CNA Insider
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2016–2021
4:30 · 27K views · Dec 4, 2014
A short Channel NewsAsia interview clip in which MasterCard's Southeast Asia president voices distrust of cryptocurrencies produced by anonymous computers in anonymous places. It is part of the Perspectives series and runs about four minutes.
Cited, usually critically, as a window into how payment companies view cryptocurrency and cash.
5 comments from Hacker News
>why not blacklist coins that have been through a mixer? If you can't mix the coins, you can't launder them. It won't be possible to use Bitcoin for these activities anymore. This would totally eliminate privacy. It would be no different than making HTTPS illegal. It's not just criminals that use privacy technology. Eliminating privacy in money for the sake of eliminating some crime at the margins is giving up the farm to gain a horse. It's making a situation where everyone is subjected to mass-surveillance, and power concentrates to a small politically connected elite that can monitor all private interactions, exponentially more likely to be realized. It's very dangerous to society. [LINK] >There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy - this video >If it's an anonymous transaction, that sounds like a suspicious transaction. Why does somebody need to be anonymous? - this video MasterCard SE Asia President on cryptocurrencies and cash
Cryptocurrencies, growing pains aside, will arrest the trend toward economic centralization. They are not just more powerful tools. They are tools that shift the control over money from large trusted third parties to individuals. They literally allow an individual to be their own bank. They are a counter-force against the trend toward eliminating cash, and with it, financial privacy [1]: >Any future cashless bank-payments society will be the outcome of a deliberate war on cash waged by an alliance of three elite groups with deep interests in seeing it emerge. These statements from an executive at MasterCard are a great window into the company's designs on cash and its electronic corollaries: >There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy - this video >If it's an anonymous transaction, that sounds like a suspicious transaction. Why does somebody need to be anonymous? - this video [1] [LINK]
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: this video "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: [LINK] Another relevant article: the War on Cash [LINK] >>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.
>>tax evasion and illegality hiding (which it isn't even good at). This is just a Big Brother smear against privacy, with a socialist twist emanating from those with a financial stake in empowering the state and its dependent industries over the private citizen. Exactly your arguments are made in the campaign to criminalize the use of cash: [LINK] Credit card company representative's statement on it in 2014: >There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy - this video >If it's an anonymous transaction, that sounds like a suspicious transaction. Why does somebody need to be anonymous? - this video
"There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy" - this video "If it's an anonymous transaction, that sounds like a suspicious transaction. Why does somebody need to be anonymous?" - this video MasterCard SE Asia President on cryptocurrencies and cash