Wealth Is an Enforceable Contract, Not a Private Attribute

This paper challenges the foundational assumption underlying financial privacy law and practice: that the magnitude and movement of an individual's wealth constitutes private information analogous to medical records or personal beliefs. This assumption rests on a category error. Wealth is not a personal attribute but a claim—specifically, a claim against every person from whom goods, labor, or services can be demanded in exchange for that wealth. The counterparty to this claim is not an abstraction called "society" but a concrete set of individuals: everyone whose productive capacity can be requisitioned by that money. From this premise, several consequences follow: (1) hiding wealth from those obligated to honor it is structurally analogous to concealing a contract from one of its signatories, (2) current "financial privacy" operates as asymmetric transparency favoring concentrated power, (3) a public identity-linked ledger would represent not surveillance but the redistribution of already-existing surveillance, and (4) the choice between anonymous and transparent financial systems is fundamentally political, not technical.