alt Hacker NewsBitcoin maximalists are learning that having a non-fungible and fully traceable ledger might be a problem. Even Satoshi called this out! As is, BTC is somewhat of a privacy nightmare. All of your transactions are on the public ledger for anyone with basic knowledge of statistics to correlate and see all of your transactions. Blockchain Analytics is big business!
All the things the Treasury is considering to be "suspicious activity" simply can't be tracked with something that's non-fungible and untracable like Monero. This suspicious activity - aka privacy - is just how all monero transactions are done.
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But with Monero, you see that it is effectively shut off from the Fiat ecosystem entirely. The proposal here clearly lays out how bad Bitcoin is for privacy. But it's not like the more private alternatives are actually allowed to be viable alternatives.
Yeah. I understand the excitement over the past two decades about the possibility of cryptocurrencies, but it came with a lot of naivete. After the fight to create sovereign central banks, did anyone seriously think that they were just going to give it up? Sure, maybe they can't stop you technologically, but it's very easy to simply make it unlawful, and then the men (and robots) with guns call.
Very true. In my opinion, and strictly from an American-centric view, privacy should only extend to transactions within borders between citizens. As soon as it involves transactions from outside our borders, then it is a national security concern. We know, right now, that both Russia and China are fueling internal political tension via massive and sophisticated disinformation/influence campaigns, a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States. Monero is definitely being used in this information warfare. I am pro-privacy, pro- individual rights, but we have to resolve this central tension of these things and the very real hyper connected world we live in which very real nation-state enemies. I am at the point where I think restricting the internet to allied countries might actually be a good idea, as currently we are leaving citizens unprotected from every nation-state actor who wishes to manipulate us with targeted, data-analytic, bot- and ai-empowered campaign against us. It is out of control, and as long as a monetary instrument like crypto enables that attack surface, it will be hard for me to support crypto-maxamialism.
If Monero ever came close to Bitcoin's popularity, it would be outlawed. Plain as that. You can't get freedom through technology.
That assumes Bitcoin maximalists ultimately see it as a means of transaction. The ones I come across in the wild are purely maximalists for speculative purposes and couldn’t care less about the “practical” use cases for it.