> promote cryptocurrency

I advice against them, generally. Only if transactions in your country are severely limited, but then you live in an unfree country already. Cryptocurrencies have a tendency to be abused for speculation, and are bad for the environment.

My worry isn't my own government; I'm worried about [some] other governments, and very large corporations.

I can’t understand how one can care about privacy for communication but not when it comes to money.

Money is a means of communication; we use it as a medium and metric for communicating value.

Unless we have truly fungible cryptocurrency as an alternative to corporate or government digital currency, all our private finances are inseparable from the surveillance machine that is now slowly emerging from adtech and fusing with capital control/KYC/AML systems.

Don’t look at where you are today, but where we are as a global community in 10 years.

The only trail it leaves is to financial institutions (who can see the transactions), and the government. The former need to be held accountable by law, by the latter. I believe the GDPR may aid us there.

Now, in a free society, I don't see a good reason why one should be afraid the government can snoop around my financial transactions. I believe I currently live in such a free society. If I want, I can buy a dildo or latex costume in an Amsterdam sex shop within an hour tomorrow, and I am not going to have to be shy about that. I don't live in a country where, for example, gay people get beaten up regularly. I'm not gay myself, btw, but I've experimented a fair share with my sexuality when I was younger. I also used to buy legal drugs online, and I just paid by IBAN. Do I want my employer to know such? Well, I'd like to have the choice to do so, and I have this choice as it is.

I can think of some very good reasons to use cryptocurrency in my free country, and none of these are valid from a legal PoV (avoiding taxation, buy illegal drugs/weapons/etc ie. criminal behaviour). By using cryptocurrency where other means work perfectly fine, I add noise to the cryptocurrency data, and it isn't in my interest to add this noise as I am not a proponent of things such as avoiding taxation or criminal behaviour.

Furthermore, nothing what you say addresses the other points:

> Cryptocurrencies have a tendency to be abused for speculation, and are bad for the environment.

These cons still exist, and need to be put on the weight with the privacy aspect. Which can be a valid argument in an unfree society, such as for example Belarus or China.

I host my own matrix, but getting my friends and family to make the switch is proving difficult...

I see it as a long-term project. For now it's mostly me and a few other nerdy friends, and otherwise it's mostly like a "new IRC".

Maybe in a year or so it'll be mature to bring people over.

I don't know. It's not as easy to set up as Whatsapp, where you just need your phone number and everything else "just works", and doesn't have the added functionality of Discord, with custom emotes, voice and streaming and servers to effortlessly participate in multiple communities with their own separate channels. My family keeps messaging me on whatsapp because that's where all their friends are and they don't want to switch apps just to talk to me, and my friends are far more comfortable with our online hangout space being discord instead. Element is still rough as a client, and for my self-hosted homeserver I had to put in a couple hours to get video and voice calls working. Unless Matrix magically becomes 10x as polished within a couple years I don't see it becoming popular outside privacy enthusiasts.

So maybe it's two years. Or three. But I think we'll get there at some point. A beauty is that while they do have funding, everything's done in the open and it's not a VC-funded company that's gonna drop the ball once they get acquired by someone who ends up killing the product or taking it in the wrong direction.

The more we try to use it, the faster that will happen. Meet someone new and if you're going to stay in touch, propose Matrix as your first preference and eventually settle on what both of you feel OK with. Every little bit helps spreading awareness and eventually adoption.

I don't see why Discord would be the first of its kind to be that big eternally.

I think it can be beneficial to offer your server, but maybe for onboarding it's a good middleground to point to matrix.org

not just difficult. you're now that paranoid guy who wants to be special.