“Last year, a young Saudi woman and mother of two children, who was a student at Leeds University in the UK, was arrested when she returned home to Saudi Arabia and sentenced to 34 years in prison. Her crime was that she followed and retweeted various activists on Twitter, while she was in the UK. A coupled of months later, a 72-year-old Saudi-American dual citizen living in the United States was arrested and sentenced to 16 years in prison when he returned to Saudi Arabia for what was supposed to be a brief trip. His crime was that he tweeted critically about the Saudi regime while in the United States.”
Discussion
“Going forward, if a meaningful portion of the economy shifts towards peer-to-peer global gig work, and money and information in general become more encrypted and private, and money is able to be self-custodied and moved around globally, then what does that mean for governments' ability to audit incomes and impose taxation on those incomes at the individual level? Such auditing and assessment could become much more expensive, and for sophisticated users, potentially becomes impossible.
One perspective would be that governments simply have to change their patterns of taxation over time, if indeed bottom-up open-source distributed privacy technology and open monetary/information networks become more widespread.”