Electronic money is inherently authoritarian. (Bitcoin is authoritarian and deflationary, and deflation rewards first movers and the rich far more than normal people.)
A few weeks ago John Michael Greer noted that part of what happened during Covid is that people left the formal economy and joined in the informal one.
The strength of a government can, most simply, be measured by how much it can tax. The early absolutist monarchs spent much of their time figuring out how to tax people, something which was very difficult: they built bureaucracies largely to increase their income, so they could wage war better.
Cash money is always a problem to governments, because people can exchange it without registering the exchange. Granted, governments became very good at tracking money, but there were always ways to avoid the system, especially if you were smart and spent cash carefully. I’ve had multiple friends who worked for some period for cash under the table, especially the in the (old) gig economy and in restaurants.
Electronic money, whether done on a blockchain or not (though blockchains are terrible for privacy), with the removal of cash money, makes it almost impossible to escape the state’s taxation and makes many small exchanges not worth doing, since the fuss and expense of tax accounting is usually an immense pain.
So e-money is something governments really want more of, and it’s something that people who are concerned with real freedom, not theoretical freedom such as “rights” the government may or may not actually bother respecting, should be concerned every time they see a movement to restrict cash and move to e-money. Even partial moves, like India’ getting rid of larger bills, can be devastating, and if the informal economy is large enough, can be disastrous economically even if the government winds up with more taxes. (India’s experiment was bad for the Indian economy, as I expected.)
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Bitcoin is not “anonymous money”. Blockchains record every transaction. Cash is anonymous money, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a scam artist.
Computers and the telecom revolution, overall, have been bad for the freedom of most people, in very concrete ways; sometimes minute to minute ways, since they also allow for bosses to automatically monitor what workers are doing. Hell is micro-management, and this is moving out from warehouses, into white collar jobs. No one who isn’t powerful at work will have any real ability to dodge it.
I first noticed this at my last big corporate job, where every “automation” of clerical workers was really about control: every one reduced productivity but made workers jump thru automated hoops and made it easier for management to see exactly what each worker was doing.
None of this should be surprising. Advanced in communication technology always allow more control because they allow more knowledge to be centralized. This was true of writing and it’s true of computers. It used to be that if the boss wasn’t there and couldn’t justify a supervisor to stand over your shoulder, you had a fair bit of freedom to do the job your way, but now an algorithm watches you and managers can see real time dashboards.
My entire experience at work was that “Hell is micromanagement”, one of my best bad jobs was being a bike courier because back in the early 90s they couldn’t track where you were or what you were doing. They told you to pick up and deliver; as long as you did that on time, it was up to you how you did it, and when work was slow, no one was telling you to do make-work.
More and more this is going away; bosses are even putting tracking software on home computers for remote workers, and sometimes insisting on having cameras watching the workers.
Freedom isn’t just about the right to free speech and assembly or a speedy trial (rights we are losing anyway, in many countries) it is about the moment to moment experience of life, and the majority spend half their waking hours working. If work sucks, life sucks. And with e-money, you won’t even be able to opt out of the formal economy.
Welcome to Hell.