> Privacy is important, and it's a binary proposition.

It never used to be a binary proposition, it used to be somewhat proportionate because (a) there was a cost to surveillance and (b) there was a cost to acting covertly - crime was inherently local and hard to scale.

So you wouldn't have the police surveilling everyone unless that was critical to the stability of the state (Stasi etc), and it was infeasible to track cash transactions so a certain amount of crime and evasion was tolerated. But it was limited because cash is inherently bulky. Even a few million dollars is hard to carry around.

Now the internet has falsified both of those. Both crime and surveillance can be scaled up and globalized. So it has become binarized, with one of two outcomes: anonymous transactions + frictionless crime, including evasion of tax and currency controls; OR omnipresent surveillance of everyone and every transaction.

Cryptocurrency is accelerating towards one of those two outcomes. I just don't think it'll be the first one.