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Events • September 12, 2024 

# Financial Privacy under Fire: Protecting and Restoring Americans’ Rights — Decentralization and Financial Privacy 

The privacy Americans should enjoy over their financial information has been in steady decline for more than 50 years. Regulatory frameworks, such as the Bank Secrecy Act and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Consolidated Audit Trail, grant government access to Americans’ financial transactions. As financial services have become increasingly digitized, the volume of financial records to which the government has easy—and often unfettered—access has grown exponentially. And proposals for a central bank digital currency, which involve the government becoming more intimately involved in Americans’ use of money, have the potential to further erode the ability to transact without government surveillance.

As policymakers are confronted with questions about evolving technologies, the question of financial privacy must not be shunted to the side. It is time to rethink financial privacy. Does financial convenience have to come at the cost of financial privacy? Does the Constitution provide the protections needed to limit government access to financial information? Can decentralization provide privacy-protecting solutions? Join us for an outstanding program featuring leading policymakers and experts discussing financial privacy at Cato’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives annual conference.

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This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). 

##### Featuring 

![Paul Brigner - cropped](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2024-08/KtA2Oo9t_400x400.jpg?itok=F9KcvZmG) 

##### Paul Brigner 

Coinbase Institute

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](https://twitter.com/paulbrigner) 

![Ahmed Ghappour - cropped](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2024-08/Ahmed-Ghappour-cropped.jpg?itok=yzhTnx_W) 

##### Ahmed Ghappour 

Espresso Systems

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](https://twitter.com/ghappour) 

![Ian Miers - cropped](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2024-08/Ian-Miers-cropped.jpg?itok=o21kAwKU) 

##### Ian Miers 

University of Maryland

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](https://x.com/secparam) 

![Miller Whitehouse-Levine - cropped](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2024-09/Miller-Whitehouse-Levine-cropped.jpg?itok=DXdf0Owg) 

##### Miller Whitehouse-Levine 

DeFi Education Fund

![Nikhilesh De cropped](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2021-12/Nikhilesh-De.-cropped.png?itok=PnZfQKh0) 

##### Nikhilesh De 

CoinDesk

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](https://twitter.com/nikhileshde)