Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gota 45 days ago
>With pix, they are monitoring 100% of transactions now.

First, I don't think they are.

Second, good - they should have an _algorithm_ checking every transaction. MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me; the government could catch all the money laundering that is the lifeblood of crime, or maybe just finally eradicate tax evasion, the necessary first step towards rationalizing our tax code and one of the core issues of our country?

Your opinions read like you have misplaced worries, if not values.

2 comments

> First, I don't think they are.

100% of pix transactions are unconditionally sent to government bodies for monitoring. It's not an algorithmic "only if it matches some criteria" affair.

What they're actually doing with the data is anyone's guess. They could be doing anything. The tax department is no doubt going to be the first part of the brazilian government to adopt AI. Who knows what other creative uses they're going to find for it?

> MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me

And we should be making it illegal for them to do that, not compounding the problem by piling on equivalent government functionality on top of it. The problem is supposed to be fixed, not replaced with a national version.

> the government could catch all the money laundering that is the lifeblood of crime

The optimal amount of money laundering, fraud, crime, are all non-zero. You can "catch all the money laundering" quite easily, just install a totalitarian state panopticon where everybody is guilty by default and constantly surveilled by an omniscient intelligence apparatus, problem solved.

You're going to need to accept some amount of crime if you want to have some semblance of freedom and basic human dignity.

> Second, good - they should have an _algorithm_ checking every transaction. MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me;

You are confusing transaction authorization done by card networks/issuers with the kind of fraud analysis that happens post settlement and requires correlating multiple transactions and accounts

> the government could catch all the money laundering

No, you don’t have enough information in transactions alone to identify all money laundering, specially the sophisticated kind.