57 sats \ 1 reply \ @jp 11 Jun 2022
Privacy needs to be handled off chain. On chain privacy will result in exchanges being forced to ban Bitcoin due to lack of KYC compliance and hurt adoption for normies.
See: Litecoin being banned from certain exchanges due to MimbleWimble upgrade
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31 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 11 Jun 2022
Another side effect of privacy is that you can't audit the supply. There could be a bug in the code issuing miners more than intended, for example.
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23 sats \ 0 replies \ @Brunswick 11 Jun 2022
Lightning makes bitcoin private enough. If it doesen't presently, and its demonstrable that payments can be tracked, it can be improved to address this without changing the fundamentals of bitcoin.
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin 11 Jun 2022
See also this review of proposed privacy-enhancing proposals:
A List of Proposed Bitcoin Privacy Improvements | sethforprivacy.com
#33089
https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/proposed-bitcoin-privacy-improvements
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/list-of-bitcoin-privacy-proposals
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Majjin 13 Jun 2022
I think that privacy can be done off chain. Lightning has lots of room for improvement and can potentially become very private. Other off chain alternatives like Federated Chaumian Mints can also greatly improve privacy.
The largest issue here is KYC in my opinion. How private transactions are matters only a little if an adversary knows you had Bitcoin at some point. Sure, with privacy features added on to Bitcoin, an adversary won't know how much you have now, nor will they know your transaction history. However, if the adversary got their information from a KYC exchange, they'll know that you had at least X amount at a certain time in the past. If they have access to your purchase and selling history, they'll know whether you're likely to be a HODLer or not.
KYC can be very compromising, even if Bitcoin's on-chain privacy were to surpass Monero. If buying Bitcoin without KYC was so easy that it was the default method everyone used, on-chain privacy improvements would be almost unnecessary. So I think the priorities should be:
- Making purchasing non-KYC Bitcoin extremely simple to use and accessible
- Improving the privacy of off-chain protocols like Lightning and FCMs
- Incremental privacy improvements to Bitcoin itself
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @mf 11 Jun 2022
Exchanges, exchanges, trading, trading, kyc, etc etc
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @notgeld 11 Jun 2022
And those who say this need Lightning. It delivers privacy via scalable off chain payments.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitgould 12 Jun 2022 freebie
Sats are fungible but Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) are not.
Privacy is being handled off chain but must be handled on chain. Off chain always eventually settles on chain. If bitcoin is to replace international reserve assets, to be an order of magnitude better than what exists now it must also have private settlement.