In the absence of law, is there any good reason to have curtains over your windows?
Maybe I don't want my wife knowing about a surprise gift I bought her. Or my grandmother knowing I bought drugs.
Privacy and law have little to do with one another.
Discussion
law should protect privacy
Privacy is just something you DO as an individual. Law has nothing to do with it as long as it doesn't get in the way (which it shouldnt even be able to do if "laws" are the voluntary contracts they should be.)
In the absence of law, why would exchanges do KYC? Is your grandmother staring at the ledger all day? Obviously a public ledger is very different from a glass house.
And why wouldn’t you want your grandmother to know you bought drugs? Because it is shameful. This is exactly my point. A public ledger could discourage shameful activity.
Even if you don’t want someone to know something, if they are doing chain analysis and stalking your transactions, you could use LN and basically completely prevent them from know what you bought.
The major benefit of a public ledger is that it can be audited. A public ledger would prevent shady deals between business and government. Monero would only make those deals easier. Privacy has a place but so does transparency.
I don't want some system preventing me from doing shameful things if I want to do them and keep them private. That sounds like a nanny structure that I would absolutely opt out of for certain activities.
It is not a system or structure. It is similar to how money used to work. You had to physically go somewhere to spend money, this discouraged certain activities as people might see you going to those places. But now that everything is digital, there is no similar form of accountability.
And again, you can opt out by using lightning network. Having absolute obscurity all the time makes auditing impossible. Monero transactions cannot be audited, Monero is specifically designed to enable transactions that you would not do in a public space. Bitcoin neuters corruption, while Monero enables it.
"Bitcoin neuters corruption, while Monero enables it."
🤡 😂