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@ Jake Woodhouse
2025-04-05 08:45:32
“The nation state relies on taxation which is a form of theft. These are not consensual transactions. Of course, they would prefer to not have citizens that are private. They would very much prefer a system of taxation that cannot be hidden from.
That’s where the term ‘daylight robbery’ comes from. Back in England, there was [this idea) that ‘the home is the castle,’ and the tax man did not have the legal authority to enter the house and see the amount of wealth that you have inside, like how many gold coins does the subject have available. That was not allowed by law. It was a rather private system. So the solution was to tax what was visible. So the tax rate that you had to pay as a subject was dependent on the number and size of windows in your house, because that was something the taxman could see from the outside. You could not hide the number of windows that you have. And so the obvious protection mechanism unfortunately was to decrease the size and quantity of your windows. So a lot of old houses have their windows laid full of bricks to decrease the tax burden of individuals. So this was why we call taxation ‘daylight robbery’ — because it literally robbed the daylight of honest people.
Privacy benefits the victim, and surveillance benefits the attacker. And so if we create systems that are used widely by people and that have privacy as a default, then all of a sudden we substantially increase the cost of attack for any type of adversary. And if we create tools and software that have this default utilization of privacy at a cheap rate, then we decrease the cost of defense. I believe that’s the closest path to world peace, so to say — it’s a cypherpunk world where privacy is safeguarded and any attack is simply not profitable.”
@npub1klkk3vrzme455yh9rl2jshq7rc8dpegj3ndf82c3ks2sk40dxt7qulx3vt / Ep.32 / 53:04
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