Money Laundering Is Financial Thoughtcrime

By Jon Matonis
American Banker
Tuesday, May 7, 2013

http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/money-laundering-is-financial-thoughtcrime-1058902-1.html

When people hear the term money laundering today, they envision the most evil of acts, in which gangsters process satchels of cash through a fabricated company to show it as business revenue. Words and semantics are very important in this post-9/11 world, and as far as creating a negative connotation, that parlance has been extremely effective.

At its essence, money laundering is the act of concealing money or assets from the state to prevent its loss through taxation, judgment enforcement, or blatant confiscation. However, as the late J. Orlin Grabbe wrote: "Anyone who has studied the evolution of money-laundering statutes in the U.S. and elsewhere will realize that the 'crime' of money laundering boils down to a single, basic prohibited act: Doing something and not telling the government about it."

Protecting one's wealth is interwoven with the history of trade and banking which has existed since the dawn of commerce. Sterling Seagrave's Lords of the Rim describes how some 2,000 years before Christ, merchants in China would hide their wealth from rulers who would simply take it from them and subsequently banish them. This concealment involved moving the wealth and investing it in remote provinces or outside China.

Part myth, part rumor, the plausible tale of Mafia gangsters running huge amounts of cash from extortion, prostitution, gambling and bootleg liquor through existing Laundromats accounts for the phrase money laundering.

Also during this period, Al Capone was convicted in October 1931 for tax evasion, which is what earned the prosecutor's conviction rather than the predicate crimes that generated his illicit income. Capone's episode inspired Meyer Lansky, the mob's accountant, who structured elaborate international and Swiss financial facilities for safely securing money and vowed never to suffer Capone's fate.

Lansky is credited with designing one of the first real laundering techniques, the use of the "loan-back" concept, which disguised allegedly illegal money within "loans" provided by compliant foreign banks. The money could then be justified as revenue and a tax deduction for interest expense obtained in the process.

Without any method of tracking cash or bank activity, Congress passed the Bank Secrecy Act in 1970, heralding the age of transaction reporting, including the Currency Transaction Report (Form 4789), the Report of International Transportation of Currency or Monetary Instruments (Form 4790), and the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (Form TD F 90-22.1). In the United States, the Money Laundering Control Act formally made money laundering a federal crime.

Internationally, the elements of the crime of money laundering are set forth in the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances and Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Also, the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering, founded in 1989 on the initiative of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, is an intergovernmental organization whose purpose is to develop policies to combat money laundering and terrorism financing.

From President Roosevelt's 1933 seizure of personal gold to the Nazi confiscation of Jewish wealth to the recent deposit theft at Cyprus banks, asset plundering by governments has a long and colorful tradition. Protecting wealth from oppressive regimes continues to this day.

It's highly political and also a matter of perspective whether protection from confiscation is a justifiable activity. Government access to wealth is at the heart of the issue and it matters not if it's hiding money or cleaning money.

Therefore, the artificial crime of "money laundering" had to be invented, mainly because more direct and traditional methods of enforcing certain laws yielded little result. Think of it as driving without a light bulb above the license plate being a felony because thieves might drive away in the night. All must participate in illuminating the way to be tracked. More than anything, this is a clear sign of regulatory desperation.

Money laundering has been called the thoughtcrime of finance. Isn't it really just banking with someone's possibly nefarious intentions attached to the act? It's like buying a drive-thru donut in a stolen vehicle. The theft of the vehicle may have been illegal and immoral but the act of purchasing a donut is not. Money laundering is not pre-crime but post-crime. And, it's difficult to identify the victim, other than the bank shareholders that must expend millions of dollars for the proactive compliance required as the state's deputized enforcers.

Moreover, money laundering is guilt by association. If the monetary flows resulting from associated businesses are deemed illegal, then the banking activity is defined as money laundering. But, in the absence of victimless crime laws against drugs, gambling, and prostitution, the majority of banking labeled as money laundering would simply be banking.

According to the International Money Laundering Information Bureau, "Money Laundering is also the world's third-largest industry by value." Apparently, it happens in every country in the world. Well, breathing by humans also happens in every country in the world. If money laundering is actually the third-largest industry in the world then it's either being calculated wrong or it's too easily defined.

In his Rolling Stone article "Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail," Matt Taibbi mocks the anti-money-laundering regime as being hypocritical because large commercial banks like HSBC receive a light slap on the wrist and the blind-eye treatment as smaller fish are routinely scooped up in the net. Taibbi correctly distinguishes between an arrestable class and an unarrestable class. However, he misses the point of the law's arbitrariness in the first place. Thank you for the analysis, Mr. Taibbi, but dispensing enforcement of an immoral law more evenly is not a solution for justice.

Even as the money-laundering laws are said to exist for the fight against terrorism or drugs or gambling, the cashless utopia is simultaneously being thrust upon us as the monetary architecture of the future. Expect ever more increasing thoughtcrime enforcement as the international money flow tightens.

FATCA Is Far from a Done Deal

By Jon Matonis
American Banker
Monday, April 1, 2013

http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/fatca-is-far-from-a-done-deal-1057947-1.html

Largely affecting those banks outside of the U.S., the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act requires all foreign financial institutions to report the activities of their American clients to the Internal Revenue Service. But given the recent demands from other nations hinting at reciprocity, the overreaching legislation could impact banks and financial institutions in the U.S. as well.

Now, there is the additional element of certain key countries rejecting FATCA outright, and the Asia-Pacific region could end up holding the most sway.

Cited as a hindrance to foreign investment that would ultimately dampen U.S. economic growth and threaten American jobs, the FATCA penalties for noncompliance provide a strong incentive for overseas investors to avoid U.S. depository institutions altogether. Tax Management International Journal cites 11 reasons why FATCA must be repealed. Reason number one is "the height of arrogance."

It is either the reciprocity angle or the cascade effect of China's reluctance that has the greatest potential to derail FATCA.

"The United States should be moving toward full reciprocity," Georgetown Law School Professor Itai Grinberg, a former Treasury official, told Reuters. He added that it would be "deeply hypocritical" for the U.S. to ask for information on American taxpayers "without offering some kind of reciprocity."

Because direct reciprocity may mean foreign banks violating the privacy laws of their own jurisdictions, the Treasury Department has started negotiating bilateral agreements so that foreign governments can aggregate the bank data necessary for the IRS.

Attorney Brian Mahany of Mahany & Ertl, a law firm specializing in offshore reporting and compliance, believes that reciprocity is a bit misleading. "We are one of the few countries that tax based on worldwide income. Reciprocity isn't as important to most other nations," he added.

Also, the U.S. is one of the worst offenders globally when it comes to tax havens and "secrecy jurisdictions." For instance, Mahany said "many people, including Chinese nationals, hide money here." While President Obama has asked Congress for reciprocity, he is dealing from a position of weakness. "The support for FATCA is not very strong," Mahany added.

However, with global financial transparency on the increase and more countries considering taxation on citizen's worldwide income as a way to combat growing budget deficits, reciprocity with U.S. financial institutions starts to look appealing.

On the China issue, Mahany concedes that the U.S. government will never get every nation to join FATCA and the Asia-Pacific countries are heavily influenced by Beijing. He states, "China is certainly an important player. Currently, none of the Asian-Pacific countries are signed up, although Japan will probably be the first. Without Singapore, China, Hong Kong and Macau, FATCA faces real challenges."

James Jatras of the Repeal FATCA campaign claims that Hong Kong, like the People’s Republic of China, is not even on the list of 50 countries the Treasury claims to be negotiating with.

There will probably be so few U.S. citizens holding bank accounts in China that the cost of implementing FATCA outweighs the benefit to China's financial institutions. Also, the Chinese taxpayers with U.S. bank accounts appear to be of minimal interest to the Chinese government, according to Lisa Smith of iExpats.com.

"Before rushing to safe keep all your money in Communist China, remember that even if China elects to ignore FATCA, they may still cooperate with the IRS on a case-by-case basis," according to Mahany. China and the U.S. signed a Mutual Legal Assistance Agreement in June of 2000.

However, none of this potentially disruptive turmoil means that financial institutions should put FATCA-related IT infrastructure plans on hold until China makes its decision, because foreign banks and other financial institutions are currently ill-prepared for FATCA.

According to Mahany, "Implementation has been delayed once but folks should not depend on that happening again. The penalties for not complying outweigh the risks of noncompliance."

Meredith Moss of Finomial believes "that a technology solution is the only way to go, given the tremendous amount of data, PDFs and paper documents to sift through." She says that banks moving forms online and creating a comprehensive FATCA audit trail will demonstrate diligence to the regulators and that "due diligence should be underway by January 2014 and completed by July 2014."

Although experts in the FATCA preparation business tend to agree that moving forward with expensive FATCA compliance plans is the prudent and logical step to be taking now, a comprehensive and worldwide FATCA rollout is far from a foregone conclusion. For those financial institutions and their shareholders offended by the overreaching legislation and lack of respect for mutual sovereignty, the cost savings alone may start to make FATCA's non-compliance penalties look tolerable.

France Plans To Prohibit Cash Payments Over €1,000

By Jon Matonis
Forbes
Thursday, February 14, 2013

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/02/14/france-plans-to-prohibit-cash-payments-over-e1000/

One of the best things about covering payments news is that you never run out of stories where various myopic governments attempt to restrict the flow of cash in a squeeze for revenue.

France becomes the latest as Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault plans to erect new controls on cash transactions in order to tighten up tax collection and meet the country's optimistic budget deficit target of 3% of GDP. The government needs euros and they need some fast.

In the government plan labeled "Fight against fraud," France's fiscal residents would see the cash transaction limit decrease from €3,000 to €1,000 per purchase. However, in a nod to the exiled wealthy and what Wolf Richter calls the "Depardieu exception," those fiscal residents of a country other than France would have their cash transaction limits reduced from €15,000 to €10,000 per purchase. Legislative measures could be finalized by the end of 2013.

Richter illustrates the ban's impact with an example of purchasing a used car: "two crisp 500-euro bills and a single coin -- voilà, an illegal transaction." Used cars could easily cost more than €1,000 and accepting cash protects the seller, but the larger problem may be finding those 500-euro bills in the first place. While the southern coast of Spain was once believed to have the highest concentration of 500-euro notes in circulation, the distinctive purple bill has become more like the unicorn of Europe because they are rarely seen. The UK banned the sale of 500-euro notes at exchange offices in 2010.

"It has long been the dream of collectivists and technocratic elites to eliminate the semi-unregulated cash economy and black markets in order to maximise taxation and to fully control markets," writes Patrick Henningsen at the Centre for Research on Globalization. "If the cashless society is ushered in, they will have near complete control over the lives of individual people."

The anti-cashists have escalated this sad drama to a point where it has become like boiling a frog. The limits are incrementally lowered and lowered until one day, people wake up and realize that only fully traceable transactions are permitted in the new cashless society.

In many regions around the world, a strong and vibrant cash economy is actually underpinning the faltering national economies that no longer offer sufficient mainstream opportunities for their citizens. By some estimates, the global off-the-grid economy represents $10 trillion worth of economic activity per year. People will produce, consume, and trade in order to survive and bearer cash plays a critical role in that process.

The futuristic cashless society is marketed as being ultra-modern and at the forefront of technology. However, it is more like the last gasp of a dying behemoth and it is the poor that will suffer the most.

In responding to Simon's Black's description of Emperor Diocletian's 3rd-century tax reforms in All Transactions To Be Conducted In The Presence Of A Tax Collector, a reader commented that "Tax evasion always increases along with the tax burden." He continued, "In fact, it acts as a safety-valve against rebellion.  Since the rich will always have means to escape heavy taxation, the burden of bloated government bureaucracy will eventually fall the heaviest on those of lesser means."

Is there anywhere left to go if you don't welcome the fully-traceable cashless society? Spain recently banned cash transactions above 2,500 euros and Italy banned cash transactions above 1,000 euros.

France and other anti-cashist countries could quickly become nations of smurfs, referring to the practice of smurfing, which is a method of structuring cash transactions into smaller deposits of money to avoid cash reporting requirements.

Government Ban On Bitcoin Would Fail Miserably

By Jon Matonis
Forbes
Monday, January 28, 2013

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/01/28/government-ban-on-bitcoin-would-fail-miserably/

In a blog post last week at Unqualified Reservations, the author described a fictitious account of how bitcoin dies because a "DOJ indictment is unsealed" naming any and all BTC exchange operators as criminal defendants and the "BTC/USD price falls to zero and remains there."

While this U.S.-centric plot would seem more plausible in a cryptographic flaw scenario, it does bring to light some interesting game theory strategies for both regulators and free market monetary proponents. Aside from the impact on price, would a government ban on bitcoin, including a direct ban for law-abiding merchants, shrink the available size of the so-called bitcoin market? Is an officially "illegitimate" bitcoin a useless thing?

I maintain that a government ban on bitcoin would be about as effective as alcohol prohibition was in the 1920s. Government prohibition doesn't even do a good job of keeping drugs out of prisons. The demand for an item, in this case digital cash with user-defined levels of privacy, does not simply evaporate in the face of a jurisdictional ban. One could even make the case that it becomes stronger because an official recognition that Bitcoin is not only a "renegade" currency but a "so-effective-it-had-to-be-banned" currency would imbue the cryptographic money with larger than life qualities.

Ironically, the ban would create something like the Streisand effect for Bitcoin generating an awareness for entire new demographic groups and new classes of society. Unlike alcohol, bitcoin itself might not be considered a consumption good but it certainly makes it easier to acquire and sell certain consumption goods.

The under-banked people of System D would awaken to using bitcoin for eliminating onerous fees or the risk of handling cash. The individuals seeking drugs without violence or prescriptions would understand the imperviousness of sites like the agorist Silk Road. The anti-banking crowd would race to get their hands on some bitcoin as a symbolic gesture to weaken bankers' firm grip on payments. The pro-gambling casino people would all of a sudden realize how play money bitcoin bypasses the ridiculous and religious anti-gambling laws. The asset protection wealth managers would start to become fascinated with esoteric things like deterministic brainwallets and Tor.

Which brings us to the giddy, pro-banking-integration spokespeople for Bitcoin that tend towards full compliance because it's required or, worse, preemptive compliance because they believe it to be safe. What happens to their rosy world when bitcoin exchanges can no longer operate in the open without fear of State retaliation? After all, they were patiently counting on 'railroad tracks' and connected links with existing financial institutions to grant Bitcoin a legitimacy mandate.

Now with burgeoning covert and in-person exchange opportunities plus a variety of reliable exchanges operating outside of the U.S., the Bitcoin of our fictional story is far from fading into obscurity. Conversely, it is the ambitious opportunities for crony capitalism that fade into obscurity because a closed-loop bitcoin economy not requiring meatspace exchanges would emerge and accelerate.

One doesn't drive Bitcoin underground. A free Bitcoin was designed to be 'underground' for its own survival otherwise it wouldn't need such an inefficient, decentralized block chain. The low-cost and non-reversible bitcoin transactions that appeal to mainstream commerce are merely byproducts of a mutinous system that doesn't rely on trusted third parties. Joel Bowman writing at The Daily Reckoning clearly recognizes that bitcoin's future doesn't depend on State legitimacy let alone low-cost sanctioned transactions:

"In the end, bitcoin is a bet on the other side of The State’s coin; the free market side. It’s a bet that voluntary trade will, in the end, overcome neanderthalic force and coercion. It’s a wager that the conversation currently underway in the shadowy 'black' market is far more intriguing, far more complex, far more nuanced and exceedingly more interesting than the yip-yapping that distracts the undead, mainstream TV-consumer for an hour or so around feeding time every evening."

I would add that it's also a bet on income and consumption privacy becoming the norm over 'reportable earnings' and invasive transaction tracking. It's a bet that career mobility and independent contractor businesses will eventually outstrip the growth of the corporate wage-slave population. It's a bet that the degree of an individual's financial privacy is selected solely by the individual and not by what the State reluctantly permits.

Prohibiting bitcoin is the opposite of what a rational game theorist would conclude. But are our regulatory overlords smart enough to advocate a hands-off policy? If the State cannot plausibly ban bitcoin, why would they want to give it the additional power to grow and propagate? Bitcoin challenges the State as monetary sovereign and that has grave implications for their monetary authority and quasi-peaceful taxing authority. A savvy and smart regulator would seek to avoid the confrontation that "Old Bitcoin Radical" foresees.

Their best response to Bitcoin is irrelevancy, or failing that, extreme gold-like market manipulation for as long as possible. The end game for the State is perpetuating the fiat myth -- their fiat myth not the populace's cryptographic Bitcoin myth. They have always known that faith in money is a mass illusion, however they never considered that they wouldn't be in charge of the illusion.

In the meantime, just enjoy the spectacle and relax people for mining bitcoin, holding bitcoin, sending bitcoin, and receiving bitcoin is not against the law in any country in the world.

Katherine Mangu-Ward Talks Stateless Currency on Stossel

Reason Managing Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward discusses stateless currency bitcoin on John Stossel's January 3rd, 2013 program. Overall, I think women are better than men at explaining bitcoin.

Generic Viagra Industry Is Pro-Choice In Payments

By Jon Matonis
Forbes
Friday, October 26, 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/10/26/generic-viagra-industry-is-pro-choice-in-payments/

"Right now most affiliate programs have a mass of declines, cancels and pendings, and it doesn’t depend much on the program IMHO, there is a general sad picture, fucking Visa is burning us with napalm," screams one pharmaceutical operator.

Payment intervention is defined as the use of the payment mechanism to detect or prevent certain transactions that are deemed to be politically incorrect or against a particular jurisdiction's law. The latest target is online pharmaceuticals and their affiliates providing medications such as generic or unlicensed Viagra, Nexium, or Lipitor, all of which are illegal for Americans to have mailed into the United States.

In the recent paper "Priceless: The Role of Payments in Abuse-advertised Goods" presented at the 19th annual ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, five academic researchers outline the methodology behind the aggressive practice known as payment intervention and arrogantly conclude that it is in society's interest.

This is the ugly face of monetary repression. It is shameful! Using the payments system as a repressive tool for or against certain behavior is like using Catholic Church attendance as a way to target illegal immigrants. In a free society, private payments should be covered by merchant-customer privilege just as attorney-client privilege covers confidential legal communication. Like the telephone network used to execute a transaction, the payments network is a neutral actor. Pro-choice means placing the decision of payment type in the hands of the money owner. Grandma wants her affordable generic Lipitor.

Oddly coupling the pharmaceutical sector with the counterfeit software sector in a dual study, researchers acknowledge the fragility of payments and show how an eradication effort can lead to the pursuit of riskier alternative payment methods:

"Overall, we find that reliable merchant banking is a scarce and critical resource that, when targeted carefully, is highly fragile to disruption. As a testament to this finding, we document the decimation of online credit-card financed counterfeit software sales due to a focused eradication effort. We further document how less carefully executed interventions, in the pharmaceutical sector, can also have serious (although less dramatic) impacts, including program closures, pursuit of riskier payment mechanisms, and reduced order conversions. Finally, we document the set of countermeasures being employed now by surviving merchants and discuss the resulting operational requirements for using payment intervention as an effective tool."

Herein lies the problem with the current payments network. It is far too dominated by Visa and Mastercard whose contracts with acquiring banks stipulate that merchants are prohibited from selling goods that are illegal in the purchaser's destination country. Therefore, simply participating in those payment networks inextricably links the law to a voluntary transaction between two consenting parties providing an enforcement mechanism that wouldn't necessarily exist under other payment types.

Access to safe and affordable pharmaceuticals should be a natural right for all Americans and denying it would be unacceptable, unethical, and a threat to the public health. A strong case can be made that uninsured, low-income patients obtaining affordable medications is a morally legitimate activity. "Does legality establish morality?" asks economist Walter E. Williams, who answers, "Legality alone cannot be the talisman of moral people."

In June 2011, Visa (and Mastercard similarly) made a series of changes to their operating regulations and explicitly classified pharmaceutical-related merchant category codes as "high-risk" along with gambling and various kinds of direct marketing services. Kudos must be given to the State Bank of Mauritius for being the only bank that both correctly codes pharmaceutical transactions and supports a large number of affiliate programs.

Leaving aside for the moment the twisted economics of privileged drug manufacturers collaborating with generic manufacturers, the immorality of the patent system, and the case against intellectual property, supranational authority was bestowed upon the IACC (International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition) in 2010 through a series of agreements made between brand holders, payment providers, and the White House’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. The agreements streamlined targeted actions against 'rogue' websites and merchant accounts used to monetize counterfeit goods and services.

Bragging about the simplicity and effectiveness of the initiative, the study's researchers reveled in determining who was 'rogue' and then preparing them for 'termination':

"Security interventions should ultimately be evaluated on both their impact in disrupting the adversary and their cost to the defender. On both counts, the payment tier of abuse-advertising appears to be a ripe target. For the few tens of dollars for a modest online purchase, our data shows that it is possible to identify a portion of the underlying payment infrastructure and, within weeks, cause it to be terminated."

Unfortunately, the practice of targeting the payments mechanism is on the rise by governments and sufficiently "chilled" payment network lackeys, but it will backfire in spectacular fashion. Consumers will be driven to more liberated alternatives such as the privacy-oriented and cash-like bitcoin. They certainly don't want VISA, Mastercard, PayPal and the rest of the gang telling them what is and is not an acceptable purchase. Interestingly, the study cited bitcoin among creative alternatives when Visa processing becomes abruptly disabled:

"A few US-based pharmaceutical programs, notably Health Solutions Network (which we did not study in our analysis), enabled Cash-On-Delivery (COD) payments for their customers when their Visa processing was disabled. Ultimately, the effectiveness of such mechanisms depends on their familiarity and overhead to consumers, the readiness of alternative sites offering more traditional payments, and the extent to which consumers are well motivated. Indeed, while we witnessed some programs (notably in the OEM software space) attempt to continue their businesses using alternative payment mechanisms including PayPal and, most recently, Bitcoin, by all accounts this has not been successful."

I expect that to change radically for Bitcoin as the features of decentralized cryptographic money become more widely appreciated. Used properly, bitcoin can have the privacy attributes of paper cash and bitcoin doesn't make morality judgements about what you choose to do with your money. It is a natural fit for the online pharmaceutical industry. Payment providers, especially mobile payment providers, claim to represent the best in consumer-centric solutions, but if they truly care about consumers, why do they block so many important transaction types that consumers want?

Somebody has to say it. Big Pharma is a racket and Americans are being duped by the government and the powerful drug manufacturers that push their overpriced medications while simultaneously hiding behind the veil of protecting patient safety, for your own good of course. But "the little blue pill" will be protected as Pfizer's expiration date for the Viagra patent has just been extended until April 2020 which means no legal "generic Viagra" in the U.S. for several more years.

Perhaps more broadly disturbing is that the five individuals authoring the study seem to tacitly recommend the 'payments network' as the delegated enforcement arm of the justice system and sanctioned brand holders. These complicit payment providers do not practice payment neutrality nor do they recognize the importance of remaining nonpolitical and challenging encroachments that lead to politicalization.

The reason that it has become possible to utilize the payments apparatus in this manner is because society has become too complacent on insisting that our money not be used for identity tracking. The general attitude towards the privacy of cash (both physical and digital) has been eerily nonchalant and too readily conceded. Until that changes, expect evermore diminishing privacy in your transactions.

For further reading:
"Forbes on Viagra, Bitcoin and Intellectual Property", Stephan Kinsella, October 29, 2012
"Rogue Pharma, Fake AV Vendors Feel Credit Card Crunch", Brian Krebs, October 18, 2012
"Pharma vs India: a case of life or death for the world’s poor", Nick Harvey, October 17, 2012
"Fake pharmaceuticals: Bad medicine", The Economist, October 13, 2012
"What Payment Intermediaries Are Doing About Online Liability And Why It Matters", Mark MacCarthy, July 5, 2010

Bitcoin, Dollars and Pot-Banging Protests in Argentina

By The Blue Market

Thursday, October 18, 2012

http://thebluemarket.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/bitcoin-dollars-and-pot-banging-protests-in-argentina/

200.000 people in the Plaza de Mayo

This post is a peep into the underground exchange markets for dollars and bitcoins in Argentina. For the last couple of weeks, I have experienced the informal exchange of bitcoin and dollars on first hand in Buenos Aires. Furthermore, I have realized how both locals and expats may reap significant gains by using bitcoins as a medium of exchange.

Inflation and Monetary Restrictions

Before we dive into the details of the underground markets in Argentina, let me try to paint the picture of the current economic situation in Argentina.

For several years the Argentine inflation rate has been bumping around 25-30% per annum, according to figures published by independent institutions. The Argentine government doesn’t recognize the independent estimates and has allied with INDEC, the National Statistics Institute, to calculate inflation figures 2-3 times lower than the independent figures. The interesting fact is that the peso’s fixed exchange rate with the dollar is only taking into account INDEC’s inflation rate of 8-12%, causing overvaluation of the peso by not incorporating the true higher inflation rate. INDEC is indeed a neat implementation of an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”, and the magic calculations have raised concerns with IMF who is threatening to expel Argentina from the organization.

Naturally the high inflation rate has caused capital flight out of Argentina, and every Argentine with a bit of savings is looking to exchange their pesos into something more secure. In order to stop the capital flight and fortify the central bank’s reserves, the government has implemented strict measures to prevent Argentines from obtaining foreign currencies. For example, only if you are travelling abroad are you allowed to exchange pesos for dollars legally, but there is a limit of 100$ per day abroad. Recently the government also imposed a 15% tax on all foreign credit card purchases, and a 50% custom duty on any goods which Argentines purchased abroad. Aside from the outrageous taxes, this legislation completely flashes your personal banking details to government officials, who can then snoop on your shopping list.

The complex regulatory environment has caused Paypal to suspend all domestic transactions in Argentina. Ebay and Amazon has followed suit with similar restrictions.

The Blue Dollar

In Argentina the dollar you care about is blue. The reason is that the difficulty for locals to acquire dollars through traditional means has fueled a secondary dollar exchange market. The unofficial exchange rate, known as the “blue dollar rate”, is approximately 25% higher than the official rate.

For expats, it’s a no-brainer that you are being ripped-off by withdrawing cash at ATMs from established banks, where the withdrawal is conducted at the official exchange rate currently around $ARS 4.70 pesos per dollar. In comparison, if you exchange USD on the “blue market” you get around $ARS 6.20  pesos per dollar.

Luckily before travelling to Argentina, my girlfriend and I were tipped off to this news and carried along dollars in cash when entering the country. One can exchange dollars at the blue market rate simply by heading to Bs. Aires main shopping street, Calle Florida. Here lots of street vendors are drifting around advertising their business to anyone who looks like a potential customer. The street vendors here are known as arbolitos by locals. Arbolitos means “little trees”, a reference to the street vendors are full of “green leaves”. If you are looking to exchange dollars the street vendors will quickly approach you and provide a quote. If you accept the quote, you just head to a nearby jewelry or electronics shop and complete the transaction.

Above approach is generally safe but I wasn’t too keen on exchanging dollars with street vendors. Instead I posted a small note on an online forum and got in contact with a couple living in Buenos Aires, who were eager to exchange dollars for pesos at the blue market rate. The snapshot below is the result of this exchange – and what an underground dollar market looks like.

The Bitcoin Hero

The dollars we brought into Argentina are soon running out, and we have been looking for alternatives to increase our dollar reserves. One approach is to cross the border to Uruguay – but you have the hassle of ATM withdrawal limits and the risk of travelling with lots of cash. There is also a service called Xoom, which allows you to transfer money from abroad to various pick-up locations in Bs. Aires. The magic of Xoom is that they somehow manage to provide the blue dollar exchange rate. Unfortunately they also require a US bank account to use its services.

Another possibility is Bitcoin, a new electronic currency, which has been flourishing online for the last couple of years. In our situation Bitcoin has turned out to be a great vehicle to transfer money into Argentina and achieve the blue dollar exchange rate. I completed my first bitcoin to pesos transaction last week and gained 25% in comparison to the official exchange rate.

The way it works is that you simply buy some bitcoins online through one of the many bitcoin exchanges. Mt.Gox is by far the largest but there are local alternatives as well, such as Bitcoin Nordic. Once you have your bitcoins you identify an Argentine who is on the market for bitcoins at the blue dollar rate. Given the economic situation there are lots of Argentines who are looking to get rid of pesos in exchange for other more secure assets.

In my case I circulated a note to Eudemocracia’s bitcoin mailing list announcing that I was interested in selling bitcoins. The price I offered was the Mt.Gox USD price converted to pesos at the blue USD exchange rate. Based on the number of replies this was an attractive offer, and after some email correspondence, I agreed  to meet up with one contact and conduct the transaction. After getting the agreed pesos in cash I made a one-click transfer of bitcoins to his online bitcoin wallet. A bitcoin transfer is instant and non reversible, and the picture below shows how we could confirm completion of the transaction on the spot.

Because of the dollar restrictions and the escalating inflation the demand for bitcoins in Argentina is greater than our personal need for pesos. Therefore, if you are an expat or just travelling through I encourage you to explore bitcoin as an alternative to finance your stay. Not only will you get a 25% higher exchange rate but you will also help locals protect their savings from being hollowed by inflation.

I believe the bitcoin adventure is just kicking off in Argentina. Also I’m keen to see how the 200.000 Argentines demonstrating for libertad in the Plaza de Mayo might use bitcoin to fight the monetary restrictions themselves. Maybe it’s an even better approach than banging a pot?

Large Cash Transactions Banned In Mexico

By Jon Matonis
Forbes
Wednesday, October 17, 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/10/17/large-cash-transactions-banned-in-mexico/

Outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderon has signed into law a ban on large cash transactions. The ban will take effect in about 90 days and it is part of a broader effort to control monetary flows within the country.

Under the law, a Specialized Unit in Financial Analysis operating within the Attorney General's Office will be created to investigate financial operations "that are related to resources of unknown origin."

For real estate transactions, cash payments of more than a half million pesos ($38,750) will be forbidden and, for automobiles or items like jewelry, art, and lottery tickets, cash payments of more than 200,000 pesos ($15,500) will be forbidden. The law carries a minimum penalty of five years in prison.

In 2010, Mexico instituted strict limits on foreign exchange cash transactions to $1,500 per person per month, which caused several cash dollar exchanges to withdraw from the business and had the effect of penalizing tourists.

Of course, US dollars are a huge portion of the actual paper cash that this effort is aimed at, but the Mexican peso is the 12th most traded currency in the world and by far the most traded currency in Latin America.

Reuters reported that, "Sales of drugs from marijuana to cocaine and methamphetamine in the United States are worth about $60 billion annually, according to the United Nations. About half of that amount is estimated to find its way back to cartels in Mexico."

The Woodrow Wilson International Center For Scholars' Mexico Institute published a comprehensive study in May 2012 entitled "It's All about the Money." The report recommended tight integration and coordination with the United States in the areas of legal framework, financial institution regulation, intelligence on cross-border currency flows, and non-conviction based asset forfeiture.

Two years in the making, the new law also requires notaries, real estate brokers, and other dealers to report the forms of payment for transactions above the respective limits. Financial institutions will also be required to report monthly credit card balances in excess of 50,000 pesos ($3,875).

Although it's part of a global trend among governments, Mexico will still have a long way to go to catch up. Spain recently banned cash transactions above 2,500 euros and Italy banned cash transactions above 1,000 euros.

Blackmail And A Briefcase Of Bitcoin

By Jon Matonis
Forbes
Tuesday, September 6, 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/09/06/blackmail-and-a-briefcase-of-bitcoin/

The anti-cashists are right about one thing. A briefcase full of paper cash is a dirty, inefficient way to move money around.

Upon hearing the news that a hacker had seized presidential nominee Mitt Romney's prior year tax returns and was asking for $1,000,000 to destroy them, you could be excused for thinking that you had stumbled into a Dr. Evil film. But, this blackmailer was demanding payment to be made in the cryptocurrency bitcoin, not dollars. A bitcoin receiving address was provided so that the public could monitor the progress.

But, is blackmail really an illegitimate act? In the fictitious case of Dr. Evil's demands, he was threatening a violent crime as a consequence. With the Romney tax hacker, the consequence of merely revealing the truth is not a crime. If the alleged hacker(s) acted alone to break in and obtain the information from PricewaterhouseCoopers, rather than discovering the information, that break-in would of course be considered a criminal act. However, the act of blackmail itself is a separate issue.

Professor Walter Block of Loyola University New Orleans reflects on the old axiom that "the truth shall make you free" and says that a blackmailer is simply setting the truth free to do whatever good or bad it is capable of doing. In his book Defending the Undefendable, Block suggests:

"We will find, however, that the case against the blackmailer cannot stand serious analysis; that it is based upon a tissue of unexamined shibboleths and deep philosophical misunderstandings.

What, exactly, is blackmail? Blackmail is the offer of trade. It is the offer to trade something, usually silence, for some other good, usually money. If the offer of the trade is accepted, the blackmailer then maintains his silence and the blackmailee pays the agreed-upon price. If the blackmail offer is rejected, the blackmailer may exercise his rights of free speech and publicize the secret. There is nothing amiss here. All that is happening is that an offer to maintain silence is being made. If the offer is rejected, the blackmailer does no more than exercise his right of free speech."

Professor Block also posits some good effects of blackmail, such as diminishing real crime (robbery, murder, rape) because it increases the penalty associated with crime if a criminal has to share the loot or pay up to avoid the reporting of an 'anonymous' tip. The legalization of blackmail could also have a beneficial effect on non-aggressive actions that are generally at odds with societal mores such as sadomasochism and adultery, according to Block.

Vitalik Buterin of Bitcoin Magazine extends that thinking to the potential beneficial effects on governments and the corporate world:

"Although the tools of communication and financial privacy are granting the small thieves an unprecedented ability to carry out their business with impunity, the large thieves that have so far been able to hide in the bureaucratic shadows of governments and large corporations are finding themselves more and more thrown into the limelight. This is the world we are moving towards: one that is perhaps more anarchic, and in some respects more dangerous, but one that is at the same time more just."

It is not yet known whether the threat to disclose tax return information is a real threat, but I suppose we will all know on the expiration date of September 28th. For its part, PricewaterhouseCoopers stated "we are working closely with the United States Secret Service, and at this time there is no evidence that our systems have been compromised or that there was any unauthorized access to the data in question."

Transactional privacy in the digital age is a double-edged sword. It has the potential to liberate individuals from many aspects of political tyranny but it also creates new challenges as the physical cash drop-off point is no longer a deterrent to getting caught. Regulating a bitcoin is like regulating an air guitar. The only thing we know for certain is that it's not going away.

For further reading:
"Blackmail as a Victimless Crime", Walter E. Block and Robert W. McGee, July 13, 2011

TORwallet Sparks Trust Without Jurisdiction Debate

By Jon Matonis
Forbes
Tuesday, June 19, 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/19/torwallet-sparks-trust-without-jurisdiction-debate/

In the world of the Internet, entities can provide online services without any consideration for a legal jurisdiction. But, in the world of Tor or Onionland, entities can do so anonymously.

Intended to protect users' personal freedom, privacy, and ability to conduct confidential business, Tor (The onion router) is a system that improves online anonymity by routing Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of layering and encrypting servers which impedes network surveillance or traffic analysis.

TORwallet has just announced an online bitcoin wallet run as a TOR hidden service (to access the service users must run the onion proxy software on their computer). They do not log any information except the current account balance and the bitcoins from many TORwallets can be mixed instantly to a single address in a single transaction to make them extremely difficult to trace. The same anonymity and untraceability of that crumpled paper money in your pocket is now available in electronic form.

Obviously, the cashless society people do not want this because full transaction traceability is the unstated motivation behind eliminating cash. Don't fall into this complacent attitude of a 'cashless society represents the future' because if we lose the monetary privacy features that we already have, it is a grim future indeed! Game over.

With Tor, the trade-off then becomes near total anonymity versus the ability to have legal recourse in a national jurisdiction. In relinquishing the option for legal recourse and for identifying the site operators, users must be content with the ongoing trustworthiness of the service. How do users become content and satisfied? Is anonymous reputation even possible? Trust will always be relative so is that enough?

eBay pioneered large-scale reputation credentials with its buying and selling platform that rewarded excellent service and punished repeat offenders. Long-standing positive reputations became very valuable in the competitive online marketplace, but users still had limited legal recourse against eBay and even though they may not know the other party to a transaction at least eBay did. The digital marketplace Silk Road currently operates a platform with a participant reputation system. However, in a two-party online Tor wallet service, you only have the earned trust of the non-jurisdictional site operator and that is comprised mainly of longevity and customer service. Only time will tell.

Essentially, the principle behind all mixing services is the ability to remove or obscure any linkage to a real-world identity because the bitcoin blockchain maintains a public transaction log of all transactions. Since the method used to obtain or purchase bitcoin may have revealed certain financial or personal links, it becomes necessary to render the blockchain useless for traffic analysis. Properly mixing bitcoin with other users' bitcoin will cause a chain of custody to break down and thereby provide plausible deniability for any transactions.

The privacy advantages of Tor-based mixing services are numerous. For instance, compared to proxy servers or VPNs, there are usually no IP logs kept which would be vulnerable to a court order or a server raid even if you paid for the VPN anonymously. A court order can also force a VPN to commence logging at any time.  According to TORwallet, "Any service not on Tor probably keeps logs of your IP address and could be coerced into giving up your information. Anyone wanting to force us to talk would have to find us first." They also claim that moving clean coins around from several large disconnected pools decreases the risk of matching inputs and outputs to trace client coins. Additionally, "being a Tor relay mixes your traffic in with other people's traffic, making it more difficult to do timing and correlation attacks." And from the user's perspective, the use of multiple wallets and mixers distributes risk.

Another Tor-based mixing service is Bitcoin Fog which charges between 1%-3% (randomized for obscurity). Perhaps the earliest and original bitcoin mixing service is Bitcoin Laundry which acquired the BitLaundry service running on Google App Engine in 2011. 

Disclaimer: bitcoin is not a recognized currency or monetary instrument in any jurisdiction.

For further reading:
"Review: TORwallet", Vitalik Buterin, Bitcoin Magazine, June 19, 2012
"Tips for Running an Exit Node with Minimal Harassment", Mike Perry, June 30, 2010
"Plaintext over Tor is still plaintext", phobos, June 1, 2010
"Anonymity and the Tor Network", Bruce Schneier, September 20, 2007

Book Review: The Sovereign Individual

The International Society for Individual Liberty published James Elwood's book review of the amazing and prescient The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.

Here is a brief excerpt from the full review:

It is the computer revolution that provides the promise of a real-world Galt's Gulch. Still in its infancy, the cybereconomy will allow the successful practitioners of computer technology to escape the regular economy and the predations of governments. Widely available strong encryption tools like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) are already allowing ordinary users to make it impossible for government to monitor their communications or decipher the contents of their hard drives or storage disks.

The Information Revolution will also bring us the death of politics as we know it. Participants in the cyber-economy will operate in the anarchic environment of the Internet, choosing who they will deal with, how and when. The authors think that the morality of the marketplace will dominate the Internet, and that private clubs with their own security procedures will arise to prevent theft by cybercriminals. Politicians will become increasingly irrelevant, as people bypass them and form new voluntary local institutions and virtual communities on the Internet.

The death blow to the nation-state will be digital cash, which has just become available. E-cash or even e-metal, using encrypted verifiable signals will allow individuals to make their transactions in secret on the Internet, and will destroy the ability of governments to exact wealth through the hidden tax of monetary inflation. Using financial institutions domiciled in tax havens, and using anonymous remailers, cybernauts will be able to largely avoid taxes and inflation, and thus amass wealth at a vastly accelerated rate.

Governments will starve. Their ability to exact large sums from the rich for transfer payments will disappear. If they are to survive, they will be forced to radically downsize, and treat their citizens like customers instead of livestock. And since their ability to police large territories will also decline due to weapons technology, there will be enormous pressures to break up nations into much smaller jurisdictions. The provision of protection will become a business service, and much more personalized, especially for the rich cyber-entrepreuners.

For further reading:
"The Sovereign Individual Book Review", Peter Macfarlane, October 31, 2008
"Will Computer Technology Liberate Individuals from the Nation-State?", Greg Kaza, The Freeman, February 1, 1998

The US Government's War on Cash

By Joseph Salerno
The Circle Bastiat
Wednesday, March 28, 2012

http://bastiat.mises.org/2012/03/laundered-money/

By repeatedly refusing to print money in larger bills, the Feds make it harder to make huge financial transactions and can more easily monitor the financial maneuverings of citizens.

Under cover of its multiplicity of fabricated wars on drugs, terror, tax evasion, and organized crime, the US government has long been waging a hidden war on cash. One symptom of the war is that the largest denomination of US currency is the $100 note, whose ever-eroding purchasing power is far below the purchasing power of the €500 note. US currency used to be issued in denominations running up to $10,000 (including also $500; $1,000; $5,000 notes). There was even a $100,000 note issued for transactions among Federal Reserve banks. The United States stopped printing large denomination notes in 1945 and officially discontinued their issuance in 1969, when the Fed began removing them from circulation. Since then the largest currency note available to the general public has a face value of $100. But since 1969, the inflationary monetary policy of the Fed has caused the US dollar to depreciate by over 80 percent, so that a $100 note in 2010 possessed a purchasing power of only $16.83 in 1969 dollars. That is less purchasing power than a $20 bill in 1969!

Despite this enormous depreciation, the Federal Reserve has steadfastly refused to issue notes of larger denomination. This has made large cash transactions extremely inconvenient and has forced the American public to make much greater use than is optimal of electronic-payment methods. Of course, this is precisely the intent of the US government. The purpose of its ongoing breach of long-established laws regarding financial privacy is to make it easier to monitor the economic affairs and abrogate the financial privacy of its citizens, ostensibly to secure their safety from Colombian drug lords, Al Qaeda operatives, and tax cheats and other nefarious white-collar criminals

Now the war on cash has begun to spread to other countries. As reported a few months ago, Italy lowered the legal maximum on cash transactions from €2,500 to €1,000. The Italian government would have preferred to set a €500 or even €300 maximum limit but reasoned that it should permit Italians time to adjust to the new limit. The rationale for this limit on the size of cash transactions is the fact that the profligate Italian government is trying to reduce its €1.9 trillion debt and views its anticash measures as a means of cracking down on tax evasion, which "costs" the government an estimated €150 billion annually.

The profligacy of the Italian ruling class is in sharp contrast to ordinary Italians who are the least indebted consumers in the eurozone and among its biggest savers. They use their credit cards very infrequently compared to citizens of other eurozone nations. So deeply ingrained is cash in the Italian culture that over 7.5 million Italians do not even have checking accounts. Now most of these "bankless" Italians will be dragooned into the banking system so that the notoriously corrupt Italian government can more easily spy on them and invade their financial privacy. Of course Italian banks, which charge 2 percent on credit-card transactions and assess fees on current accounts, stand to earn an enormous windfall from this law. As controversial former prime minister Berlusconi noted, "There's a real danger of crossing over into a fiscal police state." Indeed, one only need look at the United States today to see what lies in store for Italian citizens.

Meanwhile the war on cash in Sweden is accelerating, although the involvement of the state is less overt. In Swedish cities, cash is no longer acceptable on public buses; tickets must be purchased in advance or via a cell-phone text message. Many small businesses refuse cash, and some bank facilities have completely stopped handling cash. Indeed in some Swedish towns it is no longer possible to use cash in a bank at all. Even churches have begun to facilitate electronic donations from their congregations by installing electronic card readers. Cash transactions represent only 3 percent of the Swedish economy, while they account for 9 percent of the eurozone and 7 percent of the US economies.

A leading proponent of the anticash movement is none other than Bjorn Ulvaeus, former member of the pop group ABBA. The dotty pop star, whose son has been robbed three times, believes that a cashless world means greater security for the public! Others, more perceptive than Ulvaeus, point to another alleged advantage of electronic transactions: they leave a digital trail that can be readily followed by the state. Thus, unlike countries with a strong "cash culture" like Greece and Italy, Sweden has a much lower incidence of graft. As one "expert" on underground economies instructs us, "If people use more cards, they are less involved in shadowy economy activities," in other words, secreting their hard-earned income in places where it cannot be plundered by the state.

The deputy governor of the Swedish central bank, Lars Nyberg, gloated before his retirement last year that cash will survive "like the crocodile, even though it may be forced to see its habitat gradually cut back." But not everyone in Sweden is celebrating the dethronement of cash. The chairman of Sweden's National Pensioners' Organization argues that elderly people in rural areas either do not have credit or debit cards or do not know how to use them to withdraw cash. Oscar Swartz, the founder of Sweden's first Internet provider, a supporter of the phasing out of cash, argues that without the adoption of anonymous payment methods, people who send money and make donations to various organizations can be "traced every time." But, of course, what the artless Mr. Swartz does not see is that this is the whole point of a cashless economy — to make even the most intimate economic affairs of private citizens transparent to the state and its fiscal and monetary apparatchiks, who themselves hate and fear transparency like vampires do sunlight. And then there are the benefits that accrue to the government-privileged banking system from the demise of cash. One Swedish small businessman shrewdly noted the connection. While he gets charged 5 kronor (80¢) for every credit-card transaction, he is prevented by law from passing this on to his customers. In his words, "For them (the banks), this is a very good way to earn a lot of money, that's what it's all about. They make huge profits."

Fortunately, the free market provides the prospect of an escape from the fiscal police state that seeks to stamp out the use of cash through either depreciation of central-bank-issued currency combined with unchanged currency denominations or direct legal limitation on the size of cash transactions. As Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of economics, explained over 140 years ago, money emerges not by government decree but through a market process driven by the actions of individuals who are continually seeking a means to accomplish their goals through exchange most efficiently. Every so often history offers up another example that illustrates Menger's point. The use of sheep, bottled water, and cigarettes as media of exchange in Iraqi rural villages after the US invasion and collapse of the dinar is one recent example. Another example was Argentina after the collapse of the peso, when grain contracts (for wheat, soybeans, corn, and sorghum) priced in dollars were regularly exchanged for big-ticket items like automobiles, trucks, and farm equipment. In fact Argentine farmers began hoarding grain in silos to substitute for holding cash balances in the form of depreciating pesos.

As has been widely reported recently, an unlikely crime wave has rapidly spread throughout the United States and has taken local law-enforcement officials by surprise. The theft of Tide liquid laundry detergent is pandemic throughout cities in the United States. One individual alone stole $25,000 worth of Tide detergent during a 15-month crime spree, and large retailers are taking special security measures to protect their inventories of Tide. For example, CVS is locking down Tide alongside commonly stolen items like flu medications. Liquid Tide retails for $10–$20 per bottle and sells on the black market for $5–$10. Individual bottles of Tide bear no serial numbers, making them impossible to track. So some enterprising thieves operate as arbitrageurs buying at the black-market price and reselling to the stores, presumably at the wholesale price. Even more puzzling is the fact that no other brand of detergent has been targeted.

What gives here? This is just another confirmation of Menger's insight that the market responds to the absence of sound money by monetizing highly salable commodities. It is clear that Tide has emerged as a subsidiary local currency for black-market, especially drug, transactions — but for legal transactions in low-income areas as well. Indeed police report that Tide is being exchanged for heroin and methamphetamine and that drug dealers possess inventories of the commodity that they are also willing to sell. But why is laundry detergent being employed as money, and why Tide in particular?

Menger identified the qualities that a commodity must possess in order to evolve into a medium of exchange. Tide possesses most of these qualities in ample measure. For a commodity to emerge as money out of barter, it must be widely used, readily recognizable, and durable. It must also have a relatively high value-to-weight ratio so that it can be easily transported. Tide is the most popular brand of laundry detergent and is widely used by all socioeconomic groups. Tide also is easily recognized because of its Day-Glo orange logo. Laundry detergent can also be stored for long periods without loss of potency or quality. It is true that Tide is somewhat bulky and inconvenient to transport by hand in large quantities. But enough can be carried by hand or shopping cart for smaller transactions while large quantities can easily be transported and transferred using automobiles.

Just like the highly publicized war on drugs that the US government has been waging — and losing — for decades, it is doomed to lose its surreptitious war on cash, because the free market can and will respond to the demand of ordinary citizens for a reliable and convenient money.

Reprinted with permission.
 
For further reading:
"The end of the cash era", The Economist, February 15, 2007

Could Bitcoin Become the Currency of System D?

By Jon Matonis
Forbes
Monday, March 19, 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/03/19/could-bitcoin-become-the-currency-of-system-d/

If zeros and ones are outlawed, only outlaws will use zeros and ones.

Cryptography shall always have a place in securing our digital future and most especially in securing our digital value. Advanced public-key encryption for the masses cannot be eliminated nor denied -- the genie is out of the bottle and mankind is the better for it. The unintended consequence of regulating or restricting decentralized cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin is that their use as a currency will have been 'recognized' officially and that usage will be driven largely underground.

However, underground may not be so bad anymore as Robert Neuwirth points out in his brilliant Foreign Policy article, "The Shadow Superpower". If aggregated, this $10 trillion global black market is the world's second largest economy after the United States and it is also the world's fastest growing economy. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) projects that, by the year 2020, fully two-thirds of the world's workers will inhabit this shadow economy, or "System D." As Neuwirth elaborates, it refers to the entire untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated cash-based economy:

"System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy."

Enter bitcoin. All kind of vibrant economic activity is occurring in this informal economy, which in some regions is between 20-60% of GDP or more, and every economy needs a currency. Essentially, bitcoin is the 'System D' of currencies -- global, decentralized, and non-state sanctioned. It is still early days but as bitcoin bypasses traditional banking and financial institutions, it is a currency off the grid just as System D. To deny the existence of System D is to deny the fact that economic participants find ways to survive even during prolonged times of hardship. According to Neuwirth "it asserts an important truth: what happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, resilience, self-organization and group solidarity."

It is inconceivable to think of those in under-developed countries and the developed economies of the eurozone coping without System D activity given the recurring recessions that are exacerbated by the violent central bank-induced business cycles. Despite increasing consumption taxes like VAT (value-added tax), the informal economy can still provide relief through various markets and bazaars. Americans too will need black markets to survive. System D represents the future.

Currently, transactions within the shadow economy have to be made face to face, but an electronic System D currency would enable remote and even cross-border transactions. This could significantly broaden the entire informal ecosystem because consumers would have an international reach and merchants would have vast new choices in selecting suppliers. Not all bitcoin transactions require a standard computer and if the mobile payment prognosticators are correct, the mobile phone equipped with applications like Bitcoin Android could end up originating the majority of bitcoin transactions. Contrary to the thesis of anti-cashist David Wolman, the unbanked and the System D traders will not migrate away from cash unless its replacement offers similar privacy features.

Bitcoin is barely three years young. Any bootstrapped currency initially will have a chicken-and-egg problem due to the fact that a currency's overall success is determined by its network effect and pervasive spread. Critics of bitcoin as a currency are quick to point out that not many merchants accept it as a payment type yet. That will change. And, they also point out that the total available market is severely limited. Oh, how wrong!  Bitcoin's first potential mega-market just so happens to be the second largest economy in the world and its sole competitor in that sphere is depreciating government paper cash. Game on.

Esquire Editor Fined for Promoting Silk Road

From this March 15th, 2012 Russia Today broadcast, it is amusing to watch the news anchors struggle around trying not to mention something that they are not allowed to mention.



According to realhuman on the Reddit site, "Police called it 'promotion of drugs'. The magazine published buyers' reviews about different sellers and how to log in with tor and buy with bitcoin. The fine was about $1300."

For further reading:
"Russian Esquire magazine fined for writing about Silk Road", Amir Taaki, Bitcoin Media, March 15, 2012
"Silk Road: A Vicious Blow to the War on Drugs", The Austin Cut, January 2, 2012
"Bit Coins for Black Markets", Virginia Prescott, New Hampshire News, November 16, 2011
"Using Silk Road", gwern.net, June 2011