Title over Possession
I want to start in an unusual manner, at least for me, and that is with a conclusion; if you want to travel the rest of the ‘flashback’, you’re very welcome…
Debanking
“Debanking is the closure of people's or organizations' bank accounts by banks that perceive the account holders to pose a financial, legal, regulatory, or reputational risk to the bank.
Examples of this include the enforcement of anti-corruption and anti–money laundering laws, anti-terrorism efforts, and the closing of bank accounts of sex workers or people violating immigration laws or considered to be politically exposed.
Debanking has been criticized for limited legal clarity and financial exclusion…” Wikipedia
If, like me, you’re new to this idea… this horrible idea, of being simply separated, unilaterally from your ‘money’, you are probably wondering how it might work and whether you’re next in line…
Let’s define a few key terms like ‘client’, account’, and ‘banks’..
- ‘client’; this is easy; you, me, and granny McGee…
- ‘bank’; a digital spreadsheet to record clients’ accounts and wealth as 0s and 1s, i.e. binary…
- ‘account’; is one spreadsheet tab, amongst thousands, with your name and a collection of 0s and 1s that represent your wealth…
UK Accounts: 453,000 UK accounts forcibly closed in 2025 ten times more than the 45,000 closed in 2016-17. The trend is exponential.
Farage: Coutts closed his account in 2023. NatWest CEO Dame Alison Rose resigned after admitting she discussed his account with a BBC journalist. An independent review found the closure was “primarily commercial” but leaked internal NatWest memos showed staff calling him “vile,” “awful,” and a Russian asset.
- Political, dressed as commercial.
Palestinians: in the diaspora having accounts closed without explanation. The spreadsheet owner bends to politics, own or others, and removes your Read permission
- Our 0s and 1s aren‘t wealth; its sysadmin’s conditional agreement to humour our requests.
Albanese: Francesca Albanese, denied any access to any spreadsheet anywhere, international (sanctions), national (red flags from complicit government), and local (cancel culture), for being the shield of Gaza; she is as poor in os and 1s as they are; yet more common cause;
- if this can happen to the great and the good just because of their job, or politics…we’re not far behind…
- who would have thought that Francesca Albanese and Farage could have anything in common, least of all this…
Freezing: national level sanctions, such as Russian assets by EU Banks, read access denied. Deserved or undeserved fraud flags, divorce judgements that ’sequester’ your read rights over your 1s and 0s, with no due process.
Payment rails: Visa and Mastercard dropped Pornhub overnight. Didn’t matter what was legal, what was contractual. The rails decided. PayPal froze/freeze accounts of journalists and activists, every day…
Once we moved our cash from the tangible world of ‘to have and to hold’ to 0s and 1s, we surrendered our right of disposal in return for convenience that came/comes with a leash.
Australia: home of the despicable Albanese; debanking of cryptocurrency operators and politically exposed persons; read those against the genocide in Gaza…
This isn’t left-right politics.
- It’s power-asymmetry politics.
- The bank possesses the 0s and 1s…
- The customer holds an empty promise of title…
You may remember, as I do, going to the bank possessing money; it was in my hot little hands…giving it to the cashier who made marks in my passbook and handed it back to me as my ‘proof’ of ‘title’ to the money I… just… gave… in exchange…for marks in a book!! Well, that was stupid…
Then came the online world where we made the exchange from ‘to have and to hold’ to digital marks in a spreadsheet, which we need the bank’s permission to even see…at least, in my day I came away with a piece of paper with marks on it… a system as old as banking in the days of Hamurabi…
The moral of the tale is…
The institution possessing the switch can debank you, disconnect you, throttle you, or amnesia you, and the law arrives after the damage is done…to punish the criminals, but leave the victim to seek redress in civil courts…which costs money… you don’t have because you were de-banked…
And, this the conclusion with which I start…
Digital sovereignty
If this transition from the world of ownership through possession to the digital world of ownership through title is to work symmetrically…
The only viable solution is for
- each ‘individual account’ record be held as a blockchain across every bank…
- ‘our’ bank would be the point of access to
- ‘our’ account in the blockchain…
Sovereignty through transparency…
How best to define sovereignty, or ownership…
‘The right of disposal’
The phrase ‘possession is 9 points of the law‘ is a legal trope made murky through time; an aphorism which resonates with our real world experience.
But, what exactly are the 9 points; and how did they loosen our grasp of our most valuable and most nebulous ‘possession‘; money.
The 9 points, in pointed jest or no, arose from the common law of British jurisprudence where judges favoured the easy, and self-evident ‘proof’ of possession over title abstractions in disputes about ownership.
Never a statute, nor formal legal principle, not even precedent; just a fait accompli…
The 9 points needed for weak equivalence with possession are, and ‘in bocco il lupo’
- a good deal of money
- a good deal of patience,
- a good cause,
- a good lawyer,
- a good counsel,
- good witnesses,
- a good jury,
- a good judge,
- and, good luck,
- actual right and title being the weakest of all.
A legal framework to articulate the ’natural justice‘ of the school yard taunt,
‘Finders, keepers, losers, weepers’.
The acid test of ownership is the right of disposal; if you haven’t the right to decide whether to keep it, trash it, sell it, burn it; then it ain’t yours.
Our ‘money’ is held in our name as 0s and 1s in a spreadsheet (aka account) with read/write access in the gift of the spreadsheet owner who also has sysadmin rights over creation and deletion of ‘accounts’.
We only get read permission, which denies us the right of disposal over our ‘money’.
It is our ’betters‘ who, in the name of blessed mammon, relieve us of the burden of choice.
We create the ‘money‘ in units, they ‘exchange’ it for service or product; our ‘choice‘ of vendor establishes the direct relationship between whip (vendor) and whip-hand (bank), leaving us as the ’whipped’.
The whip hand doesn’t need our permission, it has possession; it is we who need permission to have a virtual ‘pot to piss in’; so that Vespasian may tax it en route to the fullers. ‘pecunia non olet’ (1)
Our title to our ’money’ (numbers in a spreadsheet) is enshrined in statute, the ombudsman’s teeth as defence sufficient.
But, as in the time honoured mindset of asymmetrical judicial power, the read/write owner has possession and therefore right of disposal; and, should push come to shove, they’ll see you in court… at which point you’ll need ‘a good deal of money, patience, cause, lawyer, counsel, witnesses, jury, judge and luck’… all to secure your sovereign title; should you be so fortunate…
E.g. Holocaust Jews have been challenging Swiss banks for assets deposited during hitler’s war… 80 years ago.. and those assets are tangible treasures, not 0s and 1s. The 9 points of possession at work…
The only time we have the sovereign right of disposal is after a visit to an ATM for the holy, tangible cash. And that’s only when it’s in our hot little hands; until that magic moment, we are potless.
This issue of ’exclusive, unilateral right of disposal’ is at the very heart of the tension between a fully digitised economy and one where cash is still king.
A testament to the deep suspicion of those with asymmetrically greater power, the spreadsheet owners; the only ones with full sysadmin privileges, gods of accounts, and exclusive read/write access.
CBDC: Central Bank Digital Currencies is the logical endpoint that is preferred by the biggest spreadsheets; permission filtered by social network status, politics, and any prejudice desired.
Again, blockchain account records across every bank is the only way to offset the current asymmetry…
Emerging systems such as 6G (replacing 5G cellular tech - see adjacent post) will lock us in so tightly to this permission structure that opting out will erase us as social and economic entities.
As with all human affairs, ‘follow the money’ shows the links, the strings and ties that bind; and surely show they do not benefit the fullers; its Vespasian that’s taking the piss, and taxing us for the pleasure…
Programmable money with expiry dates, permitted use categories, and social credit conditions baked into the token, the ‘money’ itself.
The gap between “your money” and “money you’re permitted to spend” becomes visible and enforceable.
EXCLUSIVE, UNILATERAL disposal rights as the only criteria of sovereignty.
Title without possession.
Ownership without disposal rights.
A lie at the foundation of the entire financial system.
1. Vespasian, Roman Emperor 69-79 AD, taxed the public urinals of Rome, and was the first emperor to do so. From which point on, public toilets were called ‘Vespasians‘. When his son Titus objected, Vespasian, from farming stock not nobility, held a coin to his nose — ‘pecunia non olet’. Money has no smell.
The fullers used urine (urea, ammonia, the strongest chemical) to clean, amongst other garments, 9 meters of pure white wool; senatorial garb made foul from an evening’s excesses, paid the tax without complaint. Plus ça change.
This was not the only relationship Roman culture had with urine; their obsession with hygiene, at its height, had them importing Portuguese piss for mouthwash!! Look it up. Trust, but verify.