Thanks for the replies. The closest solution I can get to is the one suggested by @LoyceMobile.

What is the safest way I can get a list of those "decoy addresses" though? It doesn't make sense to add decoy addresses if I don't take them safely as well, right..?

Also.. I thought this could be a good addition to Electrum's code as well: as soon as you set up a watch-only wallet, for each address you list it adds X more decoy addresses and although it does ask for the balance of each of them, only yours are shown up. If privacy can be improved through SPV as well, why not?

EDIT: read-only wallets are the same as watch-only ones, right?

Apart from the suggestions above, consider doing all your transactions from now on during the weekends. It's when the mempool usually clears up and lower sat/bytes (or per vbytes) get confirmed much, much easier. During times where the markets don't go crazy, even 1sat/byte fees get confirmed very quickly.

Since they're centralized and you could lose your funds at any given time as they will, I would not use them at all if I had to chooae. They're quite uncertain for me, from supply to the coin team's actual intentions.

There have been cases of frozen addresses with stablecoins so that's a no-go for me unless you're talking about a negligible amount of money you can afford to lose.

As far as I know, when you're using Electrum in SPV move you're asking some servers to retrieve your addresses' balance.

I was wondering whether there was an option for Electrum to send false requests to those servers so that you confuse it about the addresses you truly own.. is there any way to enhance your privacy through it?

I'm looking for either this or using a new Tor route/identity for each balance request so that address balances never get requested from the same IP. The main principle is the same: I'm looking for a way I could use Electrum with Tor without telling a certain server which addresses I truly own..

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!

The fact that Reddit became a pretty censored platform favoring ths Elites makes me doubt it was the ordinary people who've launched this initiative. It's quite hard to do something like this nowadays with a mass of people without having somebody cut off your plans - think of protests. Can you launch one on your own? All massive protests in my country are initiated by a certain political group with a certain purpose. This is my personal take with GME as well, but I might obviously be wrong as well.

So how exactly is pumping GME considered bankrupting the rich? By pumping it, isn't that just making the rich investors who've had GME stocks.. even more rich?

To me, it's simply not logical to take stock pumping as a way of fighting the rich. It sounds like "let's purchase gold and silver so that the rich get wrecked!".. We'd actually be helping them!

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.

Would 8% of the world's wealth be that much, considering it's a global currency giving you some freedom no other currency is able to give?

I don't think $1M/coin is far-fetched. It's less than 30x the current price - and there have been larger bumps in BTC's history. Bitcoin's proven many, many people wrong when it comes to how large and powerful it can become. If it was able to get to $37k from nothing, why would it stop here?

Bump

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.

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?

Some people use them for getting rid of dust, although this might not end up as a good idea. It makes you prone to dust attacks and sometimes leaving the dust alone & just freezing the addresses containing it is the best thing you can really do. By sending remaining sats to a dust address, you might give some bad actors a clue about the addresses you own. Humans do recognizable patterns, and they are recognized with cryptocurrencies as well.

No, not really. Moving the coins from the first blocks, that are supposed to be Satoshi's, does not make for proof that the said person is the creator. Imagine generating a wallet and being lucky enough to win against the astronomically low chance of generating an already-used private key.. and that key gives you access to those coins.

At this point, either Satoshi has solid proof for his identity or nobody will be able to prove a point. This is becoming so lame it's depressing. The dude literally has too much free time on his hands.

Let him be. Scammers will keep trying.. he's one of the biggest internet trolls.

If the entire damn internet decided to re-apply the same thing they've done with GME but with BTC instead, I doubt BTC would be more resistant to those swings. It's the market just going crazy for a while.

To be honest, I don't have a solid proof for this but I remember Bitcoin swinging wildly in most bull runs it had before, and the negative swings are quite strong as well. To me, it only seems like they're trying to replicate what cryptocurrencies do during bull runs but in an even more appealing way in order to attract customers from crypto back to stocks.

I don't think so. If, as some fear, China suddenly starts willing to take control over the network, the denial of their equipment would also redeem all other similar equipment useless for BTC mining, but at the same time it'd show the world how strong Bitcoin is: whenever control is taken by force, we just reject it no matter what it takes.

Create a currency and give an equal amount to everyone. In the end, there'll be hoarders and sellers. The wealth inequality will never disappear due to this. If 5 people have 1 BTC and one of them wants to sell it to another, here goes wealth inequality already: one has 0 BTC now so is in a disadvantage while the buyer has 2 BTC, so has an advantage. A proper solution to this issue has not been found yet (or I have to hear about its existence yet).

I get your point, but you're looking for a solution that, as I said above, has not been found yet. Considering the current economical rules and status, this either has to be a thing or we "solve" the inequality by making the rich pay more.. which is now unfair for them.

 Well, finding out who does nothing and who doesn't and stealing their wealth just because "they haven't earned it" sucks. Who determines what "doing good" really means? Who determines whether I deserve not to be rewarded anything anymore due to the fact that I haven't done anything good?

As I said, these are communist/extremist rules. You can't take the wealth from someone's hands or decide not to give them any "reward" anymore and call it freedom.

There numbers are very relative, and with increasing usage of multisig, proper coin control etc... they'll just keep accelerating in time. To me, they don't really mean much tbh..

First of all, Bitcoin is not fully owned by the top 5 mining pools as you say. BTC isn't owned by anyone and if the mining pools ever decide to change the parameters as they like, we fork off and solve the issue within hours at most.

Then, there wouldn't be just 0.0000001BTC per person. 21M coins divided by 7,800,000,000 people is about 0.00269 per existent person. Bitcoin is way easier to be moved around in much smaller quantities - you can't pay with 0.0000001$, can you?

The global wealth disparity will be a thing no matter how much we change things. There'll always be someone who earns more (or steals from others). We can't really change that unless we apply communist rules.

What happens most of the time is... the rich cash out more, while the poor cash out less or nothing. Bubbles only create more FUD imo, which is unhealthy for the markets. Take Bitcoin or precious metals as examples: how do they affect other markets? When bubbles burst, it's usually throwing around a negative effect.

I cannot consider it adding value to economic growth when bubbles burst. They only do accelerate growth while they are created.

Username: 20kevin20
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BTC Address (must be SegWit): 39k74QRU6yd2HSe46DNQjJk7yaquzbk6cC