The EU parliament report is wrong. Without privacy, money's utility is extremely limited. Accounts that leak private financial information are also a major security liability, that empower criminals who engage in violent crimes like kidnapping for ransom, not to mention run of the mill scams like phishing.
Former Bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen notes how resistance to past government efforts to stifle privacy has had huge economic benefits. [1]:
>In the '90s, there was a group of people called the cypherpunks who were pushing to get encryption technology declassified. It used to be you couldn't create encryption products and ship them overseas because they were classified as a munition and the U.S. government didn't want you shipping munitions overseas. The notion of software being a munition seemed ridiculous to these people, so they began to change the way that technology was seen and used. It's thanks to them that we have good encryption that lets things like e-commerce work on the Web. There was also a lot of talk back then about digital cash and whether there was a way to pay for things that doesn't require you to trust a government or central authority.
There is now an effort by some government bodies to eliminate cash [2], and prevent the emergence of electronic cash, because of the financial privacy it gives people. I believe it's extremely important for the future that these efforts be resisted.
[1] http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/qa-gavin-andresen-bitcoin-foun...
[2] https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is...
Without privacy the authorities are able to tax you and track your purchases. That is why they hate cash, because it's anonymous. You can now cross the border with millions worth of USD stored on a microSD card without declaring anything. One of the purposes of cryptocurrencies was to escape the regulating grip of governments. What the bureaucrats in power do not understand is that anything could be used as money as long as there is confidence in that thing. In ancient China and Japan bags of rice and tea bricks were used as money during interesting times, some of which lasted up to 700 years.
Was this just a cute line or is it actually possible to reach them and get comments?
https://etherchain.org/tx/0x16b867d064cab80f0f5d938adda6d03c...
Good luck with that! :D
You may have $200 million in your "wallet" but it's not a lot of use to you unless you can find enough people to give you "real money" in exchange for your cryptocurrency.
I tan into this issue early on with Bitcoin. I was an early miner and at one point had some serious coin on hand. Unfortunately selling it all took a really long time and of course because it took so long my gains fluctuated wildly from transaction to transaction. I still walked away from the experience with more money than I had going into it - but nothing like I would have had if I had simply been able to dump it all at the peak of the market like I could do with a blue chip stock.
