A cashless society is also a society where there is no longer any anonymity
This is what concerns me the most. I think most of what this article proposes is great, but knowing that absolutely everything I buy can be traced back to me makes me uncomfortable.
> Banhof, says a digital economy also raises privacy issues because of the electronic trail of transactions. He supports the idea of phasing out cash, but says other anonymous payment methods need to be introduced instead.
> "One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time," he says.
Whatever one may think of systems like ecash or bitcoin, it's disappointing to see a journalist writing as if nothing like that has even been conceived.
I expect that tracking every single transaction would be a great deterrent to corruption, theft, and tax evasion. On the other hand, a lot of corruption, theft and tax evasion already occurs with electronic payments.
No? Money simply has a signature. The major reason why cash is "anonymous" is because there is no attempt to track the serials beyond initial deliveries to financial institutions, etc. Money already is simply pseudonymous; if, for example, we tracked serial numbers during transactions, you'd be trackable unless you exchanged currency outside of a bill reader setup.
But this is true of electronic systems as well. I could just as easily give you an SD card with $1,000 on it and the tracking system would fail rapidly.
This is what concerns me the most. I think most of what this article proposes is great, but knowing that absolutely everything I buy can be traced back to me makes me uncomfortable.