This is a bad thing unless the digital currency is also privacy preserving.
It’s just WeChat. It’s basically like Venmo. It’s been that way for awhile. Even rural farmer’s markets and street vendors and stuff took WeChat last time I went and that was 7 or so years ago. It’s not a digital currency.
It should be noted that WeChat is very much more expansive in China than in the West where it’s just a chat app. An American friend lived there for awhile for work reasons so I’d go visit her. My WeChat was just a chat app and hers was the “everything app” Elon Musk dreams of making X into. (Which I seriously doubt will work in America because we have different apps that do all that. China didn’t and WeChat filled the void.)
In China? No way.
How do people pay for illegal things like drugs, prostitution and so on?
In Brazil, people use pix (online governmental instant payment) to pay for drugs, so i guess in China people use wechat and alipay too. It is not like the government watches every transaction made.
Edit: Also, the volume is HUGE, in Brazil we have at least 2k payments per second made with pix, in China it should be even bigger, so if there isn’t an investigation, i think the government won’t look at specific payments, like a guy paying for prostitution.
The government may not actively monitor transactions realtime, but it can sure as hell arrest a drug dealer or a sex worker and then go after everyone that has paid them money.
That’s the thing about data collection: It may not be scary now, but it might be eventually. Who knows how a future government can abuse years of data (or data thieves for that matter)?
Give money transaction/banking data to anyone like you said and this will become a huge crime problem. Money is a huge risk for any information to be given, I bet it’s like this all around the world. “But the cops”, the cops of today can steal based on that information or commit other financial crimes.
You can’t trust almost anyone with any financial data, not because of privacy, but because it can cause a very large problem, not human rights problem, but destabilizing country economy problem. Have you ever seen people getting jailed at your job? I have seen in mine.
I think it also comes down to the fact most people aren’t going to label the transaction “illegal drugs”. But it does make it easier to track payments and build cases against people (or oppress people depending on the government/police).
A Chinese guy is here. Last Friday, I was buying snacks at a convenience store near my office. When I was checking out, a lady in front of me paid with cash, and the cashier helplessly told her that she couldn’t provide change, showing her the empty cash drawer. The lady couldn’t make her purchase and left disappointed.
I mean, yeah, it’s a fucking totalitarian dystopia.
how do you pay people off-books and off-contracts? how do you pay prostitues or buy drugs? no way homeless prostitues all use monero uniswap and kyc exchanges to load up their wechat. how if not cash?
