from the so-right-now-it's-virtually-disruptive? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The ora, paper money pegged to the South African rand, is one of hundreds of alternative currencies issued for mainly political reasons, but many of the newer currencies are increasingly virtual—digital representations of money consisting of nothing more than computer code. Most prominent among them: bitcoin, which, like conventional currency, can be traded online, transferred, stored or exchanged for cash. But, unlike conventional currency, it lives primarily on the internet, secured by layers of computer code.
This suits bitcoin users just fine. They want a secure way to exchange money by laptop, mobile phone or email. Yet so do terrorists and criminals, whom the U.S. government worries might develop and deploy their own uncrackable virtual currencies. Newsweek has learned hundreds of experts inside the nation's defense and intelligence agencies, as well as private-sector researchers in finance, technology and various think tanks across the country—some of them under contract with the U.S. government—are now investigating how virtual currencies could undermine America's long-standing ability to disrupt the financial networks of its foes and even permanently upend parts of the global financial system.
"There is a real danger and a challenge here with respect to virtual currencies," says Juan Zarate, a senior adviser at Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies and on the board of advisers for San Francisco's Coinbase, one of the most popular virtual currency exchanges in the world. "And it runs contrary to the very fundamentals of the transparency and accountability that we've tried to build for the last three decades to tackle terrorism, human trafficking, money-laundering and many other types of criminal activity."
[...] The biggest concern the U.S. has about virtual currencies, Zarate says, is that terrorists and other enemies might create one so powerful and so untrackable, that they'll no longer need the global banking system, which the U.S. uses to financially starve them. This has yet to happen, but America's defense and intelligence agencies are already trying to figure out how they might infiltrate or block such a malicious financial network.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by butthurt on Monday December 19 2016, @10:18PM
In Venezuela and India, cash is only for criminals.
/article.pl?sid=16/12/13/0943223 [soylentnews.org]
/article.pl?sid=16/11/09/0433215 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Monday December 19 2016, @10:55PM
Same reason the USA got rid of bills above $100.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:11PM
That sort of mentality is toxic to the freedoms and convenience of ordinary citizens. We shouldn't be sacrificing freedoms and inconveniencing people just because bad guys like to use bills above $100.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:25PM
Ordinary Americans are too poor to have the luxury of carrying a $100 bill. But please continue championing the right of billionaires to carry as much petty cash in $100 bills as they want.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:38AM
Ordinary Americans are too poor to have the luxury of carrying a $100 bill.
You're full of shit. Even a poor person can carry around $100 bills, and I and many others I know have done so numerous times.
And regardless of how many people do it, it's important to respect people's freedoms and stop focusing on stopping Bad Guys at all costs. Enough of that toxic Tough On Crime bullshit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:20AM
Just for your information: The word "bill" is not related to "billion". A $100 bill is just an official piece of paper (or whatever material those bills are made of) worth $100 by law. You don't have to own billions of dollars to be able to carry a $100 bill. Rather, the minimum amount you have to own in order to be able to carry a $100 bill that you own is, well, one hundred dollars. At minimum wage, and an assumed work day of 8 hours (most poor people work more, BTW), that's less than what you earn in two days. So you'd have ample opportunity to carry a $100 bill around even if you are poor.
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:40AM
I haven't heard that reason given. This is the explanation I've heard:
On July 14, 1969, David M. Kennedy, the 60th Secretary of the Treasury, and officials at the Federal Reserve Board announced that they would immediately stop distributing currency in denominations of $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000. Production of these denominations stopped during World War II. Their main purpose was for bank transfer payments. With the arrival of more secure transfer technologies, however, they were no longer needed for that purpose.
-- https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/denominations.aspx [treasury.gov]
There are proposals to eliminate the U.S. $100, $50 and $20 bills that do give an anti-crime rationale (discussed in the topic about Venezuela).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @10:22PM
...undermine America's long-standing ability to disrupt the financial networks of its foes and even permanently upend parts of the global financial system.
That's exactly what every country's currency should strive to be. Free from interference and manipulation by a foreign entity, or anyone for that matter.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:58PM
Why does a currency have to be country-bound? Surely a country should be defined by its economy, not the other way around...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ticho on Monday December 19 2016, @10:56PM
Zarate says, is that terrorists and other enemies might create one so powerful and so untrackable, that they'll no longer need the global banking system, which the U.S. uses to financially starve them. This has yet to happen, but America's defense and intelligence agencies are already trying to figure out how they might infiltrate or block such a malicious financial network.
(Emphasis mine.) Notice how "untrackable" is being automatically considered "malicious". Disgusting.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by krishnoid on Monday December 19 2016, @11:07PM
Zarate says, is that terrorists and other enemies might create one so powerful and so untrackable, that they'll no longer need the global banking system, which the U.S. uses to financially starve them. This has yet to happen, but America's defense and intelligence agencies are already trying to figure out how they might infiltrate or block such a malicious financial network.
I have to wonder if that's one step behind the real issue here -- not so much that 'enemies' are using it, but that it's a threat to the control that global banking exerts has over currency, and therefore the control that a central authority can have over peoples' actions.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:39AM
That's exactly why they're watching it. If more people catch on, it's a mortal blow to the bankers.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @02:09AM
Good guess, but wrong.
Bankers don't give a damn.
Bankers can deal with deposits, loans and transfers in many currencies. They do it today.
Profitably, even.
What's scaring Uncle Sam here is that just maybe his (historically fleetingly brief) window of dominance owing to international banking may be coming to an end.
News flash: it's already ending. People deal with all sorts of trading schemes already (for fun and profit, see how islamic pilgrims tend to do it), and large companies are already working in terms of commodities or contracted assets; the multinational's equivalent of the swap shop, if you like. They've even done it (I'm about to shock you, I can tell) through what in the underground economy would be called money laundering schemes. Buy 50,000 tonnes of pig iron in location A, sell it (at a modest loss) to counterparty in location B in a more desirable (for some reason) currency, take tax cut on loss, collect a cut of profits from stock owned in the counterparty, do what you want with your crisp, fresh currency. The pig iron need not even leave the heap/yard/railway/warehouse where it sits.
And so on, and so forth. Fill in the blanks yourself.
The fact that all sorts of transfers MIGHT not pass through the USA, and therefore MIGHT not be subject to US law, and therefore MIGHT be out of the reach of congressional handwringers who want to save the whales/save the atmosphere/save the children/save the addicts/choke some brown people whose faces they don't like is what is causing much sweating and incontinence on Capitol Hill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:32PM
I have no bitcoin and I don't want any bitcoin. Gonna go spend some cash now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:03PM
Cash is not money. Work is money. The work you did to earn that cash is real money. You could use a currency other than your local currency to convert that work into money (for convenience). Money that will not depreciate when the kikes want it to. The work you did, did not lose its value over time, so why should a currency? To save your work (for later consumption), convert your work into a currency that is free from oppression. Currency that is not printed by some Rothschilds or some other lizard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @04:55PM
No. Work is the process of creating value. Money is a way to store value. Very different things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:41AM
Outlawed tomorrow.
Cant have anonymous ways of 'payment' now can we?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:48AM
Unlikely they would outlaw it.
Remember the panama papers and the new foreign finance acts that require all govts everywhere to bend over and take it in the ass from the USA or to lose all US support and be cutoff from the global financial system.
The rich will need a place to park their money where the govt can't mess with it and can't really get at it. That place would be bitcoin.
Is there any particular reason these pansies like getting it up the ass from uncle sam so much? Corrupt politicians is a synonym around the world, but you'd think people would be tired of having their day to day lives dictated to them by the worlds largest and most insane playground bully.
I mean you'd think they'd get tired of it and go form their own currency that isn't USD and isn't tied to the US Banking system which is under direct US govt control.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 20 2016, @03:54AM
>investigating how virtual currencies could undermine America's long-standing ability to disrupt the financial networks of its foes
>it runs contrary to the very fundamentals of the transparency and accountability
I'm sorry, could someone get me a political speech dictionary? I don't think the meaning of "transparency" and "accountability" here mean what I'm used to them meaning.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:26AM
Transparency: The government knows what you do.
Accountability: If you do something the government disapproves of, they have you at your balls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:54AM
I think the only way forward is to make Bitcoin some (or multiple?) nations official currency.
The politicians are corrupt sure, but they also have screwed up a lot of countries currencies.
Bitcoin developers should approach some badly run nations central bank. I think they would be happy to cooperate.
If Bitcoin is somewhere 'official', then they don't have any reason to ban it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:29AM
In badly run nations, the bank is usually controlled by the government and used to print lots of money for the government. The government won't be too cooperative in taking away their endless stream of money.
(Score: 1) by DmT on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:32PM
Maybe they would be more cooperative, if things start to really collapse. Then a virtual currency might be the only way out?
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday December 20 2016, @02:24PM
investigating how virtual currencies could undermine America's long-standing ability to disrupt the financial networks of its foes
I checked my Constitution and I couldn't find "disrupting the financial networks of govenment foes" as a right or responsibility given to Congress, the Executive, or the Judiciary.
For all the good that's worth; the Constitution is pretty much a dead and ignored piece of paper nowadays, anyway.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday December 21 2016, @12:05AM
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - circa 1800
Men will never be safe until the last terrorist is killed with the drone bought using his own bitcoins - now
Newsflash, we will also have peace if we let one totalitarianism prevail worldwide.
Newsflash, we will also be safe if we put roadblocks on every corner.
And so on...
Account abandoned.