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Big Brother's War on Cash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2INFEbc4TY
Quote:
Everyone is surely aware by now that all of our digital communications are being sent to government databases for storage. If our American ancestors could see it, they wouldn't believe their eyes. We still, however, have the ability to use cash. All of our economic decisions are not under constant government surveillance. Ron Paul discusses the dangers of Big Brother's War on Cash.
The War on Cash, banning cash =
- To monitor and record every transaction; to monitor your behavior; to observe where you go, who you donate to, who you associate with; what businesses and organizations you patronize; what you buy; what you own; your patterns and behaviors and preferences; how much you save …
- To maximize collection of fees, fines and taxes, simply impose fees and skim them right off of every transaction
- To exercise total control: the ability to shut down any business, bank account, credit line; or all transactions. When all cash is gone and the computer says you’ve been frozen, every transaction is declined, how do you buy or sell or save?
- Provides the mechanism to prevent the common people from the ability to escape the ravages of mass inflation when it occurs by freezing, limiting how much or stopping altogether the conversion of electronic currency by purchasing hard assets such as gold or silver.
From Business Insider:
The shots fired by governments to fight its war on cash may have several unintended [or more likely intended] casualties:
1. Privacy
- Cashless transactions would always include some intermediary or third-party.
- Increased government access to personal transactions and records.
- Certain types of transactions (gambling, etc.) could be barred or frozen by governments.
- Decentralized cryptocurrency could be an alternative for such transactions
2. Savings
- Savers could no longer have the individual freedom to store wealth “outside” of the system.
- Eliminating cash makes negative interest rates (NIRP) a feasible option for policymakers.
- A cashless society also means all savers would be “on the hook” for bank bail-in scenarios.
- Savers would have limited abilities to react to extreme monetary events like deflation or inflation.
3. Human Rights
- Rapid demonetization has violated people’s rights to life and food.
- In India, removing the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes has caused multiple human tragedies, including patients being denied treatment and people not being able to afford food.
- Demonetization also hurts people and small businesses that make their livelihoods in the informal sectors of the economy.
4. Cybersecurity
- With all wealth stored digitally, the potential risk and impact of cybercrime increases.
- Hacking or identity theft could destroy people’s entire life savings.
- The cost of online data breaches is already expected to reach $2.1 trillion by 2019, according to Juniper Research.
From James Rickards:
These efforts are always portrayed in the most favorable light. Private parties talk about convenience and lower costs. Governments talk about putting pressure on tax cheats, terrorists and criminals.
Governments always use money laundering, drug dealing and terrorism as an excuse to keep tabs on honest citizens and deprive them of the ability to use money alternatives such as physical cash and gold.
But the so-called “cashless society” is just a Trojan horse for a system in which all financial wealth is electronic and represented digitally in the records of a small number of megabanks and asset managers.
Once that is achieved, it will be easy for state power to seize and freeze the wealth, or subject it to constant surveillance, taxation and other forms of digital confiscation.
The war on cash has two main thrusts. …1)make it difficult to obtain cash in the first place. U.S. banks will report anyone taking more than $3,000 in cash as engaging in a “suspicious activity” using Treasury Form SAR (Suspicious Activity Report). … 2) eliminate large-denomination banknotes. [They have already eliminated the $10,000, $5,000, $1,000, and $500 bills] …
The real burden of the war on cash falls on honest citizens who are made vulnerable to wealth confiscation through negative interest rates, loss of privacy, account freezes and limits on cash withdrawals or transfers. The whole idea of the war on cash is to force savers into digital bank accounts so their money can be taken from them in the form of negative interest rates. …
India provides the most dramatic example. How would you like to go to bed one night and then wake up the next morning to discover that all bills larger than $5.00 were no longer legal tender? That’s essentially what happened in India not long ago. …
Of course, there’s no denying that digital payments are certainly convenient. … The surest way to lull someone into complacency is to offer a “convenience” that quickly becomes habit … But when the next financial panic comes, those without tangible wealth will be totally at the mercy of banks and governments who will decide exactly how much of your own money you’re allowed to have each day.
Just ask the citizens of Cyprus, Greece and India who have gone through this experience in recent years.
Other dangers arise from the fact that digital money, transferred by credit or debit cards or other electronic payments systems, are completely dependent on the power grid. If the power grid goes out due to storms, accidents, sabotage or cyberattacks, our digital economy will grind to a complete halt.
Obviously governments would love to go cashless, but I don't think they'll be able to go too far with it. At some point people will rebel, either when inflation gets too high or the lack of privacy becomes too much or some other problem.
Exactly.Quote:
Originally Posted by AZJoe
Bullet points one, three and four are why government is pushing the idea.
Two is why the banksters love the idea.
They make billions annually on transaction fees.
They love the idiot AmeriKunt who swipes his card for a donut and coffee.
Once implemented, the very concept of Liberty will be fully inverted. Needs some explaining...
Currently, you are "allowed" to spend your money on anything you want, but there is one catch. There is also a list of things you are "not allowed" to spend money on. Those things are deemed illegal. For example, illegal drugs, certain types of firearms (depending on who you are and if you have a license), sex (where prostitution is illegal), etc.
When all paper money has been eliminated, the concept of Liberty will invert so by default EVERYTHING is explicitly denied EXCEPT for a list of things you are allowed to buy and who you are allowed to buy from. You will be allowed to buy stuff from Walmarx, Amazon, Ford, and other major businesses. Smaller businesses you'll end up needing to apply for permission to purchase from. That could also invert so weight of that permission to sell lands on the seller instead of the buyer. That situation could also easily apply to permissions being required for both buyer and seller.
Say hello to the most anemic budget you've ever had to live on.
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Other related thread:
In a Cashless World, You'd Better Pray the Power Never Goes Out
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...Never-Goes-Out
How do you convince people that when the government spends money without taxing you they are not robbing the bank the bank is robbing you.
That is exactly what Central Banks are for.Quote:
Originally Posted by nikcers
The real purpose of the Central Bank is to prevent the people from influencing govt through taxes. If the govt no longer has to care about taxes as a source of revenue, then the control of the people over their govt has been removed.
Many people think that governments of all forms get their revenue only from taxes. They dont. Well, at least not as far as Central Banking is concerned. When people pay Income Taxes to the IRS, that currency actually goes to pay the interest, not to the government itself. Government gets its money from borrowing it from the Central Bank, and the people are left to pay that bill, and are also left with no ability to deprive their government of funding by not paying taxes, such as being laid off, etc.
Nice infographic. One quibble is that Bitcoin should not be lumped in with Visa and other payments systems that are connected to the central-banking octopus. Precious metals (specifically, coins & bars) represent one form of dissent to the central-banking system. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that are not beholden to the central-banksters are another form of dissent to the central-banking system. Both forms of dissent are valid and both will encounter opposition from the central-banksters because they have a god-complex. Of course, they know they can't control physics or mathematics so they hate it when people use physics (gold/silver) and mathematics (cryptocurrency) to secure their freedoms.
Bitcoin is really capable of acting like cash (anonymous, offline, hand-to-hand transactions). See Opendime, for example. This device allows you to "lock" a certain amount of bitcoins into the device in a way that they cannot be removed without destroying the tamper-evidence on the device itself. Anyone can verify that the bitcoins locked in the device are still there even without accessing the Bitcoin network itself, as long as they have a general-purpose Bitcoin client. Finally, the coins can be securely re-assigned to a new owner in such a way that the old owner cannot "take back" the bitcoins locked in the device, all without accessing the Bitcoin network.
Another feature that will hopefully be coming to Bitcoin soon will allow truly anonymous exchange of Bitcoins over the Internet in an "off-chain" system. This is already possible but there are some infrastructure that needs to be built to make this capability easy-to-use for an ordinary person. I am referring to Zcash. It is very similar to what Opendime is doing but it uses some fancy maths to replicate the physical anonymity of a hardware device, over the Internet. As long as you can protect your physical anonymity (e.g. by using Tor), the anonymity of a remote transaction using Zcash would be unconditional. This gives the anonymity benefits of physical exchange with the added benefits of greater ease-of-use (email versus physical exchange) and you don't have to show your face to the person you are exchanging with.
Bitcoin will not and cannot replace gold/silver. But gold/silver cannot compete with Visa-style payment systems in terms of ease-of-use and scalability. Bitcoin can - in fact, Bitcoin can do better than these systems.
Ironic since the entire economy in Cuba runs on cash...
Ironic since Cuba's entire economy is nothing but cash.
Great post