In China, coins and banknotes have all but disappeared
In China, coins and banknotes have all but disappeared
From supermarkets to cafés and public transportation, everyday payments are made using WeChat or Alipay, two apps that have become essential to daily life in the country.
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How do people pay for illegal things like drugs, prostitution and so on?
Crypto I guess
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).
I agree, in an investigation with evidence, with authorization from the police force money laundering/financial crimes department and a judge saying that the bank should give the data, it would give more concrete evidence for a case.
If you live in an authoritarian system, it's not just the government you're worried about.
With chickens.
Bitcoin
But you'd have to get from an exchange right? Wouldn't they be able to track their movement of tokens to specific wallets (i.e. exchange wallet to cold wallet)?