Replying to Avatar Taoist Bitcoiner

By far, the majority of capital held worldwide is in public entities, not private individuals accounts. As they are all highly regulated, surveilled, and controlled by current KYC/AML regulations, they cannot send and/or receive funds without documentable provenance as to the source of, and the identity of the receiver of funds without risking everything they own in their existing accounts, their titled physical assets, and their personal freedoms.

Until the Banking Secrecy Act is repealed, then public entities (i.e. corporations & governments) can ONLY engage in commerce on public ledgers. Using smaller "anonymity sets" for herd camouflage in the much smaller "privacy coin" markets is also completely unneccessary, when more privacy can be captured by simply funneling satoshis through LN channels and thru eCash mints as a means of breaking chain analysis. By far, the most private UTXOs are acquired through mining or through in-person paper cash => BTC (for larger amounts) & LN/eCash(for smaller amounts). Earned sats expose oftentimes only partially identifiable personal information to only those paying for our goods and services, if/when providing our goods and services directly to the market, rather to an employer.

By far, the easiest way to acquire 'privacy coins' is to buy them with bitcoin, as there's almost zero liquidity in local physical cash OTC into any of those anonymous spending coins. Smart money won't bother with those added risks and will always choose to clean their transaction history within the Bitcoin ecosystem. There's simply no need for them for almost everyone, with almost no way to acquire them without going thru BTC 1st, and the risk/reward tradeoffs for public entities will never entice them to place their entire existence at risk by raising red flags for using privacy coins.

cool cool

so surveillance is a feature, not a bug

and you have it backwards

the anonymity set of monero is greater than either LN or ecash.

which is why people who need strong privacy continue to prove that they will make the effort to aquire it,

contrary to your perspective.

iow,

no.

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Not surveillance, necessarily, as much as provenance. Privacy comes from OpSec, NOT from any single tool.

Properly handled, even on-chain transactions are don't reveal personally identifiable information. While, improperly handled thru KYCd devices, phone numbers, IP addresses, etc., make surveillance easy and privacy an illusion.

I hate to break it to you, but IF you don't also use VPN/TOR, have an anonymous burner phone, and a de-Googled phone you're simply Larping when it comes to privacy. While you may be one of the small minority willing to, or having to sacrifice convenience for privacy, by far the majority will not make the same trade offs. I guarantee that more than 95% of privacy coin users don't have any of these OpSec disciplines in place.

For public entities like corporations and governments verifiable audits of balances and transaction history is a HUGE upgrade over current systems. For most people, their everyday pocket change for spending the privacy vs. convenience trade offs when using LN and eCash are a reasonable tradeoff.