<story><title>Zcash, an untraceable Bitcoin alternative, launches in alpha</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/01/zcash-an-untraceable-bitcoin-alternative-launches-in-alpha/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ctoth</author><text>Of course, once these techniques were in place, they conclusively destroyed the ability of governments to control the flow of electronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened, this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all over the modern electronic economy. By the time people figured out that raging nonlinear anarchy was not exactly to the advantage of anyone concerned, the process was simply too far gone to stop. All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air. Even physically tearing up the fiber optics couldn&amp;#x27;t stop it; governments that tried to just found that the whole encryption mess oozed swiftly into voice mail and even fax machines.&lt;p&gt;...&lt;p&gt;Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triads and the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their own cash. He simply accepted it: electronic, private cash, unbacked by any government, untraceable, completely anonymous, global in reach, lightninglike in speed, ubiquitous, fungible, and usually highly volatile. Of course, such funds didn&amp;#x27;t boldly say &amp;quot;Sicilian Mafia&amp;quot; right on the transaction screen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as &amp;quot;Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira,&amp;quot; but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers.&lt;p&gt;- Heavy Weather</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>13thLetter</author><text>Just like the rest of the cyberlibertarian blue-skying that went on back in the &amp;#x27;90s, it was a nice dream, seriously! But in reality it turns out that governments can just send some armed men around to beat up the people with the encrypted faxes, email, and digital cash, and that&amp;#x27;ll largely put an end to it. The extent to which a government is helpless to stop that behavior is purely the extent to which it is reluctant to send, or incapable of sending, the armed men.</text></comment>
<story><title>Zcash, an untraceable Bitcoin alternative, launches in alpha</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/01/zcash-an-untraceable-bitcoin-alternative-launches-in-alpha/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ctoth</author><text>Of course, once these techniques were in place, they conclusively destroyed the ability of governments to control the flow of electronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened, this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all over the modern electronic economy. By the time people figured out that raging nonlinear anarchy was not exactly to the advantage of anyone concerned, the process was simply too far gone to stop. All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air. Even physically tearing up the fiber optics couldn&amp;#x27;t stop it; governments that tried to just found that the whole encryption mess oozed swiftly into voice mail and even fax machines.&lt;p&gt;...&lt;p&gt;Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triads and the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their own cash. He simply accepted it: electronic, private cash, unbacked by any government, untraceable, completely anonymous, global in reach, lightninglike in speed, ubiquitous, fungible, and usually highly volatile. Of course, such funds didn&amp;#x27;t boldly say &amp;quot;Sicilian Mafia&amp;quot; right on the transaction screen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as &amp;quot;Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira,&amp;quot; but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers.&lt;p&gt;- Heavy Weather</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>natrius</author><text>It turns out that there&amp;#x27;s a pretty easy fix for this. People have to start caring how the money they&amp;#x27;re accepting has flowed through the economy. You don&amp;#x27;t need a government to sanction bad actors. The people can do it on their own.&lt;p&gt;Money is power. Anonymous money prevents you from choosing which power you&amp;#x27;d like to submit to. Decentralized money prevents governments from restricting power. Let&amp;#x27;s keep the decentralization and remove the anonymity so you can reject power you find undesirable.&lt;p&gt;The first application of this mechanism will probably be restoring our democracies by rejecting the power of money to influence them. It won&amp;#x27;t be the last application—I think we&amp;#x27;ll use it to enforce any rule that has a broad consensus behind it. The boundaries of the enforcement will be the same as the boundaries of our economy: there aren&amp;#x27;t any. We&amp;#x27;ll have global governance without a global government.&lt;p&gt;This is merit capitalism. &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;meritcapitalism.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;meritcapitalism.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zcash is cool, but if you accept it as payment, you&amp;#x27;re making yourself powerless.</text></comment>