TCP/IP is actually a great analogy.
Do you know the totally surveilled internet we have today? Where all metadata is sniffed relentlessly, any unencrypted content immediately stored away in perpetuity?
Direct consequence of the whole networking stack having neither privacy nor anonymity at the protocol level.
Now, this is no grand conspiracy, technology tends to start out simpler and evolve over time.
So we build all those things on top of this stack - Tor, VPNs, Nym, etc, and it's always a cat and mouse game, because all those leave breadcrumbs all over the network, most solutions are vulnerable to timing/correlation attacks, even the one that is not (Nym) is still operating on top of no privacy+no anonymity (protocol level), which means that you as a user can still be "tagged" for using the tools.
All of this would be a very different story had everything been private and anonymous, and the Internet would've been a very different place too.
Most of the surveillance methods currently employed would be innefective, and could, simply put, not work.
It's the same with Bitcoin, **the damage is already done*.
It would be bad enough on its own, but of course, it also spawned the "crypto" revolution, and now there are thousands upon thousands of equally retardedly transparent blockchains out there.
What does all this achieve? **Normalization of radical transparency and financial surveillance**.
If you really think the pseudonymity is enough, you're a fool, you know little about the value of metadata.
The Internet could not have been built private and anonymous from the ground up, it was not possible back then.
We could have gotten at least default encryption with IPv6, but this was dropped off the spec for....... reasons we can't fathom (take a wild guess).
It wouldn't have been anonymous (still clearnet IP end to end) but it could have been private (is it SSH? HTTPS? SMTPS? who knows, can't tell). That was taken from us, and few even know.
Similarly, to expect Bitcoin to have better privacy from the start is also not reasonable - **complexity comes later**.
And later it did come - in the form of #monero
I would add the privacy-verifiability duality to the blockchain trilemma.
The trilemma is:
-Security
-Scalability
-Decentralization
You cannot prioritize any of these characteristics without harming the other two.
Similarly, the privacy-verifiability duality means that we currently do not know how to make a blockchain private without compromising verifiability. The more private a chain is, the less verifiable it is, and the more verifiable a blockchain is, the less private it is:
- Privacy
- Verifiability
You cannot escape this; it is mathematics. That is why many opinions about Bitcoin and other blockchains are dishonest, trying to sell you lies.
In Bitcoin, security and decentralization have been prioritized at the expense of scalability, which is why a layered system such as TPC/IP was chosen, so that scalability occurs in layers L2 and L3, or whatever layers there may be.
All blockchains that do not have L2 will compromise their security or decentralization in favor of scalability, as is the case with Monero.
On the other hand, in terms of the privacy-verifiability duality, Bitcoin has prioritized verifiability, as it is totally unacceptable that there could be an undetectable bug and that its supply is not deterministic and fixed. If this were the case, Bitcoin would have no reason to exist.
Other chains sell privacy and verifiable supply, and this is completely false; again, it's mathematics.
What I am exposing is the lack of honesty. It's fine to have private blockchains; it's just another tool, but what is wrong is lying.
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