Bitcoin Forum

We are living in an era of technology. Our entire present is digitalised day by day as we move on to a new normal where online is more prominent and important than the offline world.

Education has moved to the Internet, something that would've been considered a negative influence over children only one year ago. Things have changed quite drastically, although it happened so smooth we already got used to our new way of living.

As we move on with the digitalization, Bitcoin becomes more and more used. However, a considerable amount of people choose Bitcoin to enhance their financial privacy. Considering Bitcoin is not a private blockchain, tools like Chainalysis owns are a threat against a significant part of Bitcoin's users since the largest part of them do not use coin control and consolidate outputs and dust the wrong way, revealing their historical traces.

In consequence, the existence of privacy-focused coins might come in handy in the era where surveillance and control are on an All-Time High. On the other hand though, that is not the case for everyone - especially since investors are being pushed away as cryptocurrencies like Monero are slowly being delisted from exchanges while privacy slowly becomes a crime.

So I wanted to gather a general opinion on the subject. What do you think? In the current times we're living, are Monero and privacy-focused coins a necessity?

Is it true to say that people accept bitcoin and choose to use it because they want to improve privacy level for their financial activities? I doubt that it is not true, and people mainly have bitcoin transactions to invest, trade, speculate. Only very few of them care to use bitcoin for privacy.

It is their practices with bitcoin transactions. If they want, they can protect their privacy better.

There is maybe demand on privacy, real or fake. Fake demand comes from people who shout loudly and ask for privacy but in practice, they don't care to do so. If they invest in a privacy coin, it is because they see opportunity to get profit, not because of privacy they can attain from it. With those guys, in practice, they don't protect their privacy.

Governments don't like bitcoin and cryptocurrency, especially they very don't like privacy coins. They will try to break them down as much as possible. Lawsuits on centralized coins that have known teams or pressures to delist privacy coins from unknown teams.

I think it is still necessary as the nature of life. The world, people, society need to have diversification and competition.

Honestly, for few years I've been dealings things in internet and pay things using cryptocurrency and such, I don't really see the need of using privacy coin. I mean, even bitcoin itself actually isn't really enhancing your privacy,
someone finds out your address they could figure out what you used your btc for.
However, privacy coin like Monero is still needed, like for example if the government suddenly ban btc out of the blue whilst giving harsh punishment for possession. I think coin like Monero gonna be really useful to use at that time.
privacy coin is like that small space of freedom you got when everything is trying to poke into your nose, more specifically govenrment.
Maybe some of us don't need it at the current time, but it's nice to have something to use if worst comes to the worst.

I think when it comes to finances,I think transparency is key which is one of the reasons of some of today's cryptocurrencies successful growth and large scale adoption, even though people are free to use mixers for any privacy concerns,but if big players are to join privacy coins wouldn't be attractive to them!.

They are needed already, since they are the best solution for private payments on the Internet, and as cashless society gains more and more ground, they become even more necessary. But Bitcoin is getting more private too - Lightning network transactions are private, there is coinjoin, new proposals like Schnorr signatures will get implemented. If Bitcoin will cover the needs for privacy, there will be much less reasons to use special coins for that, especially if they come with problems like blockchain bloat or 51% attacks.

Bitcoin is falsely advertised by many as an "anonymity-providing" cryptocurrency. I find it as wrong as the false advertisement of "anonymous VPNs" by YouTubers. You're certainly not wrong - most people do have BTC mostly as an investment! But it isn't a rare thing at all to find lots of newbies on here being totally surprised that they have never actually been anonymous with BTC.

But do they even know they can? It took me many years to even find out that I've been using it the wrong way!

While I agree with the latter, I am starting to doubt they don't like Bitcoin. Since people don't take care of privacy, BTC is a perfect way for them to monitor a very large part of the transactions and addresses.

Fair enough.

Don't you think privacy-focused coins would be very attractive to them behind the scenes though? Big players may love control, but they only love controlling others while having their own freedom. I doubt they wouldn't love having most BTC addresses under control while keeping their own funds in coins like Monero themselves.

I personally think privacy by default is still better than optional one. Once you go for opt-in privacy, "they" start suspecting you. On the other hand, coins like XMR have it by default so you are private from the start.

IMHO, I believe as an industry we should abide by the existing laws of the land, and cryptocurrencies are not exempted because we operate in our respective boundaries/countries so with that fact we should abide by the existing laws/regulation and the privacy coins like Monero, Zcash, etc. has superb privacy features that even a sophisticated government like the US are in a hard time to tract its transaction thats why they are afraid that it might be used for all illegal means like terrorism financing, etc. in that case I think we should ceased of using privacy coins for now. 

yes I agree with you, the average person who holds bitcoin doesn't care about privacy. they only use bitcoin for investment and make a profit. even if asked, which one is more profitable between using it as a means of payment or investment, they definitely prefer investing.

There wouldn't be a market for XMR and other anon coins if there isn't the need for it. Other countries are blocked to access materials like subscription and porn which has a market online, they may be able to purchase through these privacy coins. It's awkward but it's happening. The adoption of cryptocurrency I think will make privacy coins a lot more necessary because there will be more people who want to hide from surveillance.

I think op had written similar topic like this long time ago, analysing the cost of entering into privacy policy coins.
Entering the Privacy & Anonymity Atmosphere. What are the costs? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5276966.msg55227045#msg55227045)

I still see the need to bring it to our awareness again because the stability of privacy coins is still intact, meanwhile some investors think that privacy policy coins might have been banned and stopped to be operated by now, what if in 2022 upward we still analysing them won't you think they are gaining momentum?
To be sincere and realistic, privacy coins is the best options in dealing in the crypto space despite the fact that they aren't superior over the first mover advantage Bitcoin.
There's need for privacy coins for users that want privacy is their transactions, if they should be banned meanwhile mixers should be stopped as well because they functions as the same in one way or the other.

Privacy is still very important I believe, many still don't want to leave their own tracks online for their own reasons so yes I expect privacy coins to have a better home in future, I'm thinking they are better on real decentralized exchanges, because in future if privacy coins becomes a thing the SEC and government can go to war against privacy coins so they ate better on decentralized exchanges

Having privacy is abiding to the existing laws of the land. I never thought I'd see the day when people will see privacy as terrorism or illicit activity. If they want to focus on reducing criminality, fiat is the first and most powerful enemy they should confront. There's no way a cryptocurrency provides more illegal activity than a monetary system that's been alive for centuries does.

That is true, fiat has still the major role in terrorism or other fraudulent activities. And the government is having hard time to track them down. Now, they are after for the privacy coins because for them, maybe, it is easy to ban the usage of it because they can run after on the exchanges that are trading it. But I don't think all governments will prohibit the use of privacy coins, there will always a government that will accept them.

For sure, but the larger countries still matter the most. If USA decides to indefinitely ban privacy coins, it's literally declaring war on privacy. Other countries will see that as a massive opportunity instead and will decide to support privacy coins instead.

However, a ban or an oppression in a large country still means a significant reduction of volume and usage of the said cryptocurrency. Devs from the said country would probably stop supporting the coin's development so they wouldn't be legally penalized.

There will always be alternatives, but how many people would really consider them? Do you think a lot of people'd leave the US in case of a Monero ban? I wouldn't!

just make up some reason like "most of privacy coin are used for criminal activity," and the public will believe it. Remember snowden? how much people actually care about it?  the public backlash would be minimum for privacy coin ban.

IMHO, The statement of "crypto is censorship resistant" are not very true, if governments around the world ban it, less people want to be involved, the value will be dropped significantly(massive sell pressure), and the network security would be decreased significantly too.

The main advantage of cryptocurrency is its anonymity. Of course, I don't know what awaits us in the future, but I think states are interested in controlling financial transactions in the crypto space. This means that they will try in every way to kill anonymity, or at least reduce it to the possible limit.

Besides there are service that can increase users' privacy to send and receive cryptocurrency anonymously like mixer, privacy coin are what they need on the darknet. Privacy coin are very popular there and widely accepted and that is exactly what they need.

Mixer service helps users to have a good privacy and maybe some of them would prefer bitcoin over altcoin if adoption is the reason. There are so many people who care about their financial privacy and I think the privacy coin is an alternative to bitcoin. MONERO, DASH, ZCASH are some example of the popular privacy coin these days.

Yes, that's nice.
Not everyone will agree though.
I guess it all comes down if we can trust our own government to not steal our kept funds.
You put it in banks they take it without permission. Just a note that the funds was already gone because of government taxation reasons.
What if that is your last drop of money to eat for a month?

We still need the privacy even if it's not that totally private. Just to get away from how the world works ever since a government has more power than whom they govern.

One thing anyone would agree is that we need privacy and with all the government zooming in to infiltrate our privacy by monitoring all our actions and having the trace of our online life, we need these privacy coins even though there are news coming out that some of the governments might force exchanges to exclude these privacy coins we need them to be traded in DEX and some countries are planning to ban bitcoin trading altogether and to overcome those we need these privacy coins.

Footing the want/priority of the cryptocurrency community privacy-focused coins are a necessity but I think the privacy coin teams also don't think about the situation that may arise in the future when cryptocurrency become mainstream of payment when they created their coin to be total privacy cause they ought to make it both side functioning coin i.e sender can choose to send privacy or pseudomous payment.

Privacy never was and never will be a crime. Crime is a crime. You should not do crime. Cars help criminals. But that dont means Cars are crime. Shoes helps criminals, but that dot mean shoes are crime. USD helps crime, but that dont mean USD is crime.

Financial privacy helps you to be safe. When you use transparent ledger cryptocurrencies, any criminal can check how much coins you have and where you use them and where you get them from. Very dangerous information's open to see by anyone.

We all need our privacies is different ways, I believe privacy coins have good benefits, you can never tell when their needs will knock on your door one day even if you don't use them now, covering your tracks doesn't make you a criminal, most times you are doing it to safe yourself, it's why I invest in Monero, it's the best privacy coin I know.

I don't use anonymous coins for transactions, but there are a lot of people who are more scrupulous about their privacy. Therefore, coins such as Monero should be in circulation, so that everyone has the opportunity to use them. But the government will always be against such coins because they can't control such transactions.

If they don't practice as guided by developers of privacy coins, they won't get what you want. As a result of lazy, many people use privacy coins for their transactions and don't care about their own practices when doing transactions.

If they careless and blindly in practice, their privacy can be broken and they can not blame on others (developers or people who trace their transactions)

Guns and gun powder can be used for good or bad, to protect peace and lives or to do terrorist. Depends on the people who use it and their purposes. The same causal results with privacy coins and transactions.

That is until authorities get to monitor everyone's addresses - they would deny your argument and suddenly fall in love with Bitcoin. They're already doing it. It's the wet dream of a communist thinker: having an overview of everyone's wallets.

Yes, but not the way they existed in the past. When we think of privacy it's easy to think of "illegal" transactions. Obviously that's a direct clash with legal / regulatory issues. There's concept emerging surrounding self sovereign identities. Combined with interoporable chains like DOT (as an example) I see a concept of privacy can work alongside ensuring legal activity. What I mean here is that if you have a decentralized identity tied to your person with KYC built in - this could be your entry point or gateway into blockchain enabled services. So rather then organizations having control of your data, your ID provides trustless access. For example you want to access a service that requires you to be 18 years or older and be a US citizen - use your DID. The service, without having to know who you are can trust that you meet the conditions. In addition, with interoparability projects like D4RK that plan to offer privacy services... you could operate discretely while still maintaining an identity and legality. So say in the case of running a decentralized store leveraging D4RK's discrete transactions and some self sovereign identity. No one needs to know who you are, you can operate freely yet still be bound to the restraints of your local legal system etc. Say my identity is 30 year old US citizen and I live in a state that allows the sale of pot for which I have a license. All of those things could be bound to the blockchain, yet obscured via privacy services. The legal terms could be worked in to the chain to flag illegal behavior satisfying governments and legal bodies. For example a smart contract that says okay this ID trusted and allowed to sell xyz products. But if the on-chain pot license expires or if they move to a state it's not legal it get flagged and reported to authorities.

Anyway that's my far away view of things - privacy, extremely important as well as regulations. It might be far away but I see a future where both are possible in concert... they don't need to be at odds.

As an aside... I think simple, dark, anonymous transactions aren't going anywhere. There will always be a some privacy project with users leveraging it.

I think this depends on how society will be accepting these private coins, and that is my answer to the poll.

Right now, we have the matter about India re-banning Bitcoin in the country. Posted in this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5313666.msg0#new), India will be prohibiting private coins in their country if that law was passed by the government. There are a lot of users of cryptocurrencies in the country but I think this is not a social decision but a decision of the government so that they could control their digital currency well. Still, these private cryptos might be necessary as not all people could use Bitcoin in the future.

it is quite important moreover for someone who overly obsessive about security when buying digital goods, there's always reason why I used throwaway email just for buying vpn or such just to make sure that in the future when any of the websites
I used got their data breached, I don't need to worry about my credentials ;D  and using monero is definitely no brainer for me.

The fee for transaction is cheap too  ;D ;D but I bought digital goods like once a year.

Governments can have that power also when people use opaque ledger cryptocurrencies. They ask them to show them their view keys to see their transactions. It is your government so you show. With transparent ledger cryptocurrencies just anyone can see everything. Your neighbour. Someone that wants to apply for same job as you. Someone that runs same business as you. Someone that his business is to steal others people money.  Sorry but I simply dont see that huge use case for transparent ledger cryptocurrencies. Yes there is use case, but a niche one. In the future mainly will be used opaque ledger cryptocurrencies.

Buying digital goods is the one reason you can keep some privacy because at least buying digital goods doesn't expose your details including residential address. It serves its purpose. Not really very necessary for some since we still can purchase with USD, but if you don't trust the seller's identity it's best to just remain private.

The problem arises when government gets in the way for transactions involving contraband, this is when you will have to worry because users like us when identified by them can become a suspect.

I think that over time, there will be increased pressure on cryptocurrency from states that want to keep it under control. Coins with a high level of anonymity and confidentiality will be the first to hit. They will be an indicator of the degree of such pressure by states on the decentralized cryptocurrency. Therefore, we need such coins, they are the ones that can resist states due to their anonymity. People have a right to anonymity and it is not necessary to equate such a right with the possibility of committing crimes.

Given the immense number of "potential" addresses, governments monitoring all of them is virtually impossible.
Of course, most are careless and claim that they have nothing to hide, hence actually helping governments' surveillance.

Of course, privacy coins are necessary and I do hope that they will survive the continuous assault against them.
On the other hand, with every day passing by there are more criminals that will use privacy coins instead of Bitcoin, proving the viability of these coins, but making the governments' actions intensify.
I would hate to see privacy coins remain "alive" only on darknet...

Privacy coin are important to those who are more concerned about their privacy, some people don't care about it, to me they are necessary to have to prevent the authorities from keeping track of our financial status, already as a result of technological advancement people are very expose, nothing is private anymore, the internet has made sure of that, if your social life is not private then at least make your financial life private, away from the prying eyes of the government.

My favorite privacy projects are incognito chain and 0xMonero.

If you aren't already using privacy coins for their use cases they can come in handy some day, there might come a time where people will have to go anonymous to cover their tracks, this is what most government don't want, it's why I believe that privacy coins will have a big place in crypto space soon, covering tracks isn't a crime and it can safe lives too

Hmm, very interesting point of view. Would be curious to know: if XMR-kind of anonymity is not going to go anywhere, do you think Bitcoin has a better future since it's a transparent ledger?

They do have the same power even with opaque ledgers, but when you have someone withdrawing 100 XMR out of an exchange after which you completely lose track of the coins, things go in the dark for them. All they know is you had 100 XMR in your wallet at some point. Meanwhile, you might have earned more or lost some of them.

How often are people asked about their cash savings, especially when they do not make it seem obvious that they've saved or earned a lot of money? It's quite hard, especially compared to the public ledger they now fell in love with.

Well, don't imagine the governments actually have hundreds of people checking manually everyone's addresses. No, it's much simpler and faster than that: if I used my BTC for 7 years straight without purchasing anything with it or so and then I suddenly make a payment, that's where my address starts getting marked with my identity. AI is advanced enough to do this kind of stuff automatically and constantly. There are lots of new addresses, but all they need is the mined transactions - so besides checking up on the entire BTC ledger next to the gov's database (such as payments to stores, withdraws from exchanges, IPs and so), all they need is to only update their database every new block.. so about every ~10min.

If they declare privacy cryptos illegal, it's going to be "fun" since Monero's dev team is preparing a fully open-source and free atomic swap function between BTC and XMR. At that point, the only thing left governments can do is also not accept "tainted" BTC no more.

It soon to come the moment that Bitcoin is already controlled by the government and no longer hears about anonymity. Maybe it is a need for us to submit KYC in order to become a legit holder otherwise they will confiscate it from you. And this might be the reason why people must use privacy coins just to keep their identity out of sight.

But wait, that suppose to be a long and heavy work for the government if they wanted to control cryptos.
Anyway, never mind them, they are not doing good for crypto, they only just wanted to get some benefits from us that is why they wanted to make it centralized. Do they need transparency? They are joking, actually.

That's correct. But I am sure that many can be careful enough to keep his coins in multiple wallets and even if they make payments, only a small part of his wallets will get revealed. Then I guess that mixers will keep coming up for those who want to "start fresh".
If change addresses are properly used, they will not be able to track all those addresses with good enough precision for linking them to actual persons.
And if change addresses are used properly, the agencies will have a lot of DB space spent for addresses used in 2 tx (one in, one out) and when we'll have proper adoption ... I don't want to see how will they handle their databases  ;D

Not really a necessity, unless we don't trust in our government anymore, this coins are for complete privacy, however it can also be use for illegal activities, and we know that government does not want that. In a world that we are living, we have a government which we called a centralized, it wants to oversea or monitor its people and privacy coins if it will gain adoption, it might become a threat to the national security.

Most traders use anonymous coins exclusively to make a profit. And they are not going to use them to hide their transactions. Only a small part uses anonymous coins for their intended purpose, to ensure complete anonymity when making a transaction. And a very large part of such transactions is accounted for by crime.

I personally see that the way this will be going is, Bitcoin users going for optional privacy will be seen potentially worse than Monero users. Here's why:

Imagine you've used Bitcoin pseudonymously for the last 5 years and nobody knows who you are. Suddenly, you make a transaction to some Amazon dropshipper accepting BTC and the government gets at some point the information that it was you who paid for that. From that point on, your address will be known as " NeuroticFish"'s address.

One day, you decide to enter the privacy sphere by mixing your coins. The authorities know that it was you who did that, but you obviously had a reason to do so. Doesn't it seem more likely to get interrogated and into trouble as soon as you decide to switch the privacy flip than it'd be to use Monero straight away from the start?

Privacy is becoming a necessity these days, especially when it has been put to the test with governments' efforts to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. The so-called "contact tracing" is the first step for the end of privacy. Slowly but surely, we'll reach a point where privacy will come to an end. The introduction of CBDCs and many other things will make this happen faster than you could imagine. It's why I believe privacy coins like Monero and Grin will become heavily used by people in the mainstream world as governments increase their surveillance efforts.

Ultimately, mainstream governments will declare privacy coins as "illegal". Their main excuse will be that such coins can be used for money laundering and other illicit activities. But we all know their true intentions. A private and decentralized cryptocurrency like Monero goes against what was established by the government in the first place. Something they cannot control or track, will become a threat to the current monetary system. It's why most (if not all) governments are against privacy coins these days. That's not the case with Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other popular cryptocurrencies because their blockchain networks are transparent for anyone to see. Tracing transactions on the aforementioned blockchain networks is much easier than doing so on privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies like Monero or Grin. Even if we have nothing to hide, there's always the need for privacy. Just my thoughts ;D

Monero is actually good for anonymity and I quite know how important privacy is to everyone. We all deserve that privacy but how much do you think you can have to be satisfy over the internet. It's all depend on how good or expert in covering tracks but even at that, one cannot fully cover tracks.

• The exchange platform for transactions are aware of your activities except you want to used VPN
• At a point, you may have used your real email address which one may have publicly given to other parties
• Your favourite exchange where you kyc perhaps is having xmr which you may have want to use for transaction instead of going into other exchanges. Some new exchanges may delay your withdrawal when you create an account purposely for Monero transactions.
• Your device isn't completely safe, we are all limited to anonymousity all over the internet

In conclusion, we can have a level of privacy but I doubt if we can 100%

I expect this as well, but the fun part is that other countries will accept Monero specifically to profit off the situation. Some people would literally leave their countries just to have the freedom of using cryptocurrencies.

True. Fully agree with this. :)

No I think XMR type anonymity is here to stay as long as P2P is here. But I think there's opportunity for privacy at scale within interoperable ecosystems. Imagine for example being able to say scan a card to let you in a gym. The gym can trust that you have a membership and meet the minimum age requirement but the ID and membership can be wrapped in privacy and de-identified. Perhaps you could even sell say your behavioral data at discretion etc... For me this is true privacy. If all privacy solutions have to offer is peer to peer transactions then it will always be synonmous with "breaking the rules". But with privacy services like D4RK we have opportunity for privacy in areas of our life that we currently just give it up.

The thing is that in some cases I can’t tell how really private that these coins are, I have also read that Monero can be traced, though tracing and tracking down such a transaction is going to be a very hard job. But privacy coins are good, though I have not used them before because I haven’t seen the need for them since nobody is using them for a transaction, people I come across everyday are usually making use of Bitcoin , Ethereum.

But, all these cryptocurrencies can be affected once the government decides to ban and shut them down, unless we are going to switch to making use of decentralized exchanges. Privacy coins will be good if you have something that you want to cover up, and it’s a transaction that you don’t want anyone to know and trace easily.

That's certainly true, mate. There's no such thing as 100% anonymity. There will always exist loopholes, vulnerabilities, and bugs that need to be addressed in order to maintain a high level of privacy. Monero is the best privacy coin in the world with its proven track record of development and innovation. It's much harder to trace XMR transactions than it's the case on other privacy coins like Dash or Zcash. In a world where government surveillance is increasing at a fast pace, people will look for ways in order to preserve their privacy. And what better way to do so with a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency like Monero?

The real issue would be acquiring Monero without leaving any trace whatsoever. Getting XMR through centralized exchanges is not the most viable way to preserve anonymity. After all, such exchanges require users to comply with KYC/AML. You can use a decentralized exchange, but without a VPN or TOR, you can risk yourself getting your IP address exposed. Your best bet would be to buy Monero with paper money in-person. This would give you better privacy/anonymity as everything is done in an offline manner. There are so many ways to protect your anonymity, limited to your own imagination.

Nonetheless, nothing is safe in this world. Still, it's better something than nothing. We should embrace privacy technologies in order to protect our freedom. Otherwise, governments will be able to take full control of our lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has urged the need for privacy due to governments' increased surveillance efforts. I wouldn't be surprised if they declare privacy coins as "illegal" in the future. At least, the decentralized nature of Blockchain tech will keep Monero and other privacy coins alive for a long time. The only difference is that people won't be able to conduct privacy-oriented transactions legally. Everything will be performed under the scope of mainstream governments worldwide. Just my thoughts ;D