the solutions to social and economic problems are rarely solved from the top down, I do think the issues can be addressed bottom up. The people have the power and it's only by circumstance that some people appear to hold the power.
But fighting corruption is not a goal I'm ready to pay any prize for.
Russia almost did it. Now it's finally free of corruption!
Haha , nope. It's way more corrupt than before. You can even purchase on the dark web a list of items your person of interest bought this year.
so ban it only for government (people and assets) related transactions
True that. The system that we have is the product of many painful lessons, taught to us by global crises and crimes. People, who oppose this system, should stop reading nonsense on reddit and 4chan, and start with books and lectures from educated economists.
Putin's corruption works fine without anonymous payments
i mean does it really? russia is heavily sanctioned to the rest of the western world.
Putin is not Russia
That's literally what businesses do, it's called accounting. And if you read the underlying article and/or law, you'd see that this is targeting businesses, not individuals.
You've just invented accounting haha
i mean banks and law enforcement can already get that information
There's a special status for some people in Russia, it's called Foreign Agent, and I believe they need to write down everything they spend money on this way