On 22/10/2014 03:22 am, Jason Iannone wrote: > On a fundamental level I wonder why privacy is important and why we > should care about it.
Financial privacy is all about theft. If someone knows where the money is, it can be stolen. It works statistically, in that the set of attackers is typically not well known, so people tend to habitualise financial privacy. There would be some who would say this isn't required today, but this is just sophistry. The wealth-stealing attack is as pervasive today as it was thousands of years ago. One inside complaint about for example AML is that it is a setup for theft, and there are plenty of cases which bear that out. I.e., now that wealth can be measured via pervasive financial monitoring and now that the principle of consolidated revenue has been breached, the police are incentivised to become the attacker. Because they get to share in the proceeds. C.f., recent reports that foreigners are being warned not to carry cash in USA because police steal it. Financial privacy isn't universal. In my work in Kenya I discovered that it is somewhat reversed, groups come together and share their financial information as a defence against other attackers. I speculate that this may be helped by the fact that most of their wealth is observable at a close distance by their close community. One can get into trouble mixing financial privacy with other forms of privacy. The conversation gets tortured. A system to protect money might provide for split keys, which results in less 'privacy' but more security. As security of money is the number 1 goal of any money system, other forms of privacy might be compromisable, it isn't an absolute. This philosophical flaw might be levelled at Digicash which placed the blinding formula on a pedestal, and we can note the irony of financial privacy with Bitcoin. iang _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
