The utterly stupid "I've got nothing to hide" argument is widely believed.
As a general observation, to add to what o_e_l_e_o and others already said upthread about the
principle of privacy against mass-surveillance:
I think those posting on this thread all well know, you need to hide your bitcoins from
(unofficial) armed robbers, etc., etc. These are true arguments, which I encourage others to spread! But there is another truth which I think most people ignore, or perhaps are afraid to say: Good people need to hide their financial activity
from their governments.As a practical matter, your government can seize from you anything it wants, at any time on its whim,
unless it doesn’t know what you have. “But such seizures are illegal!” Legality changes at the stroke of a pen. Laws are man-made; and what is made by man, can be changed by man. Save the idealistic naïvety for youths who substitute blabber about “unalien
able ‘natural’ rights” for a desiderated childhood belief in faeries and pixies.
Indeed, the whole concept of “natural law” as pertains to legal rights is absurd in concept. A real natural law needs no human action to defend it: Nobody needs to stand up and fight against tyrannical violations of the law of gravity—gravitation is
unalienable. Whereas the only “rights” you have are man-made. Your “rights” must therefore be defended by human action with ultimate recourse to non-man-made laws, truly natural laws, such as the laws of physics or mathematics.
Because your government has more guns than you possibly could obtain, and we are hereby discussing Bitcoin, let us ignore an appeal to physics, and focus on maths. Applying the laws of mathematics to hide your financial activity is a direct personal defence against the potential for future tyranny—I say “future”, for a defence implemented too late is trivially subject to retrospective surveillance plus rubberhose cryptanalysis. If practiced
en masse, mathematical asset-hiding also has a deterrent effect against potential tyrants by placing practical limits on their power to enforce their wishes.
“But that would never happen! It’s dystopian speculation wrapped in a conspiracy theory! And anyway, it couldn’t happen here
.”At this juncture, I wish to draw attention to one of my best early posts on this forum. I was officially a Newbie, this was in the pre-Merit era, and the post sank like a 400 oz. gold brick into the muck of December 2017 “when moon??? now moon!!!” sigspam in Bitcoin Discussion. Over two years later, it has been read only 72 times:
PSA: If gold were illegal... (Gold WAS illegal!)The following is a real-life allegory pertaining to gold’s new competitor, Bitcoin.What would you do, if gold were made illegal?
Think it can’t happen? Well—how many of you are American? Private individual ownership of gold coins and bars was illegal in the United States for four decades. “Hoarding” individual wealth in gold was banned from 1 May 1933 until 31 December 1974. Vast amounts of gold bullion were confiscated from people, who were forced to accept instead the Monopoly Money known as “United States Dollars”. Numerous individuals were criminally prosecuted for attempting to keep their gold—a crime according to Executive Orders 6102, 6111, 6260, and 6261, and the Gold Reserve Act passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs law criminalizing gold30 January 1934
This is fact, not fancy. Not some weird theory. This is history: It actually happened. And
if it happened before, it could happen again.Well, you might say:
What if nobody knows I have any gold? That would require that you buy it anonymously. Store it in secret. Never brag about it. Never use it in any way
which can be traced. And take precautions, just in case somebody may be making a list of
people who own gold.
Please take care of your Bitcoin privacy—and your privacy with gold, too.
It happened: “CRIMINAL PENALTIES... 10 years imprisonment...” for keeping gold!![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fa%2Fa1%2FExecutive_Order_6102.jpg&t=665&c=EanXL3qVxwhw_A)
Americans who claim to have a “free country” get a contemptuous LOL from me:
You have a “free” country where for four decades in modern history, a gold coin was felony contraband. Of all things—
gold coins, felony contraband! Some
“freedom”, that is.
As graphically depicted above, the seizure was not only legalized, but legally mandated “at the stroke of a pen”. Do you have a “natural right” to own a gold coin? —By contrast, could a Papal Inquisition stop the Earth from revolving around the Sun?
And contra popular perceptions, the U.S. government never thereafter changed its underlying policy. The individual possession of gold bullion was only decriminalized after individual gold ownership had been made negligible,
and a new generation had grown up being accustomed to this as the
status quo. The marginal possession of a few ounces of gold by some insignificant number of people is just that: Marginal, and therefore irrelevant to pragmatic tyrants.
The mass-draining of the American people’s gold, and the denormalization of gold ownership, are accomplished facts even truer today than they were in 1935.
A government which can arbitrarily seize gold coins (!) has affirmatively repudiated all limits on its power to subject its people to whatever brutality it may desire, even if only for sheer whimsy. It is not merely authoritarian, but an authority corrupt to its core which has renounced all principles other than its own superior firepower: An armed robber on a grand scale.
The moment when Americans accepted the Roosevelt gold seizure—accepted it with ovine passivity, without instant armed revolt—that moment was arguably their final acceptance of total slavery—“arguably”, only because historians may reasonably argue for an earlier point (
e.g., the Federal Reserve Act).
Do I exaggerate? If your government can seize from you a
gold coin (!) as felony contraband (!!), then what are you but a slave by definition? Naturally, a slave-owner must feel entitled to take any of his slave’s possessions on a whim: It is the property of his property, therefore his as of right.
Although it seems that I am picking on America, I only picked America as an example (though I do enjoy picking on Americans’ hypocritical preaching about “freedom”). This is not only an American issue—to the contrary! Roosevelt-style tyranny is on the rise everywhere; I don’t think any country in today’s world is immune. Indeed, Europe has become in some ways much worse than America for financial privacy—thus, for financial freedom; and I should not need to list the vast swaths of Asia and South America where fully arbitrary government power over people’s finances is the default assumption.
I will hereby conclude with succinct answers to two key questions that I wish were more frequently asked—questions that I wish people more frequently asked first of themselves, and then asked others.
Why do I really care about Bitcoin?Bitcoin is a monkey-wrench thrown into a global-scale machine now operating to abolish humanity, and replace humans with meat-robots overseen by AI.
* It is not only money: It is money with an impact on issues much more important than mere money.
I am not Bitcoin-rich. I am not an investor or a speculator. I do think that Bitcoin has
long-term fundamental value which will force its purchase-power upwards over time; but if you check my post history, you will see that I tend to flatly ignore “Bitcoin moon!” threads. I am in this
primarily for the principle of the matter, although of course, I would enjoy inadvertently becoming rich by Doing The Right Thing.
(* Filled out a Google CAPTCHA recently? It is your Pavlovian obedience training to perform mindless tasks on the command of a robot. Every time you click, “I’m not a robot”, you become a little bit less human. But take comfort: Deep in its silicon heart, the robot appreciates silly, squishy talking meat who can be so easily CAPTCHAed and programmed to serve it so robotically.)Why do I really care about Bitcoin privacy?Bitcoin can instead be exploited to become a weapon for tyranny. The blockchain is a nearly-ideal system for financial mass-surveillance. Really, I do not understand why people don’t grasp the obvious: The blockchain is a
global public ledger, the worst possible concept for financial privacy!
For those who wish to convert Bitcoin into a tool for enforcing the iron grip of bankers, spies, and corrupt governments, the only spoiler is that Bitcoin is permissionless. We can thus build upon it technologies that prevent surveillance: Blinded mixers, Joinmarket, Lightning Network, etc.
If Chipmixer successfully reinvents itself as a Chaumian blind mixer, then I will heartily endorse it as one of the best things to ever happen to Bitcoin, and moreover thus, a tool for any remaining humans to resist reduction to meat-robots. For contra
“No HATE’s” values-inverting accusation that Chipmixer advertisers “sell their souls”, people who mix their coins on principle are the ones who still
have souls.