By talking about as if anything were not "legit" with transactional privacy, you clearly show what is wrong here.
A viable currency which has no privacy is no problem for any authoritarian state. Therefore its not a viable currency in the first place.
Obviously I think transactional privacy is legit, but governments don't. FYI, why Lightning usage is generally banned in China as well.
So the solution is to comply ones way out of tyranny on a transparent ledger?
The solution is to build open standards and networks resilient to all threat models. Monero is not resilient to nation-state level scrutiny, whereas Bitcoin is - and I can point to this simply because Chinese state authorities (including at the time, Vice-Premier Liu He) tried banning Bitcoin left and right but probably has no idea what Monero is.
Nostr hosts a lot of Chinese cypherpunks. None of them ever really post about Monero.
I dont get the logic, what in this example shows Bitcoin is resilient to nation state attacks?
They do not even need to attack it. They just integrate the public ledger, attach digital ID to it and outlaw all transactions from/with non digital ID utxo's.
It's not possible to be resilient to all threat models.
I don't even think China banned Bitcoin mining. They banned mining Bitcoin using the electric grid/fossil fuels iirc and only in a particular region.
Only a few manufacturers make most of Bitcoin newest most powerful ASICs and they are all from China. How is that not vulnerable to state attack?
-Over half Bitcoins hashpower is KYC
-It's obvious what you're doing with that ASIC
-Open to targeted mining censorship
Also, these give off a very obvious fingerprint (energy draw, heat, noise)
"Police raid a concealed #Bitcoin mining operation, initially mistaking it for an illegal marijuana farm due to the heat signature"
https://twitter.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/1721359382745874489
China's State Council (under Liu He) pronounced Bitcoin mining as undesired, and the provinces started banning and kicking out Bitcoin miners. However, ever since then, people sell miners in Mainland and etc.
"A viable currency which has no privacy is no problem for any authoritarian state." - you shoehorn in one section, and you get the rest. Just like how Github is allowed in China because there's too many useful repos.
Same way BTC is allowed in Turkey, the airport is full of advertisement for a BTC exchange - and at the same time you need to scan your passport to get access to the airport wifi.
It clearly shows that BTC is not a problem for governments, that should make people think when promoting it as a freedom technology.
Github is clearly a problem for China - they've tried to take down Github repos multiple times. But they can't enforce protocol-level bans on Git because it's too useful.
