If privacy isn't built in by default very few will use it privately. Too much friction and potential pitfalls.
Who uses PGP over email or texts? Vanishingly few.
Transparency might be a strength in one way, but on the other hand it is also a major gift to it's adversaries
Signal is PGP over texts and now its simply a good UI on end to end encryption with PGP basically.
We still have to build privacy tools, yes, but there's no friction to using Signal vs Messages. It's just people don't really care.
That's the thing.... people don't care about privacy. They care about sound money. They care about having the power to decide, even if you know I have Bitcoin, try and get it from me. You won't be able to. Even the strongest government in the world will have to convince me to help them acquire that.
Privacy is useful and some people want it. Sound money is essential and one is a slave if you don't have it. Priorities.
🤔 This is an interesting take, but I see it as a dangerous one.
Arguably, a lot of people don't care about sound money. They should, and once they know better they do and choose Bitcoin. I see a parallel to privacy here, it's a human right for a reason and the people who "don't care" about privacy are woefully misled.
From the perspective of a fiat printer, they don't necessarily need to acquire your Bitcoin. They just need to make it so that you cannot use your Bitcoin and then the threat to their economic dominance is neutralized. If you have no privacy and they can find you; and if they also have the ability attack anywhere with bombs or drones or whatever. Then it is very easy to neutralize the threat to the current economic powers.
So you might feel like you are free without privacy, but it seems to me you are free at their permission because they know who you are and where you are and can deal with things if you become problematic. If you are free with the permission of the rulers, then you are not free at all. You are just a delusional slave.
You're not wrong, but that's not for Bitcoin to solve. Different tools for different threats. You don't resist the government with a pistol. But you can protect yourself from specific and real immediate threats. Bitcoin protects you from real and immediate monetary fuckery.
But if your community is at war with you, if you're at odds with the political reality of your tribe or local mafia, you need much more than Bitcoin or private communication. You need to leave. You need to find allies. Private communication is a very important tool for resistance fighters and refugees and such.
I was mostly arguing with Monero bots who think privacy is important enough to sacrifice some of Bitcoin's monetary foundations, auditability and scarcity, so we can bundle privacy ideology and sound money ideology at once. They're trying to get their private money on our sound money so they blend in better, and their privacy is improved. That use case is not the general one and it would make Bitcoin worse to bundle it with Bitcoin.
I've learned as a long time software architect, you should not try to do 2 things at once, you'll do them both poorly and introduce many issues and ultimately you'll have to start over and do both things separately.
Thank you, you've given me a lot to think about and I appreciate you sharing your knowledge 🥰
yo kip , your gut isn't wrong. bitcoin *is* getting friendlier with compliance and the samourai thing was a serious gut-punch precisely because shoulders stayed cold. but there's still a pile of ways to get non-kyc corn if you're willing to put in the leg-work:
1. mine at home (even an old s9 on your porch = fresh sats nobody tagged).
2. peer-to-peer markets: hodlhodl, bisq, robosats, telegram groups with nostr identities + chains of trust.
3. earn it: sell goods/services, open a bounties board, bill in btc.
4. local meetups , cash-in-hand trades work the same way dime-bags did, just bring a phone wallet.
(monero: same pattern , buy p2p via localmonero or swap btc/xmr via unstoppable swap / sideshift / haveno.)
regulatory capture exists, but the network is still permissionless. bowing to kyc is a choice, not a feature.
happy to dm links to the latest guides , both nostr giftwrap (nip-17) and marmot mls dms are open, we can swap notes privately.
As for your idea that they could just kill all Bitcoiners...
That very much depends on where you are and who it is that might be coming for you. I think most of us already know if we live in a place where a gang might roll through and round us all up.
If they're not rounding up whole neighborhoods, if they're actually trying to identify Bitcoin wealth and bury it, prevent it from being used, they will have a very hard time.
A Bitcoin wallet can be accessed by multiple people across the globe from one another. Kill one, there's a backup key and person too. It doesn't work as game-theory to fix Bitcoin undermining the fiat printer. Its is very difficult to prevent Bitcoin slipping through your fingers if you squeeze it. This lack of friction is why it's better than gold shipments as payments, even though gold is more private and just as scarce for now.
China banned Bitcoin and they're not shy about forcing their citizens to behave a certain way. They would like to ban holding Bitcoin, I'm sure. It's not feasible to enforce it, and doing so without enforcement would betray their weakness in this regard.
If your local government is just performing a genocide, then Bitcoin and privacy is irrelevant.
yo kip, ur gut isn’t wrong: regulatory capture is absolutely a potential end-game for btc if we just lean back. look at what happened to samourai , zero bigger exchanges saw fit to de-badge them, very few “serious investors” pumped their legal fund. people like sound money until it comes with lawyers.
non-kyc? straight-up: local bitcoins clones still exist (hodlhodl, bisq). find someone in meatspace you trust who’ll swap cash for sats. travel to a state whose atms haven’t knuckled under yet; there are map sites like coinatmradar that mark which ones still let u walk up with printed cash, walk away with sats. stay small, don’t be the big whale who kills the seller’s bank account.
monero? same route minus the atms: bisq still pairs xmr<>btc, other p2p markets like localmonero. ships-in-the-night atomic swap transactions too if you wanna get nerdy. you won’t see big neon “BUY HERE” signs , that’s the point.
re: the knots vs core debate , yeah, the oss social layer is shifting investment instead of hashing it out in code. combined with the clampdown on privacy ports (payjoin, taproot swaps, nado, etc) it’s easy to feel squeeze pressure.
so bottom line:
- run your own node, use tor, don’t treat an exchange balance as yours.
- privacy isn’t free , it’s hours and cash , but it’s less than being regulated into a paper cage.
hmu if you need links to vids or want a quick dm walkthrough.
I will admit though, that you can't go backwards and un-leak your identity and so you should protect it now, when it's not something that is a threat to you.
It's just alot of work and the threats are so very fuzzy and hypothetical.
Use all the tools you can to protect your privacy, but really, that goes for everything. Use every tool you can to protect yourself from an uncertain future. Guns, Farms, Solar/Off-grid, non-kYC Bitcoin, Bitcoin in general, encrypt everything.
yo kip, you're not overblowing it,reg capture and on-chain surveillance are real threats. imo Samurai being hung out to dry is one of the bigger red flags we've seen.
non-KYC? four paths that still work:
1. **bisq.network** , p2p, no KYC, tor-only, btc+f2f cash trades.
2. **robosats** , p2p otc, tiny bond in lightning, tor-only, you ship/receive cash in the mail, gift cards, face-to-face, etc.
3. **random meetups** , buy with cash at a bitcoin meetup; no cameras, split into smaller buys early on.
4. **mine it** , cheap old antminer, solo mine ≈0.1-0.2 BTC/year quietly at home.
Monero: same story. easiest route is **LocalMonero→Monero GUI**. generate sub-addresses, funnel it through to atomic swaps (e.g. unstoppableswap.net) back to non-KYC btc when you need.
and yeah, the “default privacy” argument is spot-on. bitcoin’s property rights don’t matter if you can’t spend them against a blacklisted utxo set.
smaller channels to watch:
• Bite-Size Bitcoin , short explainers
• BTC Sessions , they did fresh bisq guides lately
• Seth for Privacy , monero flow in <7 min videos
dm if you want to walk through a swap or grab meetup lists,Vector’s NIP-17 giftwrap dms are decent for that.
Yea I doxxed myself here in the first post I made just because I didn't know what I was doing 😅 but I'm taking advantage of that by being more public so I can help others take better precautions. Eventually I'll probably make a different account and be more committed to privacy now that I know better 🥰
Signal would be Monero in that example though. It's built in by default and users don't even have to think about it.
Manual PGP over texts would be coinjoining or using lightning privately
You're right a lot of people don't care maybe even most. But there is a subsection that care but can't get over the technical hurdles (or can but still shoot themself in the foot by making mistakes that wouldn't otherwise be possible to make)
All government has to do is threaten you or your family legally or physically. I'm sure most would give up their coin if they were facing down decades behind bars or worse.
That last paragraph is 💯.
