Comrades: I'd like to use this newfound soapbox to share a PSA on a non-obvious existential threat looming to all potential socialist societies:

Truly Anonymous Digital Currency

While the ability to hide vast sums of wealth from taxation in the Caymen Islands or as cash reserves has always been around, we are entering into a new level of dark money where assets can be hidden yet still used every day as highly-liquid digital currency or digital assets

If/when this becomes private enough and trustworthy enough for the big players to anonymize their assets, any wealth taxes we dream up will be entirely impossible to enforce. That money is off the books for good

Worse, if the general public starts to use these too and the norm just becomes anonymous cryptocurrencies (or whatever form this takes) then we wont even have the ability to easily tax our public markets, maybe not even enforce income tax

Without taxes, that will mark the end of traditional governments, unless some counter tech is created or a widespread political movement to only accept public, auditable money/assets with a long papertrail becomes the norm

This is very likely the response if the left gains any ground in US politics or otherwise - a strategic retreat by the rich into the crypto/multi-national ether.

You might still be able to hunt down the well-known billionaires, but the rest will likely be able to look like they lost it all in a stock crash and now live a modest life in Switzerland etc

It could certainly be the end of the ability to easily enforce taxation in any legit systemic way, for anyone with enough money/know-how to hide it well. And thus all taxes will just come from those with the least ability to play the game (as usual)

I likely include income taxes and sales taxes in this as well, as the ability for governments to track payments of any size becomes as difficult as catching torrent pirates back in the day. Especially if everyone is doing it

And especially if governments have already been pillaged and weakened beyond measure as the ruling class makes their last hurrah (y'know, in the best case scenario where we eventually win). We're at this pillaging stage now - US (and UK) at least

So keep that in mind as we fight for control of these gov systems: they're quite likely sinking ships. Even if we ever win control of the State (any State), all the old wealth coffers will just disappear and we'll be left with their debt, a crashing economy, and nothing to tax

This shouldn't be surprising, and it's basically our expected lot in life at this point. But I wanted to get people thinking about this because it changes priorities. Winning the throne (any throne) ain't gonna do much, sadly. (imo)

What we will need to do, instead, is create systems with rigorous auditing and technical financial control, essentially rebuilding a (digital) government where every cent is accounted for in the same old boring ways we thought/hoped gov worked back in the 90s

where black market assets (without long papertrails) are fined before they can enter the marketplace, and overall we aim to make sure economic participation incentivizes openness and honesty

This route means unexpected allies with all the liberals and pencil pushers who just want a boring well-run state and strong law. Fiscal conservatives might even be happy, until we use a lot of this infrastructure to fund social programs and UBIs

One alternative route to do this - the Libertarian Left route - is to bake these measures into the money system itself, and otherwise keep a mostly-flat anarchist* style to society

(anarchist* with asterisk because I don't think its possible to have a society without an overwhelming force to fill the power vacuum. Maybe standing armies could be replaced by networks of well-armed citizens, idk, but its a fair limitation)

But baking wealth redistribution into money: currently money and asset ownership is inherently predisposed to being hoarded, way beyond reasonable measures - in fact, you collect interest even more efficiently as your stack grows

Government has been the counter-force there (when its effective at all) - taxing those vast sums of wealth and re-distributing them, or printing money (devaluing all the rest) and directing those new funds towards public works (again, in theory)

If government is permanently crippled by most transactions becoming totally private and untaxable (without monumental effort), we need that counter-force again.

It's an open question what this could look like. But personally, I see hope for the rise of digital identity to be the counter-force.

If people can identify they uniquely exist without being easily hacked or relying on the trust of any particular gov/system, then we can tie economic ownership to that too

Example: instead of just relying on gov-issued ids, or a Facebook profile, combine those with biometrics, fingerprints, dna, social graph, other ids etc: altogether that's very hard to fake

We do this identity stuff already, of course, and digitizing just makes it stronger and more redundant, but hear me out:

If we ensure every person has only one id, then we can issue social benefits and UBI directly to each account.

We could build a whole socialist society around that and try doing away with market economics entirely (which will be a dramatic adjustment, but maybe doable) but this could also work with the standard market models:

What we do is change our currency to be one that ties inflation directly to these identity accounts, such that printing new money means equally distributing to everyone (UBI style).

If these accounts have ownership inherently tied to identity, then they can't be easily traded away (seller could just re-claim after). If we setup transactions from these accounts to be inherently auditable then there'll be no more anonymous black market shenanigans*

(*Note: could still have anonymous transactions, but they'd be bot-audited to verify that there was some legitimate identity involved and not a black-market transaction)

If we went hard with this concept and just tied more and more new wealth creation (e.g. employment income, gov works, natural resources, etc) through this system, then it will quickly build up and eventually surpass the old dark markets where all the old wealth is hidden

We can speed this up by making it possible to add black market assets into the system too: you just have to pay a fine to do so (which gets redistributed evenly).

Goal is to make fines *juuust* fair enough to get begrudging acceptance from the rich. Could slowly increase fines to add a time pressure to it too (heheh)

The rich would be on the sidelines having to bet whether this system will eventually go away and they can trade freely again, or just bite the bullet and register their hidden assets and pay the back taxes on them

Goal is to make participation in this network more valuable than not, so all the hidden wealth out there eventually gets tied in and is thus available for (gradual, fair) redistribution

Reminder: a 3% wealth tax per year on the richest would still whittle away all billionaires eventually, but is slow enough that maybe - just maybe - they wont nuke the world in protest. About the best we can hope for imo

But even achieving that (and actually enforcing it) involves a monumental effort, and it's going to get a lot harder as the game shifts to become even less regulated and hard to track

So this is a (long ranty) PSA that: yes, we should expect that we need to rebuild almost everything. Can't rely on existing structures - even if we could win them, they'll be defunct by the time we hold them

What we can do and need to do is create alternative systems that do all the old boring stuff, but inherently tie equal opportunity into them. "Simplest" way I can think of is to just bake that into the currency and asset registration system itself.

Do that and we don't really need the rest of government. If taxes are being enforced and redistributed equally, then we can decide to put those back into social programs through a democracy layer (again, tied to identities, 1 person = 1 vote).

Or we can just keep the tax money and buy our own healthcare individually. Point is that we implement an inherent soft ceiling so nobody can just accrue so much massive wealth they distort the whole system, and those taxes are distributed evenly to the people

We can build a big fancy utopian social state that does everything smart over that layer after, or we can lazy-fail and just support mars missions and cat cafes on kickstarter 2.0 with our overall-decent-enough inflation UBI, using the old standard market models

Point being: we need at least this minimal layer, and we will need to actively politically unite to support it and keep participation in this network (this society) the norm.

There will always be a black market which the rich thrive in, and it's about to get way stronger as the old system collapses, so we have to make a new alliance

We have to actively think about this, find and support the builders making it happen, and form as large a union as possible to ensure that cooperation wins out over greed. It's very much a tragedy of the commons battle of civilization vs anarchy*

*And not anarchy in that good sense that we're mostly on the side of now - fighting tyrannical systems. Eventually it'll be anarchy in the sense of a complete void of society, wherein lies uncontrollable feudalistic capitalism and power vacuums where no law can protect anyone.

Thank you for hearing out this Twitter rant, and I look forward to hearing contrary opinions - as well as links to any groups you know building/thinking about this stuff. Much networking to do

Closing thought: When the chips fall and ideologies get divorced of their current contexts by a crumbling society, the statist left, the anarchist left, and the libertarian right have very similar goals: establishing that base layer of society.

Anyone making under $1M a year is on our side here. Anyone who wants a stable place to live for the lower and middle classes is on our side (and for this layer - yes, even beyond further political ideology)

And society - even capitalist society - strangely enough, loves structure, audits, openness, and rules. We have allies there.

If this stuff is corrupted-to-shit by the time we have any political power, we may need to rebuild it, but that's fine. So it be. We should expect it at this point.

But don't lose sight of where your allies lie here, once The Tower has fallen. We'll need Dorris in Accounting who loves Hillary for her great pant suits, too.

Can't just tear down society and not rebuild something better - and can't get so ideologically fervent that we cant find common ground with those behind the times

But also: don't get too laser focused about big wins and big goals - many of them are essentially illusion at this point. Focus on the long, slow build instead, and increasing class consciousness.

Nobody ever pulls you up or gives you a platform. And the platforms we've been racing towards are crumbling fast. Need to face the very real possibility that we need to build a new one ourselves. Godspeed comrades

(If this rant wasn't long enough for you)
Much of this is a response in spirit to the article The Twin Insurgency by Nils Gilman: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/

It speaks of a growing attack on society itself from both above - a plutocratic class deregulating and pillaging all they can (Republicans, Dems, pretty much every capable elite with lawyers or ability to influence law)

and below - a criminal class subverting the law using force and theft where it's weakest

Neither side wants the State to crumble, but it's a tragedy of the commons scenario - there's just too much looting for the taking. Losers are the boring middle classes too stable to be criminals (yet) but without the resources to be plutocrats.

This trend has been going strong for decades now. This thread warns of just one more catalyst to the mess that should jump it into high gear and truly break society's back, while also posing a shred of hope from the technological side that not many people know about.