For instance, if law established that taxpayers must pay 95% of their income in taxes, tax evasion would be ethically justified as a means of retaining the earnings that one has rightfully earned. How about tax evasion? First of all, it is not clear that tax evasion is immoral per se, as Bill Gates seems to assume. Today, the sale and possession is legal in eight states and counting. This might sound utopian, but legalization of marijuana also seemed unreachable a few years ago. If drug trading using cryptocurrencies continues to grow, it could end up making government efforts to stop the consumption of illegal substances useless, leading to the end of the War on Drugs and paving the way for an eventual legalization. (These policies had a severe impact on minorities, particularly black and Hispanics Americans.) To justify this assertion, here is a number: in 1974 period, 41,000 went to prison due to drug offenses in 2014, multiply the previous factor by 10. Even though it is difficult to measure the exact impact of the War on Drugs on this spectacular growth, we can state with certainty that a large part of this increase is due to the drug war. In the period 1974-2014, the prison population grew by about 600 percent. The drug war has also had a tremendous impact on prison policies. government alone (excluding state and local government spending) has spent more than $1 trillion.
Since the onset of the War on Drugs in 1971, the U.S. Besides a clear violation of personal freedom, prohibition has contributed to an increase in drug overdoses, strengthening at the same time the role of violent cartels in drug-producing countries.įrom an economic perspective, the War on Drugs costs taxpayers around $51 billion annually. In the U.S., the War on Drugs initiated by President Nixon in the 1970s appears to have resulted in more harm than good. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, at least in some cases. Leaving aside this comment, Bill Gates has a point: cryptocurrencies facilitate anonymous (pseudonymous, to be more precise) transactions, undermining the capacity of the State to enforce the law in relation to certain illegal activities. Charging cryptocurrencies with drug-related deaths is comparable to accusing Windows of causing terrorism because terrorists are using Microsoft’s operating system to store documents on how to make bombs. He also raised concerns about the negative consequences of the anonymity feature of cryptocurrencies, namely money laundering, tax evasion and terrorism funding.Īs the creator of the most successful operating system in history, Bill Gates should know better than anyone that a piece of software (or in the case of cryptocurrencies, a payment system based on a new technology) cannot be blamed for the use someone makes of it.
Gates was of course referring to the fact that cryptocurrencies facilitate the purchase of illegal substances on the black market, which sometimes leads to drug-related deaths. In a Q&A session on Reddit last week, Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates accused cryptocurrencies of causing “deaths in a fairly direct way,” leading to headlines such as this: “Bill Gates says crypto-currencies cause deaths.”
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