Re: The threat of privacy

[John Young]

Good stuff. Thanks.

Reminds that cryptography has led to the loss of 
privacy by tagging crypto users, coders, rebels!, 
promoters, investors. So too cryptocurrency, the 
Internet, anonymizers, TOR, drop boxes, secure 
drops, Signal, Telegram, burst transmissions, 
privacy policies, pro-encryption advocates, 
comsec wizards, the array of promissories one by 
one gobbling gullible adopters urged on by lists 
like this and social media, MSM. financial 
greeders, hackers, leak sites, turncoats needing pensions.

To be sure, "cash' the imaginaire of economists, 
is not the same as paper money which can also be 
tracked by human residue, transactional spoors, 
aggrieved victims, informers, world bank scholars 
under contract to finger malefactors, family 
members eager to payback those who fucked them, dear Mary tell what you know.

At 10:38 AM 8/3/2020, you wrote:

http://www.kahnfrance.com/cmk/The%20threat%20of%20privacy%20distribution%20version.pdf


The Threat of Privacy
By Charles M. Kahn1

Like artists, we academics want to believe that 
if one of our works doesn’t get enough 
attention it’s because we’re ahead of our 
time. I’d like to pretend that everything 
I’ve written is pathbreaking, and will 
eventually be recognized for its true 
importance. But I have to admit that there are 
really only a couple of cases where I can say 
with hindsight that something I wrote has been ahead of its time.

One of them2 is a paper written with Jamie 
McAndrews and Will Roberds, published in 2005, 
and titled “Money is Privacy.” We wrote it 
partly as a response to Narayana 
Kocherlakota’s famous paper “Money is 
Memory,” which could be taken as arguing that 
cash is essentially a record‐keeping device, 
tracking who was a net creditor and who a net 
debtor to society with respect to resources 
provided or consumed. The implication was that 
if it became easy to keep credit records directly, cash could wither away.
In our paper we argued instead that a key role 
of cash was its ability to protect the 
purchaser’s identity. So we predicted that, 
even while the reductions in costs of record 
keeping and increases in the speed of data 
transmission were expanding the usage of 
credit‐ and deposit‐account‐ based 
payments arrangements, cash would survive. 
Because the desire for privacy would always 
generate demand for cash, it would be a 
mistake—and ultimately futile—to attempt to 
abolish it. At the te time, people were attuned 
to many of the problems of privacy, but there 
had not yet been a clear recognized link between 
the value of privacy and the role of payments 
systems. (Remember, bitcoin was only released in 2009).

[...]


1 Keynote address at “Financial Market 
Infrastructure Conference II: New Thinking in a 
New Era” at De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam, 7‐8 June 2017.
2 The other was my dissertation, back in 1980. 
It was on liquidity and the pricing of illiquid 
assets. At that time, no one thought this was an 
important issue in finance: financial markets 
were liquid; everybody “knew” that. So the work went nowhere. Oh well.