Monero is the answer here
The FATF Travel Rule, now applied to bitcoin, requires extensive KYC data sharing, causing serious concerns about privacy, financial freedom, and personal safety.
My latest Forbes article featuring nostr:npub1mznweuxrjm423au6gjtlaxmhmjthvv69ru72t335ugyxtygkv3as8q6mak.
Discussion
In the article, I believe it mostly speaks about exchanges and taking your bitcoin back into fiat. I dont see them being able to stop a bitcoin transaction. But, yes monero is good for even more privacy.
You should never convert your crypto into fiat. They control the fiat system. And so to break their control, we must not use their system. I pay for absolutely everything I can in crypto, and only if I absolutely cannot pay for the item in crypto, do I convert back to fiat, and then only in the amount that I need.
No it is not, read the article and stop trolling.
I did read the article, and after doing so, I came to the conclusion that Monero is the answer to this.
Do expand on how Monero fixes the harms that regulations do to people who use custodial services in Europe.
Because it pushes people to use non-custodial services and since Monero is private, it's not known whether you're using it or not. The Monero community is really extremely rabid about not your keys, not your crypto. And are always saying, keep your money off of exchanges. Do not use centralized exchanges. Do not use centralized services, etc. The people in the Bitcoin community in 2012 and before are the people in the Monero community now. They know the harms caused by custodians and are in crypto for an alternative to the system. And that's what they fight for.
Monero is not on many exchanges but not by choice or through lack of trying. Heck, bitcoin is on exchanges and that is also not by choice.
But you are focusing on the community, that isn't Monero, so you could say the "Monero movement" fixes this... And power to you.
When people say "Bitcoin fixes this", I think a big part of it is how bitcoin incentivises more people to invest in it over time and how when people get burhed, it doesn't just die and so it will continue to gain traction.
People who learn about bitcoin learn about money and the evils etc. Then they move away from custodians. Bitcoin fixes custodians too, but it is not an easy or fast battle.
If Monero community refuses to make compromises, then Monero stays in a bubble and outside the mainstream. How does that fix anything? Monero does nothing AFAIK to drive adoption or to start the education process.
On top of all that, I have never heard the counter-argument to these questions:
1. How can you ever know and/or fix if there is an inflation bug or infinite money glitch?
2. How decentralized is it really if it requires much bigger blocks, beefier nodes, and hard forks are easy to roll out?
I dont have a proper answer to 1 other than range proofs prove that the amount of monero sent is a posative number. If it were able to be negative it would cause inflation through that because a small negative number becomes like 2^62. Luke Parker might be better able to answer that one though.
As for 2, not everyone needs to run a node. Hell, Hijacking Bitcoin by Roger Ver makes good arguements that even Satoshi thought btc nodes would be run in data centers. There absolutely must be a lot of nodes but "lot" is not well defined. Monero currently has ~18000 nodes so seems well decentralized. Node requirements seem well tuned to grow slower than bandwidth, cpu, storage, etc which would keep it in the bounds of usability. A pruned Monero node is ~80gb and perfectly fine for the average person to run for family and friends or even small communities.
Hard forks are not "easy" to roll out, they still take years of debate and work. They are "easier" for sure because technology changes as time moves on. Take SMTP as an example, it has no sort of encryption and cannot be updated at all because it is far to difficult. It is stuck in amber and will eventually have to be abandoned if we ever want true email encryption. Technology must be able to evolve over time as long as that process is slow and well thought out.
As for the exchanges thing, the Monero community celebrates every single time Monero is delisted from a centralized exchange, because that means you have to acquire it in a decentralized manner by earning it from a job, selling an item for it, buying it on a decentralized, non-custodial exchange, etc. Governments pressure exchanges to remove it because it actually works as peer to peer digital cash that they can't spy on and they are incredibly afraid of it. AI makes it trivial to do chain analysis on blockchains such as Bitcoin. It was easy enough before, but now it just becomes even easier. And they cannot do that with Monero.
I think you need to ask yourself why you are interested in Bitcoin. If you are interested in it for the number go up, that's one thing. But if you are interested in it for peer to peer digital cash that does not require the system that oppresses you, that's a whole different story.
With all that said, I appreciate Bitcoin and what it has done for the world. If somebody asks me if I would recommend them to use Bitcoin or fiat, I would absolutely tell them that they should use Bitcoin. But I would steer them towards Monero and say, this is what I believe to be a better option. I can't recommend Bitcoin and remain with a clear conscience. To me Bitcoin no longer is the We need to change the world burn it all to the ground and replace it with something better Thing that it used to be. If by some miracle Satoshi is reading this, I just have to say, thank you. What you have done for humanity is absolutely amazing.