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To: Dermot Burke who wrote (20286)	6/27/1998 7:30:00 PM
From: Andy Thomas	Respond to of 24154

>>Gosh, how do you tax an anonymous transaction?>> This just gets "curiouser and curiouser..." Andy

To: Dermot Burke who wrote (20286)	6/28/1998 3:37:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

>>>Gosh, how do you tax an anonymous transaction? That's going to go over like a lead balloon with governments.<<< Same way you tax anonymous real cash transactions now - at the seller. They are forced to make transaction records and deposits available, and can be audited. The only way to avoid paying the sales tax is to take money from the till and put it in your pocket, thus risking an IRS charge and jail time. Even to do this they have to fake the ring-up of the sale or destroy part of their cash register tapes, if they are in retail. This explains why you get your legs broken if you go into the vending machine business in certain locales - the mobs want the machines because the sales there are unrecorded and the cash truly untraceable, especially in those machines that make change for bills. Of course they still need to fake purchase records to show more candy bars and cigarettes being purchased, or fewer, depending on what they are doing, avoiding taxes or laundering money. Especially appealing are casinos and other pure 'service' businesses with no telling purchasing of supplies to record. They allow skimming of profits and laundering of money simultaneously. But anyway this is far easier with real cash than with anonymous ecash, so I believe the government might like it. If you are transacting over the internet, you would have to hack your own database and other databases by deleting records in some kind of elaborate scheme that let you make deposits from sales into banks that give you cash (real cash) withdrawals and still create no record. I don't think anybody should be stupid enough to try this. You would have to commit yourself to an out-and-out criminal enterprise of some kind with a phony company shell and so on. Now that's for sales in this country. If you want to set up in another country to sell software, content, services or whatever over the internet that can be downloaded, I don't think there is a mechanism in place to collect sales taxes, whether a credit card is used or any other form of transaction, but when there is such a collection system, the same problems will apply. Eventually you will have to have an out-and-out criminal enterprise to avoid taxes, and at that point the taxes will be the least of everyone's problems. The thing about ecash is that it has little appeal to the consumer, but lots of appeal to internet schemers: 1. Almost everyone with a computer can get access to a credit card. 2. Credit cards allow you to control your use: you can pay it off right away or borrow the money for a while. 3. Credit cards don't let companies with pay-for-use schemes drain your money away invisibly by nickel-and-diming you to the poorhouse. 4. If ecash were to become widespread you would either have to have your computer notify you every time you spent a penny, or severely curtail casual browsing for fear of unknowingly accumulating charges by running into a series of access for pay sites, or occasionally have your account suddenly emptied, with no recourse such as you may have with a credit card. 5. An anonymous cash scheme would allow even a more legitimate company to claim they had no way to contact customers when there is a product recall, defect case, or class action suit, and no way for the customer to file and show that they purchased something they should get their money back for. Unless they filled in shipping info or some other kind of online receipt information, in which case the whole privacy discussion is moot anyway. Is this analysis flawed, as far as any of you can tell? Cheers, Chaz