Not to mention pensions, trusts, non-profit organizations, charities, shell corporations and holding vehicles, offshore tax havens, quangos, churches, monasteries, hedge funds (derivatives, swaps, contracts, partnerships...), banks, monarchies, ‘corporations’ like the City of London, entities like the Isle of Man, aboriginal groups such as ‘sovereign’ American Indian tribes, blockchains (smart contracts, DAOs, multisig, ZKPs...)… If mysterious agents claimed assets equivalent to a fraction of annual GDP flow… how would you know? How would the world look any different than it looks now, where a very physical, very concrete megayacht worth half a billion dollars can sit in plain sight at a dock in a Western country and no one knows who really owns it even if many of them are convinced Putin owns it as part of his supposed $200b personal fortune scattered across… stuff? Who owns the $0.5b Da Vinci, for that matter?
Huh, why? The agent can pretend to be multiple agents, possibly thousands of them. It can also use fake human identities.
Not to mention pensions, trusts, non-profit organizations, charities, shell corporations and holding vehicles, offshore tax havens, quangos, churches, monasteries, hedge funds (derivatives, swaps, contracts, partnerships...), banks, monarchies, ‘corporations’ like the City of London, entities like the Isle of Man, aboriginal groups such as ‘sovereign’ American Indian tribes, blockchains (smart contracts, DAOs, multisig, ZKPs...)… If mysterious agents claimed assets equivalent to a fraction of annual GDP flow… how would you know? How would the world look any different than it looks now, where a very physical, very concrete megayacht worth half a billion dollars can sit in plain sight at a dock in a Western country and no one knows who really owns it even if many of them are convinced Putin owns it as part of his supposed $200b personal fortune scattered across… stuff? Who owns the $0.5b Da Vinci, for that matter?
Yes, I agree. This is why I said “I don’t think this is correct”. But unless you specify this, I don’t think a layperson would guess this.