Sure, the dangers exist. As do the dangers of being naive to the sides as they exist today, their biases, and the impact the ideas the sides back will have on the life of those who just decide to ignore it all.
And I say that as someone who tries to ignore it all, because there's a lot of nutjobery going on, but quite honestly most of it right now is coming from the leftists.
It is not my impression that those on the right generally think it's all sunshine and rainbows - God, Country and Family are all under attack, Free Speech is under attack, the Governments nowdays don't tend to be fiscally responsible, there are epidemics of decadency, homelessness and drug abuse, and I won't even touch the looming threat of undemocratic world government through the backdoor via globalist transnational institutuions.
I could go on, but hopefully this is enough to illustrate the fact that "the right" doesn't generally think it's all sunshine and rainbows.
As for your final paragraph, yes, placing faith on someone else to solve your problem if only you give them power is generally a bad idea in my view, but most people are not like that, and as much as it pains me to say, this will likely never change.
I disagree that picking a side brings pain and division. It can, but it doesn't have to. It's only when Ego gets in the way (and to the untrained mind, which is mostly everyone, it often does).
Ideology is a tainted word, I don't like it much either. But you could argue that Bitcoin is an ideology, Stoicism is an ideology, Free Market Capitalism is an ideology, Free and Open Source Software is an ideology.. so it seems to me that just calling something an ideology does not suffice to dismiss the set of ideas under that umbrella.
Rather, blind faith in ideology, or following ideology because it's cool (or so they think), hip, fashionable... in short, for any reason other than considerate and extensive rational thought, seems to me to be closer to the true source of the issue at hand.
Thinking is hard, checking a bunch of ideological checkboxes is easier. I can see how this would muddle the waters. But it does not - in my opinion - have to be so.
This is just failing to make a stand for what's correct.
Socialism/Communism don't work and have brought death and ruin to countless millions.
Left/Right can be an artificial divide sometimes, it doesn't mean some ideas aren't more murderous than others.
Weird? My man.. it's expected.
What a coherent, deep and detailed answer to the perspectives I raised in my previous answer.
You know what they say about arguing with fools and stooping down to their level.
Keep seeing the world in black and white and thinking you've got it all figured out - by closing your mind preemptively to every possibility that does not align with your assumptions and disregarding any attempt at intelligent discussion with simplistic platitudes - it is your birthright.
If that strikes you as the mark of an intelligent man.. well.. yeah.
That would be a very valid and self-evident category.
Applying the label to anything that isn't Bitcoin and especially to what is arguably the best tool for anonymous and private financial transactions in existence, isn't.
I really don't get people who think the way you do. Bitcoin and #monero are software, it's not a football club.
I rarely actually use Bitcoin (onchain), but I save in Bitcoin. It's great for that, Monero not so much.
I use Lightning day-to-day a lot, but Lightning is a hot wallet (not just mine, the whole network). I would not be comfortable having more than a few thousand $ worth of sats in there at any time.
I don't save much on Monero (but more than Lightning), and while thr UX/UI is not as polished, in terms of low friction and anonymity/privacy guarantees, Bitcoin doesn't match it today.
It would be great if Bitcoin could do all of it, but privacy and anonymity today onchain are a chore, and it will also flag any coins you tried to anonymize in a very public way.
In short, it's not either-or, it's not black and white, and it's not so simple as "not bitcoin? shitcoin!"
I'm sorry, but respectfully, that's rather stupid and ignorant. No offense.
Are you really placing Monero in the same category as Shiba?
Also, calling Monero a privacy coin really depends on what is your mental point of origin. Is monero a privacy coin, or is everything else (pretty much) a surveillance coin?
Matter of perspective, you see.
To call something a shitcoin is to say it has no value, and no use. The vast, vast majority of cryptocurrencies indeed add very little if anything to the table.
But a robust, battle-tested, always-private cryptocurrency? That is something else. That is a useful tool.
And it's only your zealotry that prevents you from seeing that.
#monero might not be bitcoin, it might never have as much gains as bitcoin, it might never have as many users, and it definitely will never have as much mainstream finance adoption as bitcoin (think really hard about that one), but here is what Monero does, and does well.
It keeps your transactions private and anonymous, and with a couple well-known corner cases notwithstandig, you don't even have to think about it.
That you cannot recognize this reveals ignorance, prejudice and zealotry. Nothing else, and nothing more.
'Unless it's my god, it's a fake god'.
No you're right, totally not close-minded, and totally not zealot-like.
Yes, that would be awesome, for their spending to be auditable and public (although you don't need a transparent chain for that).
But our finances must not be public for them to see: the power differential is already tremendous in the government's favor - being devoid of privacy towards them only adds to that dynamic, and not in an insignificant way.
Tyrants gonna tyrant however, and it's exactly towards full transparency from the plebs and opaqueness for the State and the elites that things are tilting towards at the moment. And not just in finance either, seems like every month now there is another mass surveillance scandal, they're still trying to kill e2ee, etc.
It's a war of attrition and it's unclear that the line will be held.
I hope so & do whatever I can to help hodl that line, but it's not easy, and it's not right: if we must have government, they should be our servants and have the general well-being in mind.
So why does it feel like it's government itself that's constantly trying to limit me, and treat me like a criminal, for the horrible crime of... wantinf to be left alone?
This is where normalizing transparency inevitably got us into.
I only wish more people had seen the unavoidable outcome years ago.
Then again, it's quite likely the governments of the world would have come crashing much harder if financial privacy tech was quickly becoming the standard.
This much seems clear to me: without privacy and anonymity, all this was a gigantic (if highly profitable) waste of time: the tools of liberation would have become the tools of oppression.
The tyranny of the psychopaths and the apathy, ignorance and stupidity of the masses conspire to inch us closer and closer to a world where privacy and anonymity have become criminal.
I wish I had answers and I wish I could say I know we are going to win this.
But when even most people in bitcoin failed to see how a transparent transaction graph would come to bite them in the ass later, and where outside of our cute nostr nubble most people into crypto are here for profits and neither for the tech, the philosophy or freedom, I fear for the worst.
When the vast majority opted to centralize on/offramps at CEXs, when silly tribalism prevents many from considering alternatives such as #monero
You see, bitcoin onchain privacy "solutions" all suffer from the same flaw: the user is not erasing their history, he's writing a new history: that he attempted to erase the history.
This is much, much worse than everything simply being opaque by design with no opt out possible. It makes the user stand out. It is trivially detectable.
I urge anyone who has KYC bitcoin to avoid coinjoining them. You will be branded accordingly, and this information will be shared. Your reputation will follow you.
Your first mistake was acquiring KYC transparent coins.
Don't make coinjoining the second mistake.
You can't have fungibility without privacy, and censorship resistance grows exponentially harder without anonymity and privacy.
Uncritical minds are going to derisively label anything that falls outside their narrow boundaries.
#monero is basically a stablecoin at this point.
You can *use* it as it's intended: anonymous digital cash.
Personally I never have much more than 3-5k USD worth of it lying around, because BTC tends to have dramatically better gains.
But when it comes time to spend, Monero is a true contender.
For spending purposes, between Monero and Lightning, I feel pretty free.
No wonder the boomer suits are trying to target them both. Anything that doesn't give them full retroactive visibility, they'll try to stamp out.
Fuck them. Resist!
No network effects, are you sure? ShopInBit, silent.link report that #monero txs outnumber BTC onchain txs (the free market working), and the darknet markets seem to have settled on XMR too for obvious reasons.
Btw, it's not a competition, but seeing the false assertion I just had to point it out.