It increasingly feels like we are in a time when anything with any potential to harm the Regime (such as web, bitcoin, etc) just gets defanged and absorbed into the system. In a few years, your web browser will probably transmit the details of your mandatory TPM chip to facebook, netflix, etc so they can uniquely identify all devices with complete precision and deny access to unapproved (user-controlled) computers. Microsoft already only allows users to install other OSes/bootloaders on new computers by their good grace. The keys are theirs, not yours.
With bitcoin we already have KYC/AML ruthlessly enforced at every onramp/offramp. It is already very hard to transact between fiat and crypto without presenting some form of government-issued identification, and it will only get harder as time goes on, I don't see how you could reverse this process. And that culture shift is important because the people whose voices are most dominant within the "crypto sphere" today don't seem to give a shit, really. The crypto people we have now seem to lack the deep, fundamental commitment to human freedom, privacy, and security that was the animating force behind the creation of bitcoin. I desperately want to believe that it still survives and I'm just not seeing it somehow. But I simply can't.
It's probably because the few remaining crypto people, in the space dominated mostly by scammers, realized that crypto anarchy is something that's fun to read about in a sci-fi novel, not something you actually want to live in.
I'm a crypto OG, and I also mourn what this space has become. You are entirely incorrect in the last part of your sentence.
Over time, most of the people shilling "coin go up" memes have lost interest in bitcoin and have moved to other coins, leaving space for this kind of thing to develop in bitcoin.
Two: Crpyto-backed smart-contract stable coins (similar to DAI). (aka USD tokens without the need for the US financial on-off ramps).
Then watch this space skyrocket into the stratosphere.
I'm not sure what stablecoins have to do with anything i said.
Apart from that, check crypto trends and quickly you will notice that they are very few projects that care about it in any real way. Every major crypto now effectively all about centralization, not the opposite. For different reasons than the central banks, naturally. Still, the trends are hard to ignore.
Otherwise, we would already have crypto outright banned or fully decentralized by now.
However there are more and more truly decentralization projects. Anything that doesn't do KYC when related to crypto trading/exchanging - have to be
Don't focus on the short-term if you want to make serious money or learn a technology that will stick around.
EDIT: in other words, my question is actually whether your claim has relevance, considering how most crypto currencies aim to be public (or that's at least my impression).
If it's just an application level shielding, as in a separation between user software that can't access the information but a layer/cluster of infrastructure software that can, then I'm not so sure if its nothing more than rather meaningless cosmetics.
Do you by any change have some references as to how this would work? because I sincerely believe that this statement of "decentralization means access to all" actually fundamentally holds.
EDIT: I'm also doubting the classification of decentralized, if a piece of the user software relies on something else that has more capabilities (essentially a typical trait of centralization).
In Zcash or Monero, everyone knows the public blockchain and their own private keys. If you make a transaction, it's broadcast to all nodes. There's no special privileged nodes that people give their keys or transaction plaintexts to. Transaction data doesn't contain the sender, receiver, or amount in a way that's clear to the public. The transaction is made so the receiver can decrypt enough to see that they're the receiver and see the amount. The transaction also contains exactly enough information so that the public can verify that the transaction didn't invent any money out of thin air and instead only sent as much as the sender could, whoever they were. (Zero-knowledge proofs can be made to prove pretty arbitrary results over data even to people missing certain inputs!)
Confidential transactions combined with bulletproofs [0] are an efficient way to deal with the added privacy.
You cannot see who sent you the amount. Blockchain is fully encrypted and you cannot see any amounts or transaction sender/receiver.
Any real person using DeFi or NFTs is not using a privacy coins
I agree with most of crypto’s philosophy. But this obnoxious naivety makes me root for and materially support the other side.
Is there a word for this?
Also known as taxes.
> these dinosaur idiots
Taxman.
A state unable to collect taxes ceases to be a sovereign state.
Complex taxation that hides where you paid taxes (ie: VAT) or where your taxes went (ie: infrastructure or old persons pension) is what's at risk here.
Eventually this will lead to decentralized warfare with dao's fighting asymmetrically and not playing by the old rules.
Monero uses ring signatures and several other mechanisms to separate a transaction from the sender, recipient, and contents so that you can't reconstruct chains of transactions but you can still verify consistency across the blocks. Monero is reasonably private but it's still technically possible to rebuild some fragments of transaction chains even if it's extremely unlikely.
ZCash on the other hand uses Zero Knowledge Proofs to verify correctness of the blocks and the transactions without leaking information about the system (such as the sender, recipient, or amounts). ZCash is much more computationally expensive, needs to be carefully callibrated, and needs the founding keys to be safely destroyed following the bootstrap of the system to remain secure however it does provide stronger and more easily mathematically verifiable assurances of privacy. "The Ceremony" is a really good one-off podcast about the story.
But in general it is possible to have privacy preserving functionality in decentralised services, it just requires far more complicated maths and lots of statistics to make work correctly.
That Uniswap UI is out there and literally nothing can stop it.
This total control nonsense will eventually end and these dinosaur idiots will stuck with their own destructive ideas