Effort is one thing. But

an engineering background is something totally different. Especially when others with engineering backgrounds are also not convinced

You pretty much get it. It's the fact that zero knowledge proofs are younger.

I also do think a lot about how a privacy token could work while having verifiable supply. The best option I've thought of so far would work like this:

There are no UTXOs, every unit of the currency has a keypair.

Every time there's a new block, every keypair changes based on seeds.

To send a transaction, you say to a network node "here's an encrypted message with moneys in it for a certain pubkey"

To confirm a transaction, the recipient says to the network "here are some moneys and their old keys and some new keys for them to change to"

To retain anonymity, the sender and recipient can also listen for other network nodes sending the same kind of messages, and they can all mix in fake spam messages without blocking each other for it, within reason. You can also just pay a transaction fee to manually cycle your seeds now and then, or to cycle additional seeds other than the ones you're sending or receiving every time you send or receive any.

I'm kinda retarded and sometimes miss obvious flaws in my ideas but I'm pretty sure this would work or is close to something that would

Actual personal responsibility and self sovereignty requires effort.

Dude let's not pretend you or any bitcoiner combed thru a billion+ bitcoin transactions and made sure all input/outputs were good. You don't do that to all new transactions every ten minutes either.

You just run a node and pay zero attention like any Monero user

"But bro three people on the planet actually do that" So now you're trusting others to do it for you and be honest if they find it and not exploit it? What was the point of running a node then?

Yall make no sense

This all seems like nonsense. I like Monero, but I don't trust the supply to be verifiably limited. You basically have to trust the protocol itself in order to trust the "proofs" you describe, as I understand it; they're not actual proof, you're relying on an assumption.

I’m trying to keep an open mind but this is basically how it sounds to me. Relies on a lot of trust.

How do you prove that the sum of the inputs and outputs of a tx are zero?

bitcoin-cli gettxoutsetinfo is so challenging, sometimes I forget the shortcuts for copypasta

Okay so you want the blockchain to have completely confidential transactions with no way of verifying the supply. Just trust the “cryptographic primitives” are correct bro. They will never have an inflation bug. Makes sense 🤡

Snowden is great and a hero but he doesn’t understand how this network runs. You can’t add privacy at the protocol level. It has to be done with services or second layer solutions. Even if someone proposed to make all Bitcoin transactions anonymous, people wouldn’t switch to that hard fork of Bitcoin because confidential transactions on the main chain will make it impossible to audit the supply and catch inflation bugs. Privacy is and always will be something that the individual must practice.

as far as i understand it, ecash has nothing to do with bitcoin at all. you can say you back it with whatever you want as it is backed by nothing at all, you can create an endless amount of ecash.

Fractional reserve will always find a way.

Be it through CEX, through ETFs, through mints...

Monero already mastered it. All other coins including Bitcoin are about to be exposed to it for the first time (not counting MT.Gox and FTX).

Abortion is a shity thing to do. It is like getting a dog and then getting rid of it...

Should it be illegal, no. Should people be shamed for doing it, no; especially if we don't know their situation. Are there cases where it is the least bad from all the terrible options, yes. Should we celebrate it as a society, no, but we should not ban it either.

You do you - but I believe they’re required scaling solutions so that governments doesn’t create an L2 or synthetic US dollar and CBDC’s and suppress Bitcoin price through derivatives forever. Similar to gold.

The game is much bigger than most realize and this is an important part

of ensuring #Bitcoin wins.

I use bitcoin privately all the time. You just don’t want to hear it. I can get send and receive privacy out of lightning transactions today. Just because you’re on copium and don’t understand what LNProxy or Bolt12 is doesn’t mean it isn’t private.

The only issue at this point is ease of use for Normies/UX frankly. Cope seethe and dilate.

You can automate wrapped invoices to obfuscate flow of funds. Bolt12 is coming which uses blinded paths so that will soon not even be necessary.

All of these tools will continue to automate and obsolete Monero. Anything else is cope. Monero is the most respectable of the alt coins. I am glad people care about privacy but it’s just a fact that bitcoin will keep moving forward and improving.

Non KYC bitcoin + coin join + lightning network + proxy node for receive privacy

Just cuz your copium stupor turns you into an 80 IQ zombie doesn’t mean everyone’s like that. I can run this infra with ease. It’s a matter of time before it’s all automated and retards can do this too.

You don't need permission to swap out via Lightning.

And using Monero requires either losing wealth or some sort of exchange cost, so if neither monero nor cashu are good places to store money, why not use the cheaper swap to make private payments? Cashu being custodial isn't any more risky than trying to exchnage btc for xmr. And like I said, better L2/L3 tech is coming.