The Long and Short publishes long-form essays on topics like cash, automation, economics, and the Aaron Swartz JSTOR case.
HN links it for essays such as The War on Cash. One commenter objects that it treats AML/KYC financial surveillance as plainly good.
The article takes it is a priori that laws that institute warrantless mass surveillance of financial transactions, aka AML/KYC, are good.
This is an opinion held mostly by those in the elite: people living in wealthy/politically-powerful countries, and or those with lucrative jobs in government or government-protected industries like banking.
The President of Mastercard South East Asia sums it up:
https://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8#t=4m12s
"If it's an anonymous transaction, that sounds like a suspicious transaction. Why does somebody need to be anonymous?"
AML/KYC laws create global second class citizens and massively centralize power in the hands of whichever state has the critical mass of financial power, which right now is the US and which one day could be another state that authors like this wouldn't be so enthusiastic about.
A great write-up on what KYC/AML laws, which are euphemisms for laws criminalizing financial privacy, mean for those outside of the elite circles:
https://np.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/comments/de0sys/kyc_is_absolutely_not_acceptable_for_makerdao/
Another relevant article: the War on Cash
https://thelongandshort.org/society/war-on-cash
>>The proclaimed Death of Cash is thus an episode in the broader drama that is the Death of Privacy, the death of breathing room, and the death of informal, non-measured, unaccounted-for behaviour.
Friend I knew, USAF reserve, served in Bosnia, worked at one of the major CC companies in the 1990s.
He related the story of talking to a friend in national intelligence. The FoaF: "You've got more data on people than we do."
Related:
"China's Internet" (Bloomberg video)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VAesMQ6VtK8
The War on Cash:
http://thelongandshort.org/society/war-on-cash
(Also discussed at HN.)
I think they meant that http://thelongandshort.org/issues/season-three/images/DeskHerbivorous.jpg has the 系 but then the translation the article gives below it is missing the "kei".