Replies (30)
You can always coinjoin etc.
The reason the base layer needs to be transparent is we just create the fiat system again if it isn't.
It should be a lot easier for individuals to act privately than for governments. The bigger the transaction, the harder it should be to keep private, which is exactly how bitcoin is structured.
Exchanges actually useful to people in most countries kill accounts that they see depositing from coinjoins. Secondly, Coinjoins are also trivial to pierce. It does not provide serious privacy protections from a state adversary with resources and entire companies dedicated to analyzing coinjoins. Coinjoins are only useful if you want to pay for small things and never do something like “buy a house”, “pay rent” or “pay for your cancer treatment.”
> The reason the base layer needs to be transparent is we just create the fiat system again if it isn't.
This is also a myth. Monero has rangeproofs! the supply is perfectly auditable! Especially with upcoming FCMP++ — you can have theoretically perfect privacy AND supply verification!
Perfecly auditable with the permission of whoever owns the address being audited. The regime is not giving you that permission. But you'll give it to them (or you'll go to jail).
It depends on what timescale you're looking at.
I don't use KYC'd exchanges, nor would I, so has never been an issue for me.
Coinjoins are as useful as the anonymity set. House/car sized payments are totally fine, war sized payments are not (which is the point).
Cc
@Max> House/car sized payments are totally fine,
You cannot show up places in the United States nations with 800k in cash to buy a house. Banks are told to immediately call the police and the cops will seize the cash. If you have a bunch of random wires from third parties going to your bank account, your bank will freeze your account. It is obviously not that simple, and huge swaths of the world are going to need access to an exchange. In the US this formula is simple. XMRUSD on Kraken. Kraken is fine with Monero in the United States because it’s not an overt act of money laundering, unlike many privacy “features” such as Tornado Cash, Coinjoins, and ZEC’s Orchard, which are a deliberate overt act to obscure the source or destination of funds. Kraken will kill your exchange account if you use those.
Oh we were talking about different things. I want to audit the State and see how they are spending my taxes.
It's just a matter of time before Monero is totally criminalized (assuming it keeps gaining traction).
Sure, you can't buy a house without engaging the jew financial system, but the way you overthrow that system is economically not by hiding under the floorboards.
> The bigger the transaction, the harder it should be to keep private, which is exactly how bitcoin is structured.
That’s not how Bitcoin is structured, but if it was, that would be great. I agree.
It is exactly how it's structured by keeping the base layer transparent.
The larger the amount of value you move, the less work is required to determine who moved it. The inverse is also true.
> The inverse is also true.
No it’s not. That’s why bitcoiners are always saying “you’re using it wrong” and you gotta do a 6 step process and trust a custodian
I don't even necessarily disagree with everything you're saying, but if the privacy Monero provides is like "rats hiding under the floorboards" and "Bitcoin is for people who are fed up with hiding and want to overthrow the system." then why are you talking about no-KYC and coinjoins (means to achieve more privacy)?
Why is the Bitcoin community always seeking methods for increasing privacy whether that is lightning, ecash, liquid, etc?
Your argument would be stronger if you just admit privacy is essential (even if you don't agree with it being at the base layer)
Privacy is necessary some of the time. I'm completely against it being integrated at the base layer though, that's going to help the adversary more than it helps us (assuming it becomes the global store of value).
Your taxes? You mean the physical, emotional and mental abuse you let happen to you and your family?
We are either entering a new rwnesaince with a renewal of enforceable rights or a new era of full enslavement.
Voluntary spending will be the outcome if we choose the former.
My point was you also seek privacy in the coinjoins and no-kyc ways you get Bitcoin. But I wouldn't say youre just a hiding rat by doing that. I would say it's smart of you to do when your adversary is powerful and isn't going to play fair anyway. The same way firearms give someone an asymmetric advantage against someone physically stronger.
there is no real privacy in coinjoins if your adversary has any significant amount of resources. They are trivial to correlate. Coinjoins are only useful if your adversary isn’t powerful, like say, you are hiding your transactions from your wife or something.
and even then, I think in the age of AI your wife’s attorney will probably shortly ask Claude to look at the blockchain and replicate all of whatever ChainAnalysis has going for it.
I like the idea of “the larger the transaction, the more difficult privacy becomes”. I just don’t think Bitcoin is intentionally designed that way. That’s why the “privacy for small transactions” still isn’t reliable (KYC, coinjoin is never default, base layer doesn’t scale, etc)
Sure, but there are short term things on the way towards a bitcoin standard. My point really is that a bitcoin standard is better than a Monero standard and by then we won't need to hide from the State, the State will want to hide from us and we can't let them.
What is easier on bitcoin though: someone with infinite resources hiding their transactions, or someone with almost no resources hiding their transactions?
Again, this idea that bitcoin is intentionally designed to make small transactions private and larger ones public just isn’t true. It will be easy for a state to have the best tools for privacy and difficult for a poor individual to have them.
It's much easier for an individual with small transactions to hide in a mixer than for a large state actor. It's practically impossible for a state actor to hide their fuckery under a bitcoin standard.
Split transactions up, mix them and recombine them? State actors could do that extremely easily. They’d have entire tech teams and processes for managing those flows
“Let’s make bitcoin less useful as money in hopes that it will deny privacy to the government!” With this attitude, Bitcoin will never be money.
I've implemented bitcoin payments and Monero payments for the hardware devices I used to produce. Bitcoin is definitely more useful as money.
And it's not "in the hopes" of it denying privacy to the state. If we assume the end state is total replacement of the financial system, it makes sense that the base layer is completely transparent and privacy exists in layers on top of it, rather than the other way around (which is how the fiat system works).
In the fiat system, the base layer is not public, and the outcome of that is oligarchs etc have privacy but individuals do not. Take like a year and get to the bottom of why that is.
No they can't. Do the math.
I’ll remind you that your first reply to this whole convo is that people are using bitcoin wrong.
If you're worried about taxable events, yes.
Why do you want to pay tax?
To not go to jail
Well, you need to report your Monero transactions for the same reason.
But the State doesn't.
