0 sats \ 2 replies \ @antic 27 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: Btc privacy tradeoffs, overt and covert bitcoin
I agree there are some things that makes it easier to distinguish characteristics.
The goal of making money as uniform as possible seems to only leave room for currencies like Monero--where you can't track the history or balances. But I don't see that existing within the framework of society in the next 20 years (regardless of whether that's an ideal goal). I think the on/off ramps for purely anonymous systems are going to close hard and those currencies are going to be worthless. Allowances will be made for bitcoin conveyed over lightning with the argument that they can track some on-chain things and ultimately, the NSA's big data profiling probably makes any effort to anonymize bitcoin a nothingburger at the state level. As a citizen, you might have the freedom to keep your neighbor from knowing you bought a sex doll online, but the supply chain records and government data pools will have that info. It's very hard to maintain anonymity and privacy and 99% of people don't care about either, so society will shape around making it harder and harder.
Not necessarily Monero.
Whatever comes to achieve that uniformity best because it greatly reduces friction on that dimension. There is already better tech available, but no/poor implementations of it.
But of course that is only one of several ideal properties of money.
Maybe it is impossible to excel in all these properties for p2p digital cash because some are mutually exclusive (privacy vs auditability)
Any white market adoption is less relevant imo.
Because of increasing onerous regulation Bitcoin will be squeezed into black markets over time, and whatever usage allowed on white markets will be greatly limited and in a neutered form.
White market acceptance might be nice to have, but is at odds with the whole point of Bitcoin: Permissionless money.
"White market trade, by definition, requires permission, and black market does not...Any person operating in the white market requires permission to do so. Bitcoin is therefore inherently a black market money."
While arguably easier for many, you don't need on/off ramps (and for some it is not even preferable (noKYC crowd) or possible to begin with (cash cultures/unbanked large populations of the world)). Off the top of my head you can always swap from other crypto, sell things, offer labor/services, or take advantage of jurisdictional arbitrage. I'm sure I'm missing more.
For sure agree that big data and NSA spying is a problem, but not insurmountable.
For example, encrypted messengers and VPN services (yes, most suck) have become very popular as a direct result.
USPS postal services deliver millions of illegal packages/letters (~16 billion just this holiday season). Even from within, these systems flail for control. Darknets couldn't do it without them.
I suspect you don't think it is all hopeless either though, otherwise you wouldn't be bothering with Bitcoin.
Private p2p digital cash can only protect you on one side of a transaction. It's only part of the solution, but something that wasn't even possible before.
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Fair enough. Time will tell as the global markets mature. I see a lot of countries dollarizing in the near future. Argentina next, then a cascade of others. And as they do this, they will look at El Salvador and in many cases dual implement BTC/LN. This is the real revolution: fixed supply, deflationary economics. Privacy is nice, but it’s not the main attraction.
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