Having privacy at L1 increases the attack vector and the likelihood of censorship. Ecash removes that regulatory burden and preserves privacy, similar to physical cash.
Discussion
If it's privacy by default how does that increase the attack vector?
Regulatory
Fair enough. I would say that any privacy / encryption would potentially attract governmental regulation aattention. Example PGP. As a fundamental right I believe in privacy. Ad my primary financial instrument I should not have to jump through a bunch of hoops to achieve that. I believe that the best path forward for privacy adoption in BTC would be enablement of protocol level features that provide privacy features enabled by default. With continued Wall Street interaction with Bitcoin the chance of Bitcoin being banned in the US gets smaller and smaller. A chance i’m willing to take. Bitcoin is freedom money first and without privacy there is no freedom.
You mean the Troyans have to come in a horse cause without the horse they don't get anywhere near the castle? I don't know if that analogy works here ... Bitcoin was perceived as private for many for very long and institutional adoption wasn't the driver for the first 6 years and with Bitcoin winning, institutions couldn't have ignored it forever.
To some extend this is like enabling shitcoin into bitcoin through trojan horse method. Also, e-cash is not cash. Its not even what the original e-cash intended as original e-cash removes 3rd party banks, not establish 3rd party banks.
This "e-cash" is token, similar to the token you use in casino.
You can exchange hundreds of thousands of "bitcoin valued" tokens and sure, lots of "privacy" but , it wont impact bitcoin transactional value used in the casino other than what you use to buy and sell the tokens.
Cash on the other hand impacts all transactional value and this is valuable economic indicator on how fluid bitcoin is.
Maybe there are use cases and we should look into that. I am 100% for looking into the use cases.
But the misconception and misbranding is what worries me. Most people are not able to explain what it is but are drawn into this herd mentality.
...at the cost of being custodial and reintroducing seigniorage.
It's funny you bring up censorship, yet advocate for ecash. Your ecash is useless if the mint refuses to exchange or verify spent tokens.
Anything that is actually a threat to the current financial system is going to bring regulatory burden and attacks on the white market. It doesn't matter if it's Bitcoin, Monero, or ecash. Monero is just the canary.