The Emunie monetary system is both interesting and scary, all at the same time. Mostly due to the fact that Keynesians are currently trying to ban cash so that people can't exempt themselves from negative interest rates and other man behind the curtain manipulation. Emunie is basically an automated central banker, so it's a big difference from what most Austrian people are used to.
If you believe deflationary, Austrian economics has shortcomings, an automated central banker is obviously going to be better than a human one issuing changes with nefarious motives. The only problem here is, governments can attempt to co-opt cryptocurrency at any given time, and a vote for Emunie economics is essentially a vote for central banking and Keynesianism in this regard.
Let's say Emunie did become huge and the number one cryptocurrency. Even though it's a global ledger, the US government can just fork it, add their own variables, set it to automatically deduct X% taxes per citizen, declare it legal tender, and claim that anyone using a currency besides this system is a money launderer attempting to avoid taxation. Anything with a central banker, whether a real person or automated, is a huge Pandora's box. Assuming you have a benign, honest government, then you've created a system to increase efficiency and reduce abuse. Assuming you don't, then you've created a system to increase the efficiency of abuse.
As I said in another post, reputation based systems are also the best candidate available for governments to link biometric data to a single wallet user address instead of having many pseudo anon addresses like Bitcoin. At it's root, technology is just an increase in efficiency. If you believe people like Ted Kaczynski are even remotely, somewhat correct, this leveraging of efficiency will always be used to decrease liberty and increase enslavement.
The standard Bitcoin and Cryptonote protocol is really a primitive piece of technology that the government might have a hard time co-opting for enslavement. The pseudo-anonymous, or in the case of ring signatures, possibly zero knowledge proof, anonymous nature of addresses, with lack of a reputation variable to tie biometric data to, might make it a useless tool for governments in the long run. Going any further past this might be creating the tools for your own enslavement.
"THE ‘BAD’ PARTS OF TECHNOLOGY CANNOT BE SEPARATED FROM THE ‘GOOD’ PARTS"
Quote from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm
Ive had similar thoughts over the period that this has been in development, but I think it would be very difficult for a govt to enforce a lot of your "fears".
Firstly, only service nodes gain any form of reputation at a system level. Non-service nodes (like regular Joes) won't have any associated reputation. I don't see how any government could associate bio-data or anything similar to a single ID, nor enforce it when it's a simple case of just creating a new account or 2 and moving funds around. The government then has to attempt to associate that same data with those other accounts, it would be an admin nightmare I would imagine.
With regard to the cashless society kind of thing, to do that they will need an electronic infrastructure to enable it, which, with our P2P debit card, we can hijack, piggy back on etc. In the event that said infrastructure is secured enough to be out of reach to eMunie or another crypto, there is nothing preventing a merchant having a dedicated piece of hardware for EMU payments. Trying to banish that hardware would be very counter productive to any country's economy IMO, let alone the costs to enforce it, patrolling merchants to ensure that they are not accepting EMU would be quite a stretch for any government.
Furthermore, there are features in place that allow merchants and regular users to be compliant with laws and regulations regarding tax and declarations etc. Most regular Joes really do not care about anonymity and all that kinda stuff, and just want an easy life with products that make it easier still. It would be a very small demographic that would have all of these features setup in a way to "Screw the Gubbermint", and even in that instance the worst case is the government is back where it is now, but with a much improved system.
I've spoken to a number of MP's in the UK on what the agendas are regarding this kind of stuff and crypto, and also sought a lot of advice from people more in the know about tax law, reg law and such than I am. The take away I had from all of these discussions is, as long as the policies are in place where the system can provide the requirements the government needs, then long term issues should be minimal and I myself (and the eMunie project) are covered from that perspective. If a user wants to enable all the features available to mask himself, that is on them.
One key challenge that safeguards a system such as this from government tactics like you suggest, is a fast and rapid user base growth where there is a lot of value in the system. If you can achieve that before any government can react (and they react slowly), then it ties their hands somewhat as the populous is already committed. Any action to discredit that system would result in a large amount of the populous losing wealth over night due to a "run". If that happens you have a major economic issue and lots of unhappy citizens on your hands to deal with, and no government, however Orwellian, will want that.
My view is to put enough measures in place so that such a system can align with the government's needs, but still keep the wellbeing of the user's as #1 priority. If the government wants all of the users to set their clients up so that it can be achieved, that is the governments job to promote, and the users decision to make.
Finally you'd need every government on the planet to take the same stance, and risk the same problems and costs. Seems unlikely to me, and even if they did, by the time they move, any currency similar to eMunie could be well established if pushed with smart direction and decision making.
