I don't want to live in a world where my paycheck can be viewed on the public ledger, my purchases can be viewed, etc etc. My life and the subsequent acquisition of material goods for my sustenance is not a commodity
I'm sorry but they already are - at least in the sense that thousands of third parties require to access and view your entire banking and credit card history in order for it to function. In the fiat world you can’t operate financially without handing your data over to third parties.
Cryptocurrency has a different privacy model - some things are more private than fiat and others are less so, but the balance is far better, even with bitcoin. In this case you
can operate without any counterparty support because your private key has to be known only by you. The fact that the other half of the blockchain (the 'public addresses') has a public manifestation is irrelevant. ALL monetary media do otherwise they can't act as monetary media.
The fungibility issue is a separate matter but I don't think people can even begin to address that without understanding the existing satoshi privacy model and how powerfully it supports classic monetary properties. In essence, the beauty of it is that it optimises public consensus (and therefor confidence & value) independently of privacy which is consistent with all monetary media since the dawn of man. The answer to the fungibility problem IMO is to enhance this model, not throw it out the window.
To hack your metaphor, people trusted flight because they SAW it happen. They didn't just blindly go "i'm a prole, peeps be getting onto planes, guess I'll do that too". Nowadays people trust flight because it has a track record, just like bitcoin is proving its track record.
You seem to be saying that people will implicitly "trust this blockchain because they saw that other one work" and therefore don't need to support public confidence on an ongoing basis. Returning to the plane metaphor, a technology's "track record" is only as good as its last flight. What happens when people have billions of dollars of value at stake in an opaque blockchain and rumours start up left right and centre about hacks, faulty wallets, double spends, cracked cryptography and heists ? Where’s the accountability supposed to come from to mitigate such attacks on confidence ? Everybody swaps viewkeys with everybody else ?
I’m afraid the challenges involved in sustaining monetary confidence in the absence of any trusted countarparty are massive. There is not one inch of room for manoeuvre on this and it’s infinitely more important than privacy. Bitcoin has been able to withstand a 5-year kicking and drubbing
because of its transparent blockchain, not in spite of it.
also on your public consensus bit, or "monetary veracity", I'm always fascinated by this argument because I can guarantee you its damn near impossible to find any of this information out in our current financial system. I.e., if I were to go to a bank and demand proof that my funds are real, fungible, etc., etc - I doubt that 1) i would be convinced and 2) it would take less than a day. So, people don't care.
That’s because the funds in your bank account are not so called “base money”, like metals or commodities. They are basically derivatives which are levered off a capital base and managed for you in bookkeeping accounts. With cryptocurrencies, however, we are re-inventing base money. We’re effectively going back through the whole process (albeit at timelapse photography rates) by which gold went from a piece of rock to a universally accepted monetary medium and in that regard things like public consensus, fungibility and other monetary properties very much DO matter.
If crypto eventually takes hold, banking concepts may be re-invented where you no longer hold the private keys to actual blockchain addresses. Instead you simply operate an account maintained by a third party containing money backed by cryptocurrency as its capital base. We would then have come full circle - who knows - but I see this as kind of likely in the long run because at the moment fiat money is backed by counterparty debt which is effectively unlimited, so crypto would at least be an improvement.
You can do your financials on the public ledger and get blasted with advertisements based on your financial habits, get insurance readjustments based on scrutiny of your daily life, etc etc.
This just is not a fair appraisal of how crypto (any blockchain) works IMO.
You are not connected to an address in the way that you are with a fiat bank account. Blockchain addresses have no association with individuals other than transient ones and certainly never at a protocol level. De-anonymisation has to be done from sources other than the blockchain. For example, people post their tipping addresses in forum posts or they register withdrawal addresses from an exchange. There are three reasons I can see why that is a million miles away from having your “paycheck viewed on the public ledger”:
[1] - mixing technologies will enhance the fungibility of the coin supply without adversely impacting on its transparency, thereby optimising its existing privacy model way beyond the threshold where it might adversely impact on its value
[2] - blockchain addresses do not correspond to our existing notion of bank accounts. You can create 100 of them in an instant just by opening a new wallet
[3] - if crypto ever gets to the point where you’re getting your paycheck denominated in it, you probably won’t be getting paid with a blockchain transaction anyway because there’ll be an entire meta infrastructure payments system in place that is only backed by crypto, (such as exists in supermarket payment processors today)
On purely privacy aspects, you make some valid points. But you're making two humungous assumptions with very little basis:
[1] - that what you're keeping private has any value
[2] - that it will be endowed with value simply by virtue of it being private
Thats why I say, "address privacy over confidence and value at your peril"
