I think you miss my point.  I think that people are completely losing sight of what crypto is about, when they write that fiat is the sure thing.

With messages like this on bct, I think crypto is over.

I would think that both monero and bitcoin are still in a kind of infinitesimal infancy before these kinds of considerations even take place.  I mean, both are essentially only used by a very small club.  Yes, bitcoin is at this moment about 100 times larger than monero if we look at volume and market cap, but this is "almost nothing" versus "100 times almost nothing".  It is not that bitcoin has already, say, 40% of the money market cap, and monero is a newcomer.  Then I would agree that there is a dominant market player.  For the moment, bitcoin is in the "parts-per-million" region of the money market, and monero is 100 times smaller yet.  There are few chances that I will be confronted with the Joe-plumber-Mary problem, so it seems that this anonymity doesn't matter.


It's more difficult than you think.  I agree with you that if Joe gave me an amount of money, and then I want to transfer that amount of money to Mary, I can do 20 transactions in between, which means I have to pay 20 fees and wait many times 10 minutes.  But if I want to give another amount to Mary, there are change addresses that will get mixed in, which may combine with other pieces of information. 
Or I can use a mixer.  And we're back to "anonymity".


My point is that "people" didn't chose yet.  By far most people didn't adopt, nor bitcoin, nor monero.  The market shares aren't established yet.  At all.  Both are still at a ridiculously small market share.  Bitcoin cannot grow much any more by block chain limitations.  Bitcoin, at this point, cannot handle yet another factor of 100 in transaction numbers.  Monero can, obviously.  Now, it can very well be that people in the bitcoin world will finally solve their issues, but in the mean time, they will be reaching "maturity", while the other one has all the possibilities to grow and catch up.

I'm not saying that that will happen.  My fear is rather that in a few years, the crypto hype will more or less be over, because apart from gamblers and geeks, it doesn't really catch on in the NORMAL economy.  At which point, again, anonymity or not doesn't matter.  But if crypto is to go somewhere, it is still in its smallest possible infancy, and one cannot yet say that there is a market domination by one or another, as all of them, including bitcoin, have infinitesimally small market shares.

There is not much "commercial activity taking place off chain".  There are people trading exchange IOU against one another, which are, indeed, denominated in crypto, but that is not "commercial activity".  There is in fact very little ACTUAL commercial activity using crypto (that is, buying/selling stuff with crypto other than other monetary assets) and I'm pretty much sure that most of that genuine part of crypto use is on-chain.  This is the only interesting part of crypto, small as it is.

They aren't, but this is because you still see crypto as a "base currency" on top of which a whole other accountancy will be built.  I agree with you that if that's the case, then anonymity features of a crypto are not much needed.  They are then like central bank money.

However, if the idea is to build a whole banking system on top of crypto, then I don't even see the point in crypto.  The point of crypto was exactly to do away with that.  And then, what you call the "monetary denomination" (which is nothing else but the "backing base") and the monetary medium is exactly the same, namely a token on the block chain, which is also the ledger, the means of payment, and the rest of the banking system.

And then, yes, it does matter, because the protocol and the block chain are ALSO the bank, the credit card, the means of payment and everything else.  You are absolutely right that privacy technology is not a monetary property.  But it is the property of a banking relationship.  And as in our case of crypto, the protocol is ALSO the banking relationship, it has to be included.


No, it is essential.  Unless you see crypto as a kind of secondary monetary asset for traders.  
If you take away the idea that crypto is there to do banking without banks, crypto loses its meaning and reason-d'être.  You may very well be right, that crypto will never be that.  But in that case, crypto will simply disappear in the long run, as it doesn't have any sensible economic function, and was just a hyped toy of a small crowd of traders.


I don't agree with that.  But if you are right, then forget about crypto immediately.  It is then just a funny hype that will fade away.
The reason I don't agree with that, is that whatever a block chain can support is essentially given by technical limitations like band width, storage space and processing power - these things grow over time (unless there are hard limits inside the protocol, like bitcoin, which make it indeed impossible to support unbound growth, but that's a design error, not an impossibility).
A 10 000 fold growth in these things means that bitcoin like chains are capable of supporting VISA transactions worldwide.  According to Moore's law, that's about 20 years from now.


I think that is a ridiculous idea, because you don't need any bloody crypto to have a "base monetary reserve".  If you want to build a whole banking system on top of bitcoin, you can just as well keep with fiat, it is the same.  No need for bitcoin as a "reserve" for fiat, no more than you need "gold" as a reserve for fiat.

Crypto as an electricity-wasting alternative for central bank gold is totally ridiculous.  It will never work.  If crypto is to live, it is to replace banks, not to build banks on top of it.  Because banks don't need any "foundation" to build upon.

If I get paid in Monero, it will of course be on a block chain, or I won't be paid in Monero, but in whatever fiat one will pay me in.

Again, crypto has no meaning if the idea is to build banking on top of it, as it was meant to replace banking.  If it can't or won't do what it was designed for, then it simply has no reason to exist.

That said, there may well be one day "central bank crypto" but that will be a private central bank block chain, not bitcoin or whatever other grassroots chain, and hard forks will be issued the same way that central bank governors decide on policy change.  It would just be a kind of bookkeeping device, that has in fact nothing to do with crypto as it was meant.

I'm not sure about that.  I think most people want some privacy and discreteness about their financial whereabouts.  Transparent ledgers such as bitcoin are way, way too transparent.  Again, we're not talking about "hiding from the NSA".  We're talking about Joe not finding out I gave some money to Mary.  

In fact the problem of too small an anonymity set solves itself: from the moment the economy is closed, it is also large enough for the anonymity set to be big enough.  A prerequisite for this is that the anonymity feature is compulsory.  This is what I don't like about zcash (amongst others).

If Joe, the bar keeper, and Mary, my friend, are coin users, that means that the user base is big enough to be anonymous enough so that my privacy is protected, and that Joe doesn't immediately see that the money he paid me for me repairing the toilets in his bar, was also the birthday present for Mary.  Even with an anonymity set of a few thousand users, that's good enough.


I don't know.  IF EVER I were to accept any crypto so that I work for it and can spend it, for sure it would have to be anonymous, style monero, zcash, dash or whatever, or I wouldn't even consider using it that way.  No way that the people that pay me, and the people I spend money on, can find out what I did, where I got the money from, and where I spent it.  Like now, people don't know this, and that's what I want.

I would never use a crypto like bitcoin the way I like to use fiat.  It has way to little privacy.

(and again, I'm not talking about doing evil things)

I'm starting to see where you're coming from.  You see crypto currencies as some value carriers between different exchanges, that is, it is a "transmission token" (in time and space) between "buying it on an exchange at date X" and "selling it on another exchange at date Y".  The "ripple of exchanges" in a way.  I fully agree that in such a case, anonymity on the block chain sounds weird, because both end points know about you.  It is just a "value vehicle in time and space" between exchanges. 

But I see exchanges rather as a kind of nuisance, which, for the moment, makes some kind of sense in crypto because of its infinitesimal adoption.  However, the idea is that one day, we will have a closed monetary circle in crypto: you work and get crypto ; you spend with your crypto, and your employer obtains crypto against the goods he produced and you bought. 

Exchanges then are only on the boundaries of monetary cycles, such as when you need to exchange dollars for euros when you travel from New York to Paris ; but most of the dollars run in closed circles, and exchanges are only "boundary effects".

Then, exchanges are not the "valuation" of crypto ; rather, merchants and employees are, when they set prices buying goods in stores, and when they negociate their pay in crypto.

In fact, what I wanted to say is exactly what you say next:


You are right that instead of "intrinsic value" I should have used the words "utility value" ; that's what I meant with "intrinsic value".


Indeed, that's right too: because otherwise, you perturb the original "utility" market of the asset.  ("salting your potatoes becomes an expensive affair").


No, that's not the reason.  In fact, most assets with an utility value that also acquire monetary value, have MUCH LARGER monetary value than utility value, rendering their utility useless, because too expensive.

It also illustrates that the hopes of "backing" monetary value with "utility value" (which is what backing is all about) is a hopeless affair, because the extra monetary value (which is usually MUCH larger) is in any case not backed.

The exact example of this is gold.  Gold has a small utility value, and a huge monetary value.   The monetary value of gold is hence NOT backed by its "utility value".  Gold's monetary value is just as well "made out of thin air" as is the monetary value of a dollar bill, and that "thin air" is nothing else but the belief system I talked about earlier.


We agree, because a crypto currency (just as well as fiat in a bank account) is not backed by anything but the thin air of the belief system, and is NOT destroying the utility of some or other asset like salt, a metal or whatever that is going to become too expensive to be useful.



Debt-backed assets are ALSO monetary assets, and it is true that as long as there is a provable 1-1 link with full possibility to redeem them, they have the same value as the debt they represent.  But not all monetary assets are debt certificates with a 1-1 redeemable link.  I would even say, that this kind of stuff is often just a bootstrap for a monetary asset to get started with the belief system, only to go to fractional banking and later, to release the redeeming all together.

That's exactly what happened to fiat money: first of all, it was just a redeemable 1-1 debt certificate for gold or silver ; later there was the joke of fractional banking, and in the end it was entirely released.

But not all monetary assets need to be "bootstrapped" by such a debt certificate.  Gold for instance, isn't.  Gold is not redeemable against something else.  Bitcoins either.  They are not a debt certificate.  So the "tracing back to exactly what debt it was" doesn't matter for this kind of monetary asset.


What you are talking about here is the value of exchange IOU tokens, which you erroneously take for BTC, in the same way as you take bank account money erroneously for FED dollars, and in the same way as people took erroneously dollar bills for "amount of silver" and later "amount of gold".

That's what I talked about earlier: these are NEW monetary assets, which can be linked 1-1 to some other asset (monetary or not) ; then one can do fractional banking, and in the end, one can even release the link.

Maybe one day, "coinbase BTC" will have their existence entirely decoupled from the block chain bitcoins, and lead their life of their own.  They will be IOU tokens on coinbase which have nothing to do any more with bitcoin.  Like dollar bills are not redeemable any more against gold.

As long as you BELIEVE that coinbase tokens stand for 1-1 bitcoins, and as long as you believe that they are redeemable against real bitcoins on the block chain, coinbase tokens will be traded like bitcoins.

But this is because coinbase tokens don't have their own "belief system" and are not independent monetary assets, they are a debt-certificate based thing.  You think that if you have a coinbase token, that you hold a debt of coinbase to owe you a bitcoin (on the chain).



There are no "base assets" in a crypto currency.  The crypto coins themselves are the monetary asset, and they sustain their own recursive belief system.  The only reason you believe in the value of bitcoin is because you think that other people are willing to give value for bitcoin (and they do so because they also believe that).  They don't believe in anything they can redeem their bitcoins against (like you believe with your coinbase tokens).  So there is no "base asset" to refer to.  The coins are the base themselves.

The only thing people need to believe, is that the coins are created according to an accepted rule, and that transactions conserve the AMOUNT of coins (no double spending).  Which coin came from where doesn't matter here to sustain the belief system ; only the ability to verify the coin creation according to the accepted rule in the system, and the ability to verify the conservation of coins in transactions.

You don't need to know where what piece of gold was dug up to accept its monetary gold value.  You only need to know that it is genuine gold, and you know the laws of physics which tell you that one cannot "copy" gold and double-spend it ; and you accept that digging up gold is a fair way of putting it in circulation.

If you don't oppose the powers in control of fiat, use fiat.  If you want to go to a bank, use fiat.  Why would you want a bank to be interested in (anon or not) crypto ?  What's the point ?  If you go to a bank, use their money.  And if you use "bank-less" crypto, don't go to a bank.  Your statement is about as pertinent as "go to a gas station and ask them how they feel about sailing boats".

Anon is not important because crypto is simply almost not used.  Most crypto is simply speculative IOU on exchanges.  There you don't need anon of course ; hell, you even don't need a block chain.  Just faith in the owner of the exchange.  Like with a bank but with less legal protection.

Whether one XMR is $2 or is $100 doesn't really matter, does it ?  The question is, will it be used to buy stuff ?

The original idea of "backing" a currency is that whatever backs it, HAS INTRINSIC VALUE.  That is to say, it has a finite market price because people want to use it, and the market value doesn't derive from the fact that people think that they can sell it to someone else (in an infinite succession).

This was the basis of John Law's doctrine, where the backing happens with land.  Land has intrinsic value.  You want to possess land, not just because you think you can sell it later, but because you want to grow groceries on it, because you want to build a house on it, because you want to put a factory on it, because you want to have forest on it and keep other people out.... so many uses of land.    
Or you could take something else with intrinsic value: salt, or coal, or oil, or whatever that has intrinsic (usage) value, which is, after all, the whole source of value in the end.

The problem with "backing" money with something is that, in as much as the money is really redeemable for the backing asset, the monetary value of money gets transferred to the backed asset, which therefor increases in price.  That is a problem for the actual usage of that asset.

Let me explain.  Suppose that "salt", which has some market value, is taken to back a certain monetary token.  People use "salt bills".  They know that for a salt bill, they can obtain 1 kg of salt at the central bank, who has acquired a huge stock of salt.  Now, in as much as that salt bill will originally get the value of the market price of 1kg of salt, if that monetary asset is successful, it will obtain more and more value, simply because of the demand for it and its limited supply (Fischer's formula).  But a salt bill being equivalent to a kg of salt, people will now hoard real salt too.  And putting salt on your potatoes will become a very expensive affair: the physical salt has become, through the equivalence, itself a monetary asset, with a much higher price than the original intrinsic usage market value of salt.
Now, the "backing" of the salt bills with salt is essentially a backing of a monetary asset (salt bills) by ANOTHER monetary asset (salt), and that value is much larger than the original intrinsic value of salt.

The monetary value of salt is again, nothing else but a belief system: salt has value because people believe that other people value it as a monetary asset.  The day that this belief crumbles, salt will go back to its intrinsic usage value of it, to put on your potatoes.  In the mean time, people have to eat unsalted potatoes.  That's the problem with "backing money": first of all, it destroys the utility of the backing asset (here, salt) because it renders it too expensive ; next, the backing asset itself gets an inflated price that only comes from a monetary belief system.  So there's no point in backing money, because whatever backs it, also becomes "inflated with belief-thin-air".

@toknormal

I could even add that your "chain of trust" is somehow not even existing with any crypto currency, not even with bitcoin.

After all, what could potentially back bitcoin ?  Bitcoins are created by WASTING electricity (PoW).  You can hardly back something by waste heat.  Next, in each transaction, bitcoins are destroyed, and an equal amount of bitcoins are created: bitcoins are unspend transaction outputs ; when they are spend in a transaction, they are not "unspend" transactions any more, and NEW "unspend transactions" are now created.  So there's nothing special about "this" bitcoin being created because of the destruction of "that" bitcoin.  The only thing that counts is that the new coins (the new unspend transaction outputs) are EQUAL IN AMOUNT to the destroyed ones.  That's all we need to know.  If you happen to possess an unspend transaction output, which you can PROVE cryptographically, then all one needs to know is that this came from SOME destroyed previous unspend transaction output, OR was a legit new one created by wasting electricity.  A trivial way to show this, is by showing explicitly WHICH one it came from.  That's what bitcoin does.  But in doing so, one kills fungibility and anonymity.  There are smarter ways to prove cryptographically that the unspend transaction output I have, came from the destruction of SOME other coin somewhere.  That's what anonymous chains like monero or zcash do.  It's more sophisticated than the blunt proof of "it came from this one so the accounts are OK", but it is just as valid.  The QUANTITY of coins in circulation is finite and conserved in transactoins - that's what one needs to know. 

One doesn't need to know that THIS coin is "backed" by THAT amount of heat wasted in THAT mining farm at THAT moment.   One only needs to know that there's only this finite amount of coins in circulation, "backed" by that amount of waste heat.  But again, backing something by waste is a funny way to consider backing.  Because it isn't.  You cannot "redeem your waste heat" with your coins.  The heat is wasted.  So it is not a backing like with a credit system.  There's simply NOTHING that backs bitcoin, or any other crypto.  So your argument that one cannot follow what backs what doesn't even go for bitcoin, because NOTHING backs it.  It is the purest example of "belief system".

No, really.  It isn't just philosophical.  It is purely economical.  Money is nothing else but a belief that others believe in value - and as such, one is part one-self of the group of believers that others believe in.  And that's all money needs: a self-sustaining community of people who mutually believe in each-others' belief in the value of the asset, the belief in the legit creation and the belief in the absence of double spending (conservation of money in transactions). 

No, that is simply not true.  All forms of money are a recursive belief system.  They are the belief that a certain asset will be accepted by others against something valuable, because they believe the same thing.  That's all there is to a monetary asset.  There is no "backing" of it by anything, it is just pure belief.  I am willing to provide value in return for the monetary asset X, because I believe that I will OBTAIN value again when spending it,  simply because the next guy will hold the same belief as I do.

However, in order for that belief to be sustainable, the belief must be held too that one cannot create AT WILL the monetary asset out of thin air.  I'm not going to deliver value for X, if you can make X out of thin air AT WILL.  

On the other hand, X has to come from somewhere.  So it has/had to be created, found, dug up, .... whatever.  In a monetary system, one ACCEPTS a way of creation of "legit" currency.  Because it is the state, because it can be dug up from the ground, because one has to spend effort on it, because there's a fair competition in doing so.... WHATEVER reason that is considered fair/legit/acceptable, and this must be the ONLY way of making X.  We can accept that the state prints it (because we believe that the state is there for the common good) ; we can accept it that the king prints it (because we are humble servants of his Majesty) ; we can accept that one digs it up (because we could also dig it up) ; we can accept that it is mined (because we can also mine it) ...

But there must be a LEGIT way to CREATE the currency X, and no other means.  One way to create it, but surely not the only one, would be the John Law kind of issuing of currency, namely creation of certificates, the way you illustrate it.  But as I said, that's just ONE way of creating a currency: as "certificates of ownership of something valuable".  It doesn't have to be that way, and in fact, most of the time, it isn't.

The only other thing we must be sure of, is that transactions conserve the total amount of currency ; or, stated differently, that there is no double spending.

Once that's in place, the belief system is potentially sustainable, and that's all there is to it.    We then know that the only currency we can receive is from a legit origin, transmitted through transactions that conserved the total quantity of currency, and that we will be able to spend exactly that amount, once.

The idea that currency has to be "backed" by something of value is erroneous.  It is just a recursive belief system, nothing more.  A belief system that there is legit creation of tokens and that these tokens are transmitted in conservative transactions.

Gold is also a belief system. Gold has some intrinsic usage value, but that is only a tiny fraction of its market price.  It has some usage in jewels and technology, but that's peanuts.  Gold has value, because people think that other people value it.  That's not "backed" by anything either.  The day that people decide that gold has only technological value, its price will plummet to the price of, say, lithium or cobalt.

That said, the "backing" of a currency can be part of the belief system: if you BELIEVE that you are entitled to something of actual value against the currency no matter what, this is a way to give value to a currency through the value of what backs it.  But it is not a necessity.  As I pointed out, gold is not backed by anything and has monetary value too.

The idea that the modern fiat system is backed by anything is also ridiculous.  It isn't.  It used to be backed by a lie, namely "gold" or "silver", but when it became too obvious that that wasn't the case, people gave up, and now, central bank money is simply not backed by ANYTHING.  "future economy" or whatever is a joke invented to instil confidence and to sustain the belief system.  If there's hyperinflation, you SEE that it wasn't backed by anything.

Money is just belief.  The belief that someone else also believes that it has value.  And it works.

With a block chain type of currency (aka a crypto currency), anonymity IS the only way to obtain fungibility.

In fact, both notions are about equivalent, even though they inspire different ideas.  Anonymity comes down to "only A and B know about the transaction from A to B".  Fungibility comes down to "when A pays B, B doesn't know where A got the money from".  This is in fact almost the same notion.

The difference seems to reside in this:
With anonymity, nobody knows about A paying B, except A and B themselves.  With fungibility, everybody may potentially know that A paid B, but shouldn't know where A's money came from.  But one sees that this doesn't work.  Because if everybody knows that A paid B, and everybody knows who paid A, then one DOES have knowledge where the money came from that A used to pay B, and fungibility is gone again.

So the only way to reach fungibility is anonymity.  Hence both notions are equivalent.

Now, a block chain is all about being able to verify publicly that there is a conservation (or an accepted form of creation) of currency by having a list of publicly known transactions where that conservation is known to be valid (or that creation is known to be according to the accepted rules).  The most obvious way is to see all transactions.  Then you can verify obviously that conservation holds, and that every coin can be traced back to an agreed-upon way of creation.  

As such, if in the block chain, it is possible for B to know where A got his money from, the currency of that chain is not fungible.  But that seems to pose a problem.  How can one have a "chain of transactions back to the moment of creation" (which is the verification mechanism of a block chain) and at the same time "not know where the money came from" (which is the concept of fungibility) ?  People like toknormal seem to think that this is fundamentally a contradiction.  They think that a block chain implies automatically lack of fungibility and lack of anonymity.  However, they miss that "tracing back a coin" is only ONE way to verify conservation of money in a transaction, and legit creation, which is the essential part of a monetary asset.  Are there others ?

Well, monero and zcash are two examples of how this can be achieved cryptographically with two different techniques: ring signatures versus zero knowledge proofs.  The cryptography used allows both to verify the validity of transactions or of creation (which was the reason why the block chain was invented), and at the same time, to hide the origins of the funds to some extend.

DASH and mixers do it in a different way, by using the "partial fungibility" of a multiple-input multiple-output transaction.

In all these anonymisation techniques, the block chain still proves conservation of money in transactions, and legit creation, but doesn't do this by showing the explicit transactions, but simply by providing proofs of the check sums in different ways.

They reconcile, in different ways, the apparent contradiction between the concept of a block chain on one hand, and the monetary necessity of fungibility which comes down to anonymity.

In a mixer like with DASH, if A paid B, but mixes with C who paid D, E who paid F and so on, we end up only knowing that A, B and C paid someone, and that D E and F got paid and that the balances check.  This is what is needed for the monetary asset.  However, privacy information is leaked, in that we know that D got paid by A, B or C, that E got paid by A, B or C, and that F got paid by A, B or C, and that A, B and C did spend their money.

With monero, something similar happens.  If A paid B, we know that A, D, E or F paid B.  It could also be that A actually paid Q, or that D paid Z.  However, we know cryptographically that if ever it was A that paid B, that A won't be able to spend that money again ; that if ever it was D, he won't be able to spend it again, etc.... but if it wasn't A, A can still spend it, so maybe A didn't spend his coins after all.    In other words, we know that the balances check.  But we don't know which balances, and we don't know who did spend his coins and who didn't.

With ZCASH, we only know that, if B can pay you with a note, that he got that note from someone else, who can't spend it any more, but who got it himself from someone else etc.... until the conversion of a legit "open" coin into a note.  (unless someone kept the golden key and can produce notes at will...)

Anonymity is not directly "paying secretly the vile guys that are going to shoot the POTUS" or something.  We then get into debates about how it is impossible to achieve "perfect" anonymity.

No, the point is much more down-to-earth.  The problem with an open ledger like bitcoin is that there is essentially no privacy.  The pseudonymity thought off by Satoshi is simply not resistent to chain analysis.  The "web" of transactions propagates too much partial real-world knowledge, and allows it to be turned into an almost complete breakdown of the pseudonymity.   This was probably not anticipated by Satoshi.  We're not talking about law enforcement, but about almost everybody who can acquire some real-world knowledge and spend some money/effort on chain analysis.

Very simply put, it goes like this: If you, Joe, pay me, I consider it a break in privacy if you find out that I used that money to pay Mary.  You're not supposed to know about my relationship with Mary.

Now, how could you, Joe, know that I used your money to pay Mary ?  Suppose that you, Joe, are a guy who has a bar, and that I'm a plumber.  I'm repairing the toilets in your bar, and you pay me.  Nice.  Now, it is not a secret that you paid me for that work.  I pay my taxes, I don't have to hide that.  But Mary is my friend, and for her birthday, I give her some bitcoin.  And now, Mary comes and drinks a coffee in your bar, and pays you with her coins.

You can easily see that the coins Mary gives you for her coffee, are two transactions away from the transaction where you paid me.  So you know that Mary got those coins from me.   This is something I think is private and you shouldn't find out.  But I cannot avoid you finding out that Mary has the coins you paid me with.

Well, unless I use a mixer.  But then we're doing "anonymity" again.  And we're not talking about shady business.  We're talking about privacy.

With fiat, you wouldn't know.  Fiat is much more private than bitcoin.  With cash, that's pretty evident.  If you paid me in cash for the plumber job, and I gave some cash to Mary, you won't know that this is the same cash.  But even with bank accounts that doesn't work.  If I got money on my bank account from you for the plumber job, and then I sent some money to Mary's account, there's no way you can know that when she pays you from her account, that those funds came from me.  Yes, law enforcement could find out the transfers if they subpoena the bank, if they suspect me to be a criminal.  But you can't.  With bitcoin, all that private information is out for everyone to grab.

That's where something like monero comes in handy: to restore about the same level of privacy as with fiat money.  Even somewhat better.  But not to pay the guys that will shoot the POTUS.  That's not what we're talking about.  

That said, there are also situations where a bitcoin like open ledger is what people want.  For instance, for charity.  If you give a donation in bitcoin to a charity, you want maybe to see what happens with the money.  There's no secret or privacy to be had with the account of a charitable organisation.

Well, depends.  Suppose that I'm the recipient of some charity.  Should the whole world know that I got some charity ?  That I'm a needy guy ?  On one hand, yes: the donors would like to be able to verify that I'm not some rich guy running away with the funds of charity.  On the other hand, maybe I would like some discreteness about my poverty.

But one can see clear usage of open, transparent ledgers.   But also of private ledgers with anonymisation.

Indeed, this is similar to bitcoin's situation, where also a very large part of it is trading on exchanges, which don't even need a block chain to exist, but just exchange IOU.  Most of bitcoin's transactions are exchange transactions ; and even most on-chain transactions are trading and not using bitcoin.  Probably the small percentage of real use of bitcoin is higher than Monero's percentage, but real crypto usage is in any case an almost negligible aspect of crypto.

Well, you'd have to redo many things in bitcoin.  So many, actually, that almost nothing would be left of bitcoin.  Your question is akin to "if flying in the air is so important, why did people build airplanes, and didn't add wings to cars which were already riding ?".  There's so much to change in a car to turn it into an airplane, that it is easier to start off from scratch.

That said, I repeated already a few times, that a good way to introduce a new coin is not to start a new chain with a new genesis block, but to fork off bitcoin, to give every bitcoin owner some of the new coins (something like the eth/etc fork) ; except that the fork is so drastic that only the "original ownership of bitcoin" is kept, and nothing else of it.

As to why one shouldn't bend to the core dev's foundation, I would think that in crypto, that's evident, no ?  There is no authority.

Machine credit.  The coins machines use to trade for human cattle.

My idea is that the *cryptography* used in ZCASH is potentially much better at anonymity than monero if it isn't broken.  However, the way it is implemented in ZCASH ruins it totally, because it is *optional*.  As such, it is not much better than in DASH (it IS better, because one "mixes" with ALL previous anonymous transactions, and not just with the "players of the moment").  But probably anonymous transactions will again be far and in between.

It is a fundamental rule that "anonymity" shouldn't be optional, because then it stands out.

If everybody writing a letter uses an open post card, and only a few people use enveloppes to "be anonymous" then they stand out as having something to hide.  If everybody uses an enveloppe, then "using an enveloppe" doesn't stand out.

The point is that it might be that the anonymity in Monero is "good enough".   If Monero needs 90% of real world knowledge to allow you to extrapolate the remaining 10%, that's good enough.  If Monero needs 30% of real world knowledge to allow you to extrapolate the remaining 70%, that could then still be improved.  I don't know what the real numbers are, but from a certain point on, it is good enough.