Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Thoughts on Cryptocurrency? (programming.dev)

submitted 7 months ago by actual_patience@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I was wondering what viewpoints and opinions this community has when it comes to cryptocurrency.

Personally, I'm not against it, but I'm not for it either. I like the concept of bringing back cash anonymity, and also decentralization (obviously). Although I don't think it will be viable for at least another decade.

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[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I use it on a regular basis. I also run a non-profit that funds open source tools for scientists, it makes accepting donations a lot easier for us among other benefits for our donors (they don't have to pay capital gains on the coins they donate, just like stocks).

Bitcoin is pretty incredible and offers decent anonymity which continues to improve, Monero offers more. Lots of scams in the "crypto world", but Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policy promises for 15 years:

Fixed supply of 21 million coins. Your money's value is not diluted by supply inflation.
You can send funds to anybody in the world with a smartphone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). And you can do it from your couch, no banks required.
It has operated 24/7, 365 days a year for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack, and has survived attacks from many angles including nation-state actors.
At every possible turn it has chosen decentralization and security. I can't say the same for most other coins.
And it has done this with < 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables and other "stranded" supply. Pretty powerful stuff.

Monero's privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to, that is the biggest long-term risk to Monero IMO. That and centralization of block production due to increased block size. Bitcoin worked around this block size problem with L2s like lightning, Monero chose bigger blocks though of course it could always add an L2 if it wants to.

[–] LemmyHead@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

"Monero’s privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to"

I think that's the biggest flaw in your thinking. Monero has this built-in from the start and everyone using it knows it and supports this approach. It affects how legislators can manipulate the coin because they can't, it will keep on living. It already affects the true value of the coin with all privacy included, because you can see how exchanges are unwilling to list it or are delisting it if they already did so, so there are no (or hardly any) institutions or billionaires manipulating the price because of the high risk factor of losing their money. You're forgetting that people in power nowadays are brainwashing us to accept that a wanting a fundamental right like privacy equals you're doing criminal activity or have plans to do so. There are A TON of reasons why bitcoin will never include such strong privacy features, because there are so many factors that influence this decision to make it possible, and the dominant reason you see that matters to btc holders (or any other crypto token for that matter) is NUMBER GO UP. Privacy is not a number go up reason. So it's not a tech issue, it's a people issue