Best Posts in Thread: SIM card registration

That's a bit offtopic but anyway:

Failure of specific actors (due to personal greed or technical failure or whatever else) doesn't necessarily mean that the general idea of introducing a means of online value exchange between individuals that cannot be tracked or interfered with by third parties is a bad thing or can't work.

Unfortunately the huge amount of money poured into "crypto" by clueless investors looking for the next big thing led to an influx of fraudsters that invented bullshit nobody needs (NFTs anybody?) just to give them something to throw money at. Gives the whole thing a bad image, but that doesn't mean that the original idea of providing cash-like transactions online is bad.

I don't think BTC etc in their current form are really the solution to the payments problem - it isn't really comparable to cash in terms of privacy (the blockchain is a gigantic public ledger, so all transactions are visible for everybody and staying anonymous is hard in practice), and it costs the equivalent of a small countries' energy consumption to run these networks.

For all the same reasons that anonymous / private communication is a good thing, anonymous / private payments are a good thing. Offline you take that for granted (or would you invite some govt official to listen in on every conversation you have or record any cash payment you make?), and in a world where many things move "online", these basic rights have to be taken care of in that space, too. That's why having a cash equivalent in the online world would be a good thing.

Of course all freedoms come with side effects / can be abused by bad actors, like idiots abusing (perceived) anonymity online, money laundering etc, but that's always the case and whatever you do, a reasonably motivated criminal will always find a way. A wiser man once said "once you take away all freedoms in the name of fighting crime, what's left to fight for actually?"

As for the taxes and oh so poor goverments: It's a fact that goverments have always been able to collect taxes, even before the invention of the internet, even when people where still exchanging gold coins.

Making tax collection _easier_ for the state is not citizen's duty, and it's certainly not a valid reason to give them (or anybody else) access to absolutely all financial transactions. Same with the SIM registration (which is law for years in Germany as well, btw) and other surveillance mechanisms - just because it may make it easier in certain cases to catch a criminal, doesn't mean it's a good thing.

 

Just saw this in the news today.

Existing SIM card holders are also required to register their SIM cards within 180 days from the effectivity of the law. Failure to do so will authorize the telco to automatically deactivate or retire the SIM number and registration.
While there are no formal guidelines yet, the SIM card registration should be done through the following process:

1. Submission of duly-accomplished controlled-numbered owner's registration form with full name, date of birth, and address. The registration form should be accomplished electronically through a platform or website to be provided by the telcos.
2. Presentation of valid government-issued ID or other similar forms of documents as proof of identity.

The registration form should include an attestation by the SIM card user that the documents presented are true and correct, and that the user is the one who accomplished the form.