Comment by lordofgibbons

Being able to transact is the point of it all. If practical use is not possible that makes it useless and that makes it worthless.

Not saying anything new here, but at the core there are only a few key reasons for using bitcoin: investment, hiding your finances, and the idealism of de-centralization.

The intrinsic value of decentralization is the ability to operate outside any fiat system of laws or government. So that one lines up a lot with the criminal side of hiding your finances. The investment aspect sure is enticing to lots of folks, but without a real core underlying value it's just bubbles and rug-pulls. So all this has the effect, wittingly or not, of lining up the incentives of all BTC users with money launderers.

Sure there are TONS of perfectly legal reasons not to want people to track your finances. Many of them are even moral. But obviously many are neither moral nor legal. (The edge case of moral but illegal sure gets people fired up, but it's a vanishing minority of actual use.) So when the regulators come looking for criminals, we unsurprisingly get lots of sound and fury about how there are lots of perfectly valid reasons why good people will want to act in ways that make them look like criminals. Uh huh. Yes, there sure are.

Is this true? Kraken and Bitfinex both seem to support XMR <-> USD

> 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.

Doesn't this describe every political party and megacorp in the US too...?

One of the biggest platforms this happens through is Reddit, and they intentionally leave it wide open. You don’t even have to have an email address to register and start posting. Bots make these platforms a fortune, and they’re happy to sell out their country to foreign influence for a dime.

So yes, and I’ve been saying this since it started really getting bad in 2020, we need to completely cut enemies of the US off from our internet. There will obviously be attempts to proxy through western countries, so it needs to be strictly enforced, possibly with an identity requirement for participants.

For those against this, imagine a physical country where anyone can spawn thousands of faceless, nameless drones disguised as real people which are free to do whatever they want in society with zero risk of consequences. What would happen to that country? It would fall. As digital societies have now become larger than countries themselves, this is the very situation we’re dealing with. It’s not the utopia we hoped for, but it will be a dystopia unless action is taken.

Monero has already been delisted from relevant exchanges last year because "reasons".

The main website that matched people to trade fiat for monero (localmonero) got closed recently because "reasons".

It is pretty popular and outlawed since a while. Basically the only relevant crypto currency used for purchases on the street since several years now. You can look up the number of daily on-chain transactions and tends to be on top every day.

You likely would only notice this if you need to donate money for someone with the wrong opinions or live at a non-aligned country.

Freedom here means transacting without:

--

anti-money laundering safeguards

sanctions enforcement

consumer protection

tax enforcement

fraud prevention systems

--

It is very true that technology won't get you this freedom from sensible legal requirements we impose on financial transactions.

That's obviously a good thing, but I guess people who are in crypto would disagree.

Which, I believe, would make it even more prevalent. It would be the confession that they cannot control it, and while most people would be deterred by this, I can see a shadow economy growing because (or thanks ?) to this.

It's not so black and white. Obviously social and political change is the goal. But in the meantime technology can help if you're living under repression.

Take VPNs and Tor helping people jump the Great Firewall of China for example. Obviously, yes, this is a political problem; the GFW shouldn't exist. But it would be foolish to dismiss the technology as a vital part of fighting back against the state.

You are being downvoted, but you are correct. I am east european and I know how hard the fist of the State hits. Sometimes I think westerners see technology like some special moves that you can quickly combo so you can defeat the evil boss at the end. No, there are no special moves, just a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

> You can't get freedom through technology

I'd argue the opposite - if Bitcoin had been created with secure private transactions (untraceability) it would be in the same popular position it is today, but the attacks on it (chain analysis etc) would be failing instead of inevitably marching forward.

Your argument seems to rely on an assumption that the insecurity of Bitcoin has been legible and apparent to the [greater] government for most of Bitcoin's life, and so the government allowed it to gain popularity knowing those insecurities would eventually make it succumb to government control. But in general government sees any lack of identification/data as a problem to be rectified, and the popular wisdom for quite some time has been that Bitcoin is "anonymous". so I'd say the government acted as quick as it would have regardless of the actual security properties. It feels like any holding off had more to do with financial lucrativeness rather than an understanding of its long term security flaws.

Now that we're here though, Bitcoin does seem like a very strong inoculation against financial privacy technology. Government is now well aware that software/cryptography can be used for money, and the first question asked is why isn't your new niche system grokkable to chain analysis?

Monero is outlawed in the EU. It's not illegal to possess, but no business is allowed to touch it.

Which proves that it does what it says. (Much like when the police suspect someone of being a drug dealer for using GrapheneOS)