And yet another wild cache find...

[robertk]

I don't think it's quite 1984 yet. Most things you buy (clothes, booze, tickets, gasoline, food, etc.) with cash don't have any record that can be traced. Cash at a restaurant? They won't even know my name.

That all depends on who's asking. There are cameras all over the place (including inside stores, restaurants, and coin dealers) that will show your presence and probably your purchases (since they usually have one pointed at the registers). All it takes is the right access and facial recognition for the ID. And that's assuming you're not carrying a personal tracking device cell phone that follows your every move.

 

[MiddenMonster]

I don't think it's quite 1984 yet. Most things you buy (clothes, booze, tickets, gasoline, food, etc.) with cash don't have any record that can be traced. Cash at a restaurant? They won't even know my name. A good relationship with a local coin shop would help moving expensive coins.

All true, but think about how much that limits you. You find a $10 million cache and you're nibbling away at it buying clothes, booze, tickets, gasoline, food, etc. How long would it take you to burn through $10 million that way? And if you die and leave it to your kids, where does that leave them?

That all depends on who's asking. There are cameras all over the place (including inside stores, restaurants, and coin dealers) that will show your presence and probably your purchases (since they usually have one pointed at the registers). All it takes is the right access and facial recognition for the ID. And that's assuming you're not carrying a personal tracking device cell phone that follows your every move.

Self checkout cash registers do have cameras in them, and places like Home Despot already have license plate readers in their parking lots to identify their customers. So if your visage ends up on someone's backup servers all it takes is a) an investigation into you because of some perceived crime, or b) an investigation into the vendor/business owners for some perceived crime on their part. How many people over the last century have been snagged because income they didn't report turned up in the paperwork of the person who paid them when the Feds came a knockin'. Now imagine, if you will, the feds doing a minor check on you because of a paperwork error. Just because they can, they scan for your name, address, Social Security number or other data linked to you in a system wide search. The more your name pops up, the bigger the file is they have on you. And every one of those popups is something they are going to follow.

 

[cudamark]

I guess I'm just not that paranoid thinking I'm being constantly under surveillance. Just because the technology is possible, doesn't mean is actually being used. You would have to send up some serious red flags before anyone would bother spending any time tracking your every movement.

 

[MiddenMonster]

I guess I'm just not that paranoid thinking I'm being constantly under surveillance. Just because the technology is possible, doesn't mean is actually being used. You would have to send up some serious red flags before anyone would bother spending any time tracking your every movement.

But that's just flat out wrong. Everyone is constantly under surveillance; the average person is caught on video in the neighborhood of 100 times a day. Even your new, connected car has several cameras and microphones inside that are monitoring the driver and passengers. The only question is what becomes of the data that is collected. In most cases, it's nothing. The hours of traffic cam footage probably doesn't have any bearing on your life. The video of you parking in the Home Depot parking lot, walking through the store and paying at the register with a credit card with a camera looking up at you is used to build a profile on your shopping habits. Is that something to be paranoid about? It's up to the individual, but I don't like the idea of being an unpaid employee of a company's marketing department.

As for sending up red flags, that ship has sailed a long time ago. The IRS uses AI and machine learning for most of their operations now, and every digitally submitted return is run through the algorithms. It doesn't take much to kick it out for further examination. There's an average "living beyond" one's income that most people who do it fall into. There's an average of being a tightwad that most of the people who do that fall into. You've got a small fudge factor in that range, such as buying ribeye instead of sirloin, or craft beer instead of mass produced consumer beer. But those limits are set by credit card companies on one side and the calculated minimum a person plus their dependents need to survive. No one entity is tracking your every movement just for the fun of it. Private businesses patiently build a profile on you with the hopes that they can get you to spend more. Governments track your movements when they believe you have committed a crime. And they believe you have committed a crime when their computers kick out your name for whatever reason. If you haven't sent up some red flags it's probably because you don't have a $10 million cache you found that's just itching to run free in its own pasture. If you were 20 years old and found such a cache it would be almost impossible to move its value to the legitimate side of the ledger by the time you reached the age of 100. And that's spending only $125K every year for 80 years.

 

[russau]

Life is to short to be worried about all of this for me !

 

[MiddenMonster]

Life is to short to be worried about all of this for me !

For me, too. Until the moment when I find a high value treasure cache, then life will be too short to not worry about it, and it will bubble right to the top of the heap.