I haven’t used cash in a very long time. I haven’t carried a wallet at all in almost 5 years because every business takes tap payments, so I can use my phone to pay. I don’t think cash should disappear, but I sure am glad there’s an alternative because I hate carrying it around.
The existence of the record is inevitably linked to the ability for it to be used in legal actions or criminal investigations.
However, the ability to use that record for literally every other purpose, and especially for it to be sold for marketing purposes, can be and should be made totally illegal by appropriate banking secrecy regulations. If that's not the case in USA, well, that should be fixable - there are countries in which anyone in the bank doing that would be literally a felony.
We need stronger privacy laws to stop these activities rather than trying to circumvent them ourselves. There are plenty of ways to track people (tracking cell phones via bluetooth beacons and wifi network pings, for example) even when credit cards aren't used.
> We need stronger privacy laws to stop these activities rather than trying to circumvent them ourselves.
This assumes that the government can be trusted to care about the citizen's privacy. This is an assumption that at least cypherpunks explicitly do not share. Just find some case involving terrorism or child abuse (depending on the political climate), and new surveillance laws will become passed.
The point is that the very design of Bitcoin forces the entire transaction history of the medium into every hand that uses it (and can be obtained by anyone who wishes to examine it).
You can pass all the laws that you want, but that will not change unless you redesign it.
I was thinking the other day about how much about me could be easily inferred by my credit card purchase history, both good and bad. Hitch it up into ML and sort me into good and bad buckets for insurance or advertising. It already has been happening I'm sure.
This is how I feel. I keep cash in a safe at home for emergencies like natural disasters, but carrying cash is a burden. It's easily stolen and it's unwieldy to work with. The presence of cash immediately makes it more dangerous to exist. I don't want it to go away because power failure happens, but anyone who has ever lived in a sketchy area knows that having a lot cash on your person is not the best idea.
