I've been seeing a lot of talk about privacy on here recently and I want to share my two sats.
Privacy is a very important and valuable tool. Societies which respect individuals will treat privacy as a human right and enforce your ability to decline revealing information through law.
However, privacy will never and can never be perfect, and it will never be as important to a society as it's underlying monetary system.
Privacy will always consist of trade-offs. I use this platform to communicate, and that has a trade off for privacy. The reality is, most people are comfortable revealing some information about themselves if it achieves a goal they see as being more valuable than the cost.
When it comes to base layer privacy as a monetary network, Bitcoin has somehow become underrated. There is no ID system, no names, no physical addresses. Just public keys and Bitcoin addresses, which often leave tons of plausible deniability and are impossible to be proven to be yours without you signing an address or giving someone your public key. Even a simple one input, two output transaction starts to muddy the water on true ownership.
The problem Bitcoin currently has in the US is the abundance of KYC laws and the frequent use of exchanges. In a circular Bitcoin economy, it would only take a couple interactions before the whole UTXO history becomes nearly impossible to track with any level of certainty around who owns what, aside from those who participated in the specific transaction.
Evolution happens in stages. Right now, 95% of people in America use a bank which gives them exactly zero privacy. Every single transaction is surveilled with 100% confidence that you are making it, and all your balances and assets are known. Even worse, the bank knows which businesses you transact with, how frequently, and at what specific times.
Base layer Bitcoin is already an impovement on this system (with a different set of tradeoffs) and tools like lightning and ECash have the potential to destroy this surveillance. The real problem with privacy is not a technical one - it is a social one. People need to actually demand it and expect to transact freely without having to self report every time you do so.
As I stated, the ability to decline revealing information to others should be a foundational human right. But currently, our problems with privacy come from our broad cultural disinterest in it and our willingness to give up all of our information through the use of threats and coercion. Alternative monetary networks with different privacy trade-offs are not a solution to that problem, and in the process they would undermine the much more important upgrade to the monetary system which is currently taking place.
Rant over and feedback is appreciated.
zforce / Zach⚡️
npub1hy…3ntt0
2024-08-03 04:52:15
Author Public Key
npub1hymqekqgkf8vhlgr2a0n6cmmre3v48l2g9dvv7mvtvg7790j35rqh3ntt0Published at
2024-08-03 04:52:15Event JSON
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"content": "I've been seeing a lot of talk about privacy on here recently and I want to share my two sats.\n\nPrivacy is a very important and valuable tool. Societies which respect individuals will treat privacy as a human right and enforce your ability to decline revealing information through law.\n\nHowever, privacy will never and can never be perfect, and it will never be as important to a society as it's underlying monetary system.\n\nPrivacy will always consist of trade-offs. I use this platform to communicate, and that has a trade off for privacy. The reality is, most people are comfortable revealing some information about themselves if it achieves a goal they see as being more valuable than the cost.\n\nWhen it comes to base layer privacy as a monetary network, Bitcoin has somehow become underrated. There is no ID system, no names, no physical addresses. Just public keys and Bitcoin addresses, which often leave tons of plausible deniability and are impossible to be proven to be yours without you signing an address or giving someone your public key. Even a simple one input, two output transaction starts to muddy the water on true ownership.\n\nThe problem Bitcoin currently has in the US is the abundance of KYC laws and the frequent use of exchanges. In a circular Bitcoin economy, it would only take a couple interactions before the whole UTXO history becomes nearly impossible to track with any level of certainty around who owns what, aside from those who participated in the specific transaction.\n\nEvolution happens in stages. Right now, 95% of people in America use a bank which gives them exactly zero privacy. Every single transaction is surveilled with 100% confidence that you are making it, and all your balances and assets are known. Even worse, the bank knows which businesses you transact with, how frequently, and at what specific times.\n\nBase layer Bitcoin is already an impovement on this system (with a different set of tradeoffs) and tools like lightning and ECash have the potential to destroy this surveillance. The real problem with privacy is not a technical one - it is a social one. People need to actually demand it and expect to transact freely without having to self report every time you do so.\n\nAs I stated, the ability to decline revealing information to others should be a foundational human right. But currently, our problems with privacy come from our broad cultural disinterest in it and our willingness to give up all of our information through the use of threats and coercion. Alternative monetary networks with different privacy trade-offs are not a solution to that problem, and in the process they would undermine the much more important upgrade to the monetary system which is currently taking place.\n\nRant over and feedback is appreciated.",
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