> 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.