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Eventually bitcoin will move to a privacy model. There is no requirement for it to make that move before mass adoption. For now, simplicity is the more valuable feature. If the average programmer can't explain how it works to the normie, all bets are off for mass acceptance. In the meantime, blockchain transparency provides the right mix of trustworthiness and auditability that it makes it very politically difficult to outright ban.

Papa Figos 2y ago

Or all this transparency and the masses of people failing to see why keeping digital privacy end up normalizing a world where transparency and full traceability is a requirement for legal services and in the eyes of the government.

It seems to me that by and large we are already there. And it was precisely the normalization of mass surveillance along with general apathy and ignorance that got us here.

In light of the above, more transparency-by-default seems to me like a very bad idea.

Why do you think all the KYC stuff is such a pain in the ass? Legacy banking got progressively blanketed with it, cash became less prominent, more/most payments became digital-traceable, and all of this was normalized.

Then along came transparent blockchains and now it's a whole new level. Whereas before you ostensibily needed some kind of warrant, now all the financial data is there for the world to troll for the rest of time.

And listen don't get me wrong, I'd be the first to cheer Bitcoin having always-on privacy like Monero, but I just don't see it happening.

Glad to be proven wrong about this one - I'm happy as long as there is some system that allows me to keep financial privacy, not because I have somethinf to hide but because it's my right.

Right now the best system for that particular purpose is Monero (I use Lightning a lot too). The important thing is that such a system exists.

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Discussion

Brunswick 2y ago

Full financial transparency is dehabilitating. Privacy is absolutely necessary to conduct business, its impossible to negotiate without it and would break competition, trade secrets and interefere with price discovery. Full privacy in the future is therefore guarantred. Regardless, that is not what we have with bitcoin. Firstly, the more bitcoin is used, the easier it is to break tracability of individuals. Secondly, we already have many privacy mechanisms and practices that assure privacy. Eventually base-layer privacy will be demanded, but at this time its unnecessary. We are still early, and the current state of the art does not reflect the future reality that innovations bring with them.

__XaristosX__ 2y ago

In my opinion, the base layer money should NOT be the latest and greatest state of the art and should not be regularly upgraded. When you update systems you tend to include bugs and increase the attack surface. I think the best is to scale in layers, I’m 100% pro privacy, but not in base layer. Let’s scale like the internet did in layers. That’s how we keep a stable reliable money (Bitcoin), and still add innovations and privacy and fast payments and everything in layers on top.