Breaking Privacy Coins Are Not Radical; Surveillance Money Is

For thousands of years, money changed hands in private. A bronze coin passed from merchant to customer, leaving no record of the transaction. No government official knew what you bought or from whom. No bank tracked your spending habits. This wasn’t a bug in the system — it was how money worked.

When paper money appeared in medieval China and later in early modern Europe, it functioned as an anonymous, transferable bearer instrument. Ownership changed through physical exchange, not personal identification. For centuries, governments didn’t know what you spent or where, and the state had to rely on audits, witnesses and confessions.

All of this changed relatively recently and within living memory. Credit cards in the mid-20th century started consolidating spending into neat, searchable records. Laws beginning in the 1970s required banks to verify customer identities and report suspicious transactions. International networks standardized transaction messaging across borders. Each step seemed reasonable in isolation: fraud prevention, Anti-Money Laundering and law enforcement. Collectively, however, they built the infrastructure for completely unprecedented financial surveillance.

The internet accelerated everything. Online bank accounts, digital cards and mobile payments capture not just what you buy, but also when, where and from which device. Payment platforms incorporate identity verification and behavioral analytics from the start. They score your risk profile in real time. Convenience was the hook, and surveillance came baked in.

Today, governments can access your spending history and with whom you transact. They can also freeze accounts at will. Canada did this to Freedom Convoy protesters in 2022. Georgia froze bank accounts of five non-governmental organizations that provided legal and financial aid to arrested demonstrators this past March, prompting Amnesty International to condemn the move as “a blatant attack on human rights.” In Syria, the transitional government ordered banks to freeze accounts linked to former regime figures.

There are morally defensible and intellectually coherent arguments in support of some of these cases. Today’s national security legislation around the world, however, often leaves defendants with little legal room to argue their case. Their accounts may eventually be unfrozen, but the initial punishment cannot be undone.

With bank accounts a lifeline for most people, freezing them amounts to coercion. You can’t expe

Source: CoinTelegraph