this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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True. However, I think its unreasonable to demand a digital euro that is also private for businesses, as the only benefit from that would be enabling tax evasion and selling illegal goods. There are differences between physical anonymous payments and online anonymous payments. The problem is scale and reach. You cant just send millions of euro in cash to someone in a different country, you can with online payments. That allows for money laundering and illegal markets at a scale never seen before.
So yes, it will be different than cash, but your identity cant be traced, so id call it a worthy replacement.
Ultimately, businesses get all of their money from customers, and those customers are people who deserve privacy. Some businesses have other businesses as customers but those other businesses also get all their money from customers.
If you make all this stuff public, then you are basically allowing customers to be tracked.
And most of the money businesses spend also, ultimately, go to people - their employees or indirectly to employees of their suppliers (or to investors, who are also people).
There's really no way around it except to provide privacy across the board and the best way to avoid tax evasion is by having clear taxation policies that can't be avoided. Sales tax, for example, is an unavoidable tax on business. Property taxes are also unavoidable. Import/Export taxes are very difficult to avoid.
Where our governments go wrong is trying to tax "profits" which are nearly impossible to enforce. Did the company really spend a hundred million dollars buying a patent? Or was the money actually for something else and the patent was just a cover? Is that old painting in the meeting room really worth ten million or is it a fake? If it's fake, is the buyer a victim or was it money laundering? You can't possibly regulate that stuff and transparency into transactions will only catch out idiots. Most people running big businesses are not idiots.
Hmm, i don't entirely understand your point. Buyers are private using Taler, and you can't find out who bought something. You cant trace a coin to its owner. And last I checked, businesses dont pay in cash, it goes through a bank, so the privacy level doesn't change compared to what we do today.