Absolutely.  A fundamental premise for anonymity is that everyone uses the same protocol, of course.  If you're the only one on the street with a bag on your head, your anonymity is worth zilch.  If you're the only one using a closed envelope, you stand out too.

In my view, a state is nothing else but a warlord, one that got so strong over a territory, that competition was exterminated, and that the only warlords remaining, were the neighbours.

I think that what states do, is nothing else but "upscale" feudalism.  Instead of having local fights, you get more global wars, and instead of having a fight every year, you get a serious war every few decades.  Now, this is maybe what you are referring at, that as these "windows of opportunity" get larger, during these periods of prosperity, in between periods of slavery, war and destruction, there's enough room to progress and "set information aside" for the next cycle, which is less the case if these cycles happen on smaller scales, with less violence, but also with less large windows of prosperity.

I think the fundamental error is to think that the problem of violence can be solved by having such a big violence monopolist that everybody has to surrender to it.  This only slows down, but amplifies, the cycles of violence and slavery.  True, as the cycles are slowed down, the windows of opportunity grow larger (but the destructions that follow are also more severe, maybe to the point of no return).  That said, the *natural tendency* for war lords is, by economies of scale, to obtain automatically a violence monopolist.  So the appearance of states is a natural consequence.  But that doesn't mean that one has to approve it. 


This isn't entirely true.  Big progress is historically made when there were no empires.  Classical culture developed by the ancient Greeks came about when Greece was not part of the Roman empire.  Development essentially halted under the Roman empire.  Yes, they built roads and legal systems and so on.  But scientific development essentially came to a grinding halt.  Arab culture became most productive during the Caliphate (when Europe was part of a few Christian empires and made us go through the Middle ages), which was very distributed, and not very centrally organized.
It is true that the discovery of modern science started inside Western empires, but in fact, mostly *against* the dominant rule of the empires, which was the God-given King and aristocracy.  Galileo, who started the western scientific revolution, got into deep trouble with that.

Now, I admit that most of modern technological and scientific development happened under the gouvernance of relatively young western states, who did, indeed, provide means and protection for these developments to occur.  But these same governments are now suffocating us.  These governments were still OK when they were just put in place after the West cut off the head of their king, fought for their freedom of another king and installed "democratic" governments.  These initially light-weight structures were indeed beneficial at first sight and opened a window of opportunity.

But these same structures grew inevitably to the level of true power structures.  When you look at the US constitution, the Founding fathers built about every thinkable protection into it against such structures, and nevertheless, it happened.  The US government evolved from a system that was designed NOT to become a powerhouse of slavery and violence, into what it is now: one of the worst violence monopolists on earth.  And every precaution has been taken to avoid that.  Which proves that even with the best of intentions, power concentration leads to horror stories.


Exactly the same situation in Classic ages, and during the Caliphate, made commerce prosper.


I think you have this impression because we just had a few decades of prosperity after a half century of devastating war (the first and second world wars were just one war with a pause).  After a period of war, there is always some "relief" (or not, when you look at the soviet union).


I don't think that this is related.  Agriculture is decentralized.  But nevertheless, states occured.  I think they didn't occur because people needed protection, but rather because agriculture permitted so much production that the accumulation of wealth and taxation became possible.  When you have a population of nomads that can only just survive, you cannot accumulate wealth by taxing them.  You only kill them, and there's too little to take.  When you have peasants, you can accumulate wealth (food) by taxing them, you can finance armies, and you can become a state.
But the peasants didn't need a state.  Of course, you told them that they needed you, but they didn't.  A passing war lord cannot come and "steal" from every peasant.  That's not lucrative.  But taxing local peasants against "protection", is what made Kings rich.
It is the origin of states.  Production, and theft through taxes.


I think we're dreaming of a similar utopia.  But in my opinion, that utopia could have been realized at any stage of development, if people didn't fall for the lie that they needed state protection, and we don't have to wait for a specific technological advancement in order to realize that.  I also think that as long as this erroneous belief lives on, that utopia will remain a dream and states will continue to convince people that they "need their protection".  So there's no reason to wait.


I don't see the use of anonymity if you allow for taxation.  And in fact, you can never prove that you declared everything.  You can prove that everything related to these addresses you own, is declared.  But you can never prove that you DON'T own the keys to other addresses.  What if you owned them, and lost them ?  How can you prove you have forgotten something ?

Seigniorage is inevitable when one creates a monetary asset.  It is considered "unfair" and can harm, as such, the monetary belief in the system, but seigniorage will always happen.
With fiat, the seigniorage goes to the government ('s buddies), and people scream "THIEF", but it is just a tax like any other.  With bitcoin, about the smartest anti-seigniorage system was thought of: you BURN it.  Every coin that is created, has WASTED as much value as it was worth (apart from a small and fair "competitive" margin).
But even with bitcoin, there is seigniorage: the first adopters could get their coins at a fraction of the value it has now.  All this "unmerited" value transfer from certain people to other people because of an "unfair advantage" (the monopoly of the state, the knowledge of the devs and their buddies....).

It is inevitable.  The only thing one should obtain, is that this advantage gets "washed out" over time.  Seigniorage is worse with PoS than with PoW for instance, because initial stakes give you the final dominance over the coin distribution.

But why don't you consider a totally different way of distributing your coin ?

Give yourself a fair premine, and make the coin for the rest a *fork of bitcoin*.  So that anyone holding bitcoin at a specific date in the past holds your coins too (and you hold your premine on top of that).  As such, you get immediately a distribution everyone considers now as "fair".  You could even only accept bitcoin that has already moved, say, at least 10 transactions at a day in the past, so that you eliminate Satoshi's stash.  

Bitcoin is a primitive coin, but has one advantage: apart from Satoshi's stash that mostly didn't move, it has a fair distribution that has a certain age.  Why not "fork" off this, and take from bitcoin what it did best, and which can only happen ONCE in history ?

I don't fully agree with this analysis.  I think cause and consequence are inverted here, although you do have a point.  I don't think that government *was needed* ; rather that it was *unavoidably created*.  To me, the "warlords" ARE the governments, and they arise BECAUSE there is wealth to steal ; not the other way around.  It is not because one created governments, that wealth occured ; it is because there was wealth, that warlords became governments.
That said, it is true that the monopoly of violence (the ultimate winner of the law of the strongest) DID have a positive side-effect: as there was no competition on the violence side any more (there was no incentive to do so, as the monopolist was so terribly strong that it was a waste of effort, and would lead to one's demise), it DID allow for the investment in violence to be left to the government, which, through economies of scale, could reduce the total expenditure for violence (and limit the total amount of capital destruction by violence).
The price to pay was a submission to a warlord (the government).  I do not agree that the government permitted less violence: what was local small scale violence, was replaced by inter-governmental wars on large scale.  But one did win by economies of scale on the violence effort: instead of everyone investing in some small-scale defence, one could profit from the economies of scale to have relatively modest expenditures for much larger scale violence in warfare.

I think the total amount of violence increased with the advent of states ; but the total investment in it lowered, because of economies of scale.  One could kill much more people, and destroy much more property, with less investment using states and armies, than the investment needed by individuals to protect their families and ownership, which was a hugely inefficient way to do mass killings and destruction.


There is no natural demand for government in my opinion.  There is a demand for a mutual agreement for non-violence but that doesn't need to go through the concentration of violence in the hands of warlords (states) that use this to fight each other in wars.

Violence is a "market failure" that is only made worse by the advent of governments if you want to.  And there's no way to ever become insensitive from violence.

However, there is a way to empower individuals with weapons of mass destruction.  As such, the economies of scale on the level of warlords/states will lose its significance.

I see two paths to weapons of mass destruction for modest individual investments.  The first is laser-isotope separation.  This is a technology of which development was stopped because one realized the danger of it, but one cannot stop eternally technological knowledge.  The day that isotopic separation by lasers becomes fully efficient, with table-top equipment it will be possible to turn natural uranium into bomb-grade U-235.  You'd need, say, 10 kg to make a bomb, which means you'd need about 1 ton of natural uranium.  This is a small truckload to smuggle.  It is probably out of reach for a modest individual, but a rich individual, or a small group, can easily do so.
In as much as plutonium production is messy, dirty, and needs huge installations because of the radioactive problems, natural uranium isotope separation doesn't need strong precautions.  Also, the triggering of a plutonium bomb is difficult, while an U-235 bomb is easy to build and activate.  The most difficult problem is the isotope separation, which still needs huge factories (it is what the Iranians try to hide from the US).   Natural uranium can be found a bit everywhere in nature, and if isotope separation can be done with table-top laser equipment, nothing can stop individuals or small groups to make a Hiroshima-type nuke in their basement.

But the second, much more attractive weapon of mass destruction I see evolving, is what I'd call "DNA printers".  If you have a DNA (or RNA) synthesizer - which will most probably be developed in the near future and will be of the size of less than table-top - you can synthesize about any known or artificial virus, and its antidote.   Give it 20 or 30 years and I think this kind of technology will be available.  The spread of a virus (eventually a triggerable virus, that you first let propagate without symptoms to get sufficient people contaminated, and that you can activate afterwards by a second infection that can be much more targetted) can then be done very very easily by just any individual who created or downloaded the right virus file and "printed" it, while giving himself and his kin the anti-dote.

When individuals can whipe out entire cities or continents, I don't see how the governments can keep their monopoly on violence based upon their economies of scale on warfare and killing.

You have to distinguish 2 different questions:

1) is a society without a human-led violence monopolist that dictates the law *thinkable* and potentially functional ?

2) is there a way to go there when you already have such a violence monopolist who doesn't want to give up its privileges ?

My stance on 1) is a clear yes, but I agree that 2) is a serious problem.


That is part of the indoctrination.  Most of the world wants you to worship Allah too.


No, that's not the idea.  Governments will end up collapsing under their own weight.  If an alternative economic system is "ready to take over" at that point, it may succeed ; in the mean time, it should stealthily develop underground without too much noise.


Count yourself in too  You even got a thread about your ramblings


The biggest threat to the US government is itself and their puppies in the UK and elsewhere.  You talked about fighter jets and terrorism.  Islam terrorism is a pure product of the US government.  They used their jet fighters to construct Islam terrorism entirely.  This was done by their total support for the Saoudis since about 70 years.  The abominable colonisations by powers like the UK, France, and so on, followed by geopolitical games mainly lead by the US afterwards, have made that people in the Middle East have been under horrible regimes that were armed, and kept in power by exactly the jet fighters of the US government, making a feeding ground for religious-based hate across the whole middle east.  This has been instrumentalized and pushed to an extreme by the US government in its fight against the Soviet Union.  Islam terrorism was a US invention in Afghanistan, to piss off the Soviets.  They have amplified it later with the biggest lies in history to start a war with their jet fighters, when they turned Iraq into the biggest Islam terrorist training camp of the world.   I think that if you would have been an Iraqi citizen, your hate for the US and their puppies would be so great for what they've done to you and your people, that you'd be happy to blow yourself up if you can blow up a few of those idiots cheering and financing that crime against humanity.  I think that from their viewpoint, there's no difference between what the US gov, his jet fighters, and their puppies, have been doing, and what the Jews had to live with the Nazi regime.
And now, to "protect" their citizens against these people, the US government needs more jet fighters and needs to reduce liberties, and needs more surveillance and more income from their citizens.  Where do you think this is going to lead ?

*that* is what "government" is about: do bad things, see some consequences, and want more power to do more bad things "to protect against the consequences of bad things".  I'm not particularly talking about the US government.  History is full of examples, and the US government is not an exception.  Concentrate violence and power in the hands of a few (that's what a government is), and ugly things happen.

Hahaha yes, it is of course possible to do worse than bitcoin, and some idiots did so indeed

There isn't, indeed, any good reason to "relaunch" monero, not more than there is a good reason to relaunch dash or there is a good reason to relaunch bitcoin.

These all have at least historical importance.  If for one or another reason, one doesn't like the way their financial dynamics got started, there's no reason to "do it over", because there is, indeed, better tech around.  That said, *at this moment* I still think that on the anonymous side, monero is one of the best.  It has also fundamental problems which will bring it maybe to an end one day, but *today* I think it is still the best anon option.

I will tell you why: I only know of one better tech for anonymity, and that is ZKproofs, of the kind ZCASH implemented.  But ZCASH made fundamental errors, and this is NOT because the boys that made it are idiots, but rather because the *implementation* of ZK proofs is, as of today, in fact way too heavy to be scalable to a sufficient extend.  This is why they made the anonymous option on ZCASH and derivatives optional, because it is in fact not really usable if you need to process many of them on limited hardware.  This will improve.  But as of today, nobody knows how to make this slick.
Also, good crypto needs some time to mature before one can be reasonably sure that it doesn't contain gaping holes.

All this means that *at the moment* monero still has the best compromise between practical usability (and even on that side, the problems with GUI and light wallets are showing) and good anon tech.

Another issue is PoS.  A premine/instamine is way way worse on a PoS system than on a PoW system, because with the former, the instamine gets amplified, while with the latter, it gets diluted.  And tail emission makes every "wrong" initial distribution even out somewhat more.

This means that in the long run, a PoW coin with tail emission doesn't really care about any "initial unfairness", while a "sound money" coin with PoS can only get worse that way.

With DASH, this poses the extra problem of the potential collusion of masternodes.  I have to say that I don't know how severe this problem is.  But the day that Evan is made "an offer he can't refuse" to hand over all masternodes under his control, directly or indirectly, to TPTB, I don't know how much of DASH's anon remains.

But, as I said, DASH is what it is, and the people wanting to use it, can do so.  Like bitcoin users use bitcoin.  DASH *does* have some nice features over bitcoin (ALL altcoins have nice features over bitcoin, which is one of the worst coins out there).

The government.  

Honestly, if there is a "trusted party" to be had, it is the government.  Trump, the United Nations, Putin, the European Union, or some other "trusted entity", no ?

I don't know why one would go through all the crypto hassle to end up with the equivalent of Putin or Trump, with the equivalent of the European Union or the United Nations.  Because that is what will happen if there is "aristocracy", that is to say, "people who are different from others, because they have institutional decision rights which others haven't".

Satoshi knew this and pulled out before people asked him to "rule".

I wouldn't see the purpose.  DASH (when it was still darkcoin) was important back then, because it was one of the first coins to see the fundamental problem of bitcoin which was its failed anonymity, the traceability of coins which propagates partial information on the block chain and kills off the pseudonymity mechanisms for anonymity.  People were setting up tumblers, but these were risky points of trust.  
Darkcoin implemented most probably the best way to tie these tumblers to correct functioning with a kind of smart contract: the masternodes.   The burden that came with that was a partial breaking of the trustlessness, a forced PoS system and the need for a complicated governance system (which has been turned in a lucrative business by the instamine, but here it is not clear what is cause and what is consequence).

So yes, Darkcoin was the best anonymous coin back then: it automated tumblers, and took most of their risk away with the master node smart contract system.

However, this was because Darkcoin simply used the known cryptography of bitcoin, and didn't implement more advanced cryptography that could provide anonymity automatically.  It is "bitcoin's pseudonymity with smart contract mixers", and the whole financial structure of Darkcoin/DASH is built around that needed smart contract for mixers.

Once cryptonote and zerocoin came out as cryptographic schemes, the need for this complicated smart contract system was done with. In other words, DASH has a large historic importance, but is using depreciated technology.  It is what it is, and it can continue living its life, but there's no point in doing this again, when better tech is now out and available, that doesn't need to build a "state and banking structure" with smart contracts in order to get these tumblers work correctly.

DASH went as far as one can go with bitcoin technology on the anonymous side.  But there's better tech known now.

And on the side of building "state and banking" structure with smart contracts, I think there are other "smart contract" type of coins like ethereum which allow you much easier to build even much more crazy things.  So on the "smart contract" side, DASH has nothing to offer that isn't implemented better elsewhere.

Again, DASH is what it is, like bitcoin is what it is.  Nobody in his right mind would want to "launch bitcoin again".  It is the oldest, most primitive crypto tech that is around !  Bitcoin is probably the worst coin on the tech side.  It is what it is.  But if you launch something new, better use more advanced tech.  Same holds for DASH.

People in North Korea say the same, but with "and I'm not flying the USA flag".

The difference is much smaller than you think.  Which is exactly what "The Man" wants you to think, and he succeeds.

A slave that doesn't know he's a slave, is it a slave ?

To be able to live without it if you want to.


By paying for it, like you pay for your cell phone, your bread, your electricity ?


You don't need that, as there is no country to defend.  If every citizen is armed and independent of any hierarchical structure, there's nothing to attack.


The emergency company you contracted with.


The organisation you paid for that, if that's one of your worries.  


The same private companies that build roads today.  If you want a road, you can pay for it.  If you don't want a road, you don't pay for it.


Citizens that like to do that, or a security company you pay for, if you want that guy stopped and you don't feel like defending yourself.

And there won't be any terrorist attack of significance, as terrorists aim for political influence, and there's no such thing as a state to influence.  Moreover, terrorist attacks are negligible.  They are blown out of proportion by states to increase their power, but the chances of you dying in a car accident are orders of magnitude larger than the chances of you dying by a terrorist attack.


Whoever likes that.  And those that don't like it, don't need it.

Who will fund movies ?  Who will fund baking bread ?  Who will fund making music ?  Who will fund the internet ?  Who will fund growing food ?  Who will fund building houses ?   Who will fund computer software ?  Who will fund windows ?  Who will fund linux ?  Who will fund google ? 

If you really need it, you will find a way to pay for it, and someone will find the opportunity to do it for you.  And if you don't really need it, well, you don't really need it.

As monero doesn't have a hierarchy, there are as many long term goals of monero as there are users.  My view on monero is that it is, as of today, still the best currency to do economic transactions nobody has business with.  Call it "dark markets", if you want to.  I call it "economic freedom".  For that, monero needs a sufficient market cap (it has that now), shouldn't be too much of a gambler's token (its price is already a bit high for that, I would like it to go down more) and hopefully, should stay sufficiently under the radar for the moment.

Dark markets are a typical application.  I'm not saying that monero should be THE dark market payment (in fact, ideally, there would be several different payment systems on dark markets, a monopoly is never good).  But rather the opposite: IF you want to use dark markets, for goodness sake, don't use a transparent coin like bitcoin !  You must be totally nuts !  You are graving publicly for ever in stone what you've done.  Dark markets are a typical application of economic freedom where you have to hide from the state, the kind of stuff for which crypto was made.  But there can be other applications of economic freedom, that can be more peer-to-peer.  That's where coins like monero have their place.  No need for "general adoption". 

This is why I wanted a plot of DASH-days destroyed.  Of course, with monero, that won't even be possible because it is anonymous, but DASH essentially being bitcoin with automatic mixers, it should be possible.

I have to think about the first conjecture, about spamming transactions to undo anonymity.

However, the second thing, about "tax declarations".  Taxes as a function of economic relationship are extortion.  Taxes to pay for public services are normal.  So I don't even consider "declaring crypto transactions".  If you want to declare it, do it with fiat.  Use crypto when you don't want to declare it, or when you don't care at all about anonymity (use bitcoin).

I have a totally different proposal for taxes, if they need to exist.  Note that as an anarchist, I think that the state shouldn't exist, and hence taxes are not a useful concept.  But if a form of state has to exist and must be financed, I propose the following.  The first is that you pay for services, like "police and law protection".  Ownership you didn't declare (and didn't pay the "protection premium" on) will not be protected by law, but you are free to do so.  If you don't declare your house, police will not come and kick out squatters: it is not legally recognised to be yours.  If you declare it, you pay a permium as a function of its value.
The second is that nobody can own natural resources, including land.  You can only lease land and natural resources.  This essentially kills the real estate market as collectible, because you can't own a house for ever, given that it can only be yours as long as the leasing period of the land lasts, something you negotiated when making your offer for that piece of land.  This is an old and wise American-Indian principle: land cannot be owned.  Maybe you have a leasing for 50 years or so.  Society ("the state") decides upon what parts of nature are open to bidding and what remain public ; people make different proposals (leasing price, period, usage restrictions....), and the state picks out the most lucrative one.    When a leasing comes to an end (either because the contractor didn't pay, or because the period comes at the end), the state decides anew whether this piece of land (and every capital on it, like real estate) goes back into the public domain, or is leased out again.  The former leaser can of course, bid again.  This bidding can even be done 10 or 20 years before the end, so that the actual leaser knows whether to invest or not on it.

All the income of those leasings of land and natural resources is the "tax income" of the state.  No more compulsory declarations, no more limitations of economic freedom because of taxes.

My opinion is that if people are so much indoctrinated that they associate "dark market" with "bad" and not with "freedom", there's no amount of teaching that can help them.  Because dark markets are essentially about freedom.  Most participants in dark markets are consenting adults that gain mutual advantage from it in an economic relationship that harms nobody else.  There are a few exceptions, like dark markets for murder or child porn: I agree that these are bad things, because they deal with suffering/death of third parties.  But by far most dark markets are for "illicit" goods, read drugs.

While the only drugs I'm using is beer and wine in moderate amounts, and I don't want to take drugs because I don't want to damage the machine that brings me most of my joy, my brain, I understand that many people do want to take drugs, and their totally *intimate* experiences they obtain with that is totally *their business*.  Maybe these people have moments of intense happiness - which is, after all, the only goal in life. It is a fundamental freedom to want to be happy for half a day and die, rather than to live 50 more years without that extasy.  It is not my piece of cake, but I can very well understand that many people want that.

So why do states outlaw drugs ?  Because they know that there's an almost inelastic demand for it, and that this will give rise to "dark markets".  They outlaw drugs, to make the business of drugs lucrative and illegal, in other words, to obtain sufficient organized crime.  The premium for the illegality of drugs makes it a very risky, and hence, very lucrative business.  The risk, and the gains, are so high that this motivates several actors to take on high risks, get high rewards, and hence, don't mind using violence and other bad actions.  In other words, states outlaw drugs in order for there to exist  sufficient organized crime.  This gives states their opportunity to exist, to oppress, to control.

States need organized crime, terrorism, or other states as a threat, in order to make the gullible population accept their oppression, control and surveillance.

Dark markets are nothing else but distorted places of freedom, distorted by the huge premium of the risk of illegality, brought by the state, in the pockets of organized crime.

States will never shut down dark markets entirely.  They cannot, but they don't want to either.  However, they need to take down some of them regularly, because otherwise, these become normal markets, the risk premium goes down, and crime doesn't thrive, which is against the wishes of the state.

Silk road was essentially taken down because if it were running too smoothly, it would have broken the crime aspect of drugs markets.  Silk road was taking out too much of the violence and crime of drug markets.  It was killing the crime premium.  If it would continue, it would have become the amazon of drugs.  What put Silk Road out of business, was the rule of non-violence.  States cannot cope with non-violent dark markets.  People would realize it is simply about economic freedom, and not about "bad guys with guns harming people".

Traders don't mind what code is running.  There's not even a need for a block chain.  Most of the trading is in Poloniex IOU.  So whatever the real performances of a crypto don't matter for traders, because they are not using it.

The problem with the DASH price is that the actual amount of coins in circulation is much, much lower than the whole amount of DASH mined, because a whole lot of them are locked up in masternodes.  I know that they are not *hard* locked up, but the few people owning the masternodes have some incentive to keep them locked up, as they earn half of the mining through PoS.

But to really know this, one would need to have a dash-days burned plot, and I can't find any.  That would indicate if it are mostly a small amount of DASH that are traded over and over, or if there is a long-lasting population of dash participating in the actual market.

In other words, chances are that this is the market price of a small sub-market cap of DASH.  Or still in other words: suppose that someone paid you, say, 5% of the DASH market cap.  Would you be able to cash this quantity out in a reasonable amount of time (say, one month) without crashing the market ? 

With bitcoin, if someone paid me 5% of the market cap of bitcoin, I think I could cash this out over a few weeks without crashing entirely the bitcoin price, because bitcoin has about 10 million bitcoin-days burned per day.  In other words, a significant part of the entire amount of bitcoins changes hands.

But I can't find a similar plot for DASH.

You just mentioned my agenda: "no laws".  I like monero in as much as it can be a tool to escape laws.  I don't like monero for monero's sake.  The day that monero is not a tool any more that might help escape laws, I won't like monero any more.  This is what is happening right now with bitcoin.  Bitcoin is essentially over as a tool to escape the law.  It is being fiatized at light speed.  That's why it is going to the moon, BTW, because the powers that be are taking it over, and have seen the use of it to tie people up.


Those "losers" should finally learn what crypto is about: trustlessness.  


There can be no corruption in a game that is based upon trustlessness, can there ?  Do you really understand what that means, trustlessness ?  It  means that you shouldn't trust anybody, because everybody is trying to rip you off.  So if people get ripped off, that means that "trustlessness" is working at full speed, and as someone who is wanting more adoption of trustlessness, it is a strange thing to be obfuscated when people cannot be trusted and "scam" one another - which is exactly what trustlessness is about.  It is an even stranger thing that people wanting general adoption of trustlessness would want people who are not to be trusted to be punished by law, so that trust comes back to the scene of trustlessness.

Do you understand the mega-contradiction of your sayings ?

If you want crypto (the technology that handles trustlessness) to be adopted, you also want trustlessness to be adopted, which means that you want it to be essentially impossible to be able to trust anything.  Of course you cannot want this, and at the same time, whine about scams, and crying for law and regulation.

I think that problem is unsolvable.  You cannot be anonymous if nobody else is.  If all transactions of all other actors are known, I don't think there is the slightest mechanism for your transaction not to be known.  If your partners in transactions have reported all the transactions with you (whether receiving or sending), then you don't even have to report anything: it is already reported.

There's no point in mixing, using ZKproofs, or whatever, if you are the only person not reporting, because all your counter parties have already reported everything, and the checksum on everyone's havings reveals exactly your balance.  

Just as you cannot be anonymous if you are alone on an island, you cannot be anonymous if everyone else is reporting everything.


EDIT: I just realized I misunderstood your point.

I'm sure people like you said that to Euclid too, when he tried to explain geometry.