If anonymity becomes a standard in cyberspace cash systems, we have to accept its potential abuse – as in copyright violations, fraud, and money laundering. Innovative new crypto schemes have the potential for mitigating these abuses, but the fact of anonymity guarantees that some skullduggery will be easier to pull off. On the other hand, the lack of anonymity means that every move you make, and every file you take, will be traceable. That opens the door to surveillance like we’ve never seen … “In one direction lies unprecedented scrutiny and control of people’s lives; in the other, secure parity between individuals and organizations. The shape of society in the next century may depend on which approach predominates.”
Predictor: Chaum, David
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine on e-cash, Steven Levy quotes David Chaum, CEO of DigiCash. Levy writes: ”If anonymity becomes a standard in cyberspace cash systems, we have to accept its potential abuse – as in copyright violations, fraud, and money laundering. Innovative new crypto schemes have the potential for mitigating these abuses, but the fact of anonymity guarantees that some skullduggery will be easier to pull off. On the other hand, the lack of anonymity means that every move you make, and every file you take, will be traceable. That opens the door to surveillance like we’ve never seen. ‘You have to let your readers know how important this is,’ Chaum tells me when discussing online anonymous cash. ‘The choice can only be made once.’ He thinks that if an economic system that tracks all transactions comes to cyberspace, the result would be much worse than the situation in the physical world. ‘Cyberspace doesn’t have all the physical constraints,’ he says. ‘There are no walls … it’s a different, scary, weird place, and with identification it’s a panopticon nightmare. Right? Everything you do could be known to anyone else, could be recorded forever. It’s antithetical to the basic principle underlying the mechanisms of democracy.’ David Chaum believes, as he wrote in an article in 1992, that ‘in one direction lies unprecedented scrutiny and control of people’s lives; in the other, secure parity between individuals and organizations. The shape of society in the next century may depend on which approach predominates.'”
Biography:David Chaum was the founder of DigiCash in the early 1990s. He was the inventor of cryptographic protocols that allowed him to create a company whose mission was to change the world through the introduction of anonymous digital money technology. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Date of prediction: December 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: E-cash
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: E-Money (That’s What I Want)
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.12/emoney_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney