Submitted 3 weeks ago by qualia@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ab93bc45-1bac-4320-9a32-b5859a48be9f.jpeg
With the serial numbers and massive storage all they’d need is a pathtracking software and to standardize scanning bills to create records at POS.
Sure there’d be gaps but this’d be automatable, so no more FBI agents in a room copying serial numbers to avoid marking the bills. Then whenever voxel scanning happens a bank worker could scan a whole palette of currency and record its data.
I mean. Your bank tracks your card transactions. Government can request access.
I mean currency as in paper money.
The issue is that there are plenty of transactions outside of the jurisdiction of the country. More than half of the physical currency supply in the US is outside of the US, and while the Euro has explicitly made this possible from the onset, I don’t think nations outside of China can have a complete enough picture to trace everything.
OwOarchist@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Not just banks, either. Imagine a lot of major retailers ‘voluntarily opting in’ to a system like this, just like they opt in to having Flock cameras.
Only direct person-to-person transactions would be even slightly resistant to this surveillance, and even those could largely be inferred by looking at where the bills show up next.
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Flee markets would be like black boxes though
OwOarchist@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
For the most part, not really.
These bills were withdrawn from the bank by Person A, and later deposited in a different bank by Person B, who is a flea market vendor (you know this because financial records and other transactions already tie them to the flea market organizers). You can reasonably infer that Person A attended the flea market in the intervening time period and bought something worth that amount from Person B.
It would only start to become difficult to track when multiple person-to-person cash transactions are done in a row – as in the case that Person B spent the cash on drugs from his drug dealer instead of depositing it in his bank account.