On August 15, 54 years ago, the gold standard was abolished.
There is no need to recount what has happened to society since then; anyone who underestimates the importance of money for a society is simply intellectually limited.
Money is obviously not everything in life, but it is very important, especially on a social level.
But more important than money is freedom, and for freedom to exist, we must have privacy and money that allows for it.
We Bitcoiners have fallen asleep and fallen into the trap of ordinals, runnes, filters, and other crap, while privacy in Bitcoin is still in its infancy. The attack has undoubtedly achieved its goal. While we argue about nonsense and use Bitcoin for purposes it was not intended for, the BIS is already thinking about how to classify Bitcoin transactions (tainted Bitcoins), and believe me, they will do it and they will succeed.
All this also shows how compromised most Core developers are. They have sold out to the system and have never had any concern for privacy, which leads me to believe that they either don't understand anything or are bad actors.
Over the years, I have collaborated on various Bitcoin privacy projects with different nyms, I have also contributed financially to various projects, and I feel that we have not made any progress and that there is nothing more I can do. I am not a genius like many programmers I have met, I am just a humble computer scientist with some crazy ideas, but if there is one thing I have, it is perseverance. I have been fighting for privacy on the internet for more than 25 years and, believe me, things are getting worse. Just look at what the European Union wants to do with chat control, but I will not give up.
And I don't want to end this boring wake-up call without mentioning the Bull Bitcoin wallet, one of the few that is concerned about privacy, currently the only one that has implemented payjoin v2, which allows you to perform payjoin asynchronously. If we all use this feature by default, neither the BIS nor anyone else would be able to do anything. Once again, payjoin is underestimated. Sometimes the simplest things are the most effective.
I would also like to mention nostr:npub1t289s8ck5qfwynf2vsq49t2kypvvkpj7rhegayrur0ag9s2sezaqgunkzs , the owner of Bull Bitcoin, who is one of the few who has always been concerned about privacy in Bitcoin and demonstrates this with all of his products. His own non-custodial exchange, Bull Bitcoin, performed coinjoin to maintain customer privacy, and he sponsored the implementation of joinstr in Rust.
Summary: If you truly believe in the free market, punish those who do not offer privacy because your freedom and that of your children are at stake.
We hold largely the same beliefs, with the small difference that some of us have given up on privacy on Bitcoin a decade ago.
Devs that don't care for privacy (or captured devs) have been a thing since at least 2013.
Now I support every possible way to increase privacy on all Bitcoin layers while pushing for Monero adoption.
Pushing for Monero adoption is a distraction and will never succeed. The protocol is flawed from the start. Bitcoin is our one and only (slim) chance of success.
Calling it a "distraction" implies you need to focus every minute, or at least a lot of your energy, on Bitcoin, to the extent that you NEVER HAVE 2 MINUTES TO DO A TRADE
In which case, why the fuck have Bitcoin in the first place?
Really should be obvious to anyone you're a cultist projecting bullshit here. Bitcoin maximalism is a distraction, it actually asks you to spend so much fucking time on it that you shouldn't have time for other things
I don’t do trades. I work and convert my fiat wage to Bitcoin. I hold most and the rest I use for daily spending. In my spare time I try my best to learn more about it, both on technical and on the economics side. I don’t grind at zero sum games. Sometimes I do mistakes and course-correct. I looked at Monero from economics perspective and it didn’t pass the test. So no, I’m not projecting cultist takes, it’s opinion based. It’s ok if you disagree.
Then find a better word than "distraction" I guess
If you don't do trades because you want to be poor when Bitcoin fails, that's different from never doing trades because Bitcoin takes so much time you never have 2 minutes
