Certainly I dentity theft is a problem. But a Universal Identifier Number is simply the nose of the camel.
"The World Bank has offered to assist the government in re-structuring the Public Distribution System (PDS), the Delhi government is set to soon initiate a pilot project to launch its ‘cash for food’ program in the Capital.
the real goal is a cashless society. An economic system where the government can track and tax every transaction.
Picture a day in the not too distant future where you will not be able to have a garage sale with out a vendor’s license where you will have to have a terminal tied in to a central bank computer.
If you want to make a private off the books sale of even the smallest item it will have to be on a purely barter bases because there is no legal currency out side of a government computer network.
Personally I am not willing to surrender my anonymity.
Personally I buy and sell guns frequently on a person-to-person basis. No background check, No record of any transaction what so ever. In a cashless society there would be a defacto gun registration system because every gun purchase would be recorded in a government computer no matter where it happened.
Any voluntary system would not stay voluntary for long. Eventually commercial business would opt out of the cash system because of the added expense of handling cash. (Just consider the expenses today of moving cash around; armored cars, security guards, safes). If the number of people using cash becomes small enough the pressure to go cashless will become immense.
Cash is the enabler of crime but is also the enabler of economic freedom.
Having seen how a simple social security system tool quickly turned into a very bad quality universal identifier in the US (the SSN), it is impossible to recommend any system that won’t be prey to becoming an instrument of tyranny. From the very early days of India’s independence, identification lists have been traduced and misused to sort out and massacre individuals from different communities.
However, your concerns about transaction tracking are only relevant to a politico-economic scenario where personal taxation is used to control people rather than provide revenue to run a shrinking government. In fact, pure transaction tracking, technically, does not need publication of details of the individual entities conducting the transaction.
A small slice of each transaction is certain to add up, across millions and billions of transactions a day, into sufficient funding for even the most badly run government. There is absolutely no reason to store - indeed, no reason to even record - the identities of the transactors.
The trouble with such transactions is the need for a simple identification system, to ensure that the tools being used to conduct the deal are being used by authorised operators. It may seem that such verification must necessarily be certified by an independent authority, but the beauty of interconnected networks is that there no technical reasons for such an authority to be centralised.
Therefore, as long as verification processes are not compromised or tainted by involuntary and unwanted intrusions of privacy, pure electronic transfer of an equitable exchange mechanism between two responsible humans is not a bad thing.
As far as your line of business is concerned, how does it really matter whether you exchange guns for apples, butter or virtual money, as long as there is no persistent link to either you or your customers? After all, even paper currency can be invisibly and indelibly marked, if you’re feeling (understandably) paranoid.