by kleinbl00

Shit's about to get interesting. Pretend you're Uganda. You're working on standing up a first-world banking system but you're, well, Uganda. Here comes Facebook. Congratulations. As far as your citizens are concerned, their central banking authority is Mark Zuckerberg.

Now pretend you're India.

Governments everywhere will view Facebook’s cryptocurrency as a huge honeypot of data about how users spend money—with all the privacy and tax reporting implications that data honeypot entails, because every transaction would be traceable by governments. This would give certain officials what they’re hoping for, which is the ability to trace, monitor and analyze every dollar spent rather than piecing together piecemeal reports (currently, banks file suspicious activity reports for transactions above $10,000). Here’s one example in a statement made during a May 2019 speech by Sigal Mandelker, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence:

“When FinCEN analyzed millions of dollars of remittance transactions with suspected links to terrorism, it found they averaged less than $600 each. In an era where a radicalized suicide bomber can bring a tragic end to the lives of hundreds for nothing more than the price of duct tape, a vest, and supplies, we cannot afford to allow any money to flow to terrorists.”