If Monero had been the first, it would have been immediately attacked and put down.
The thing is, Monero couldn't be first because its complicated compared to Bitcoin and we all know that simple product always runs first before a complicated and complex products. But if we magically assume that something like Monero has been first, then I would say that it would be crushed early because it's too much private and it would probably negatively affect upcoming crypto currencies since the existence of Monero (first coin as we assume) would scare the world.
As I said earlier, why wouldn’t Bitcoin “scare the world” as it is?
- Permissionless. [...]
- No ability to freeze and seize funds. [...]
- Censorship-resistance. [...]
- Borderless. [...]
- Irrevocable transactions. [...]
- Creates ransomware as a new business model for cybercrime. [...]
That list could be continued at length. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader. Now, what if the following were on the same list?
- Cash-like financial privacy. [...]
- Cash-like fungibility, as a consequence of cash-like privacy. [...]
Too many Bitcoiners start with their conclusion that “Bitcoin is perfect, handed down from
the gods Satoshi”, and work backwards to
retcon Bitcoin’s design bugs as desirable features.
It’s a general problem. It even happens with,
e.g., Satoshi’s senseless use of double-hashes (double-SHA2-256 and RIPEMD160-SHA256). The Bitcoin folklore excuse for this is that wise Satoshi “prevented length extension attacks”—even though (a) the double-hashes are used in all sorts of places where no length extension attack is possible, and (b) the
right way to prevent length extension with a Merkle-Damgård hash function is either to embed the message length at the start of the message, to pass the message length out-of-band, or (where applicable) to use HMAC.
Whereas the double-hashing is a relatively small idiosyncrasy. It’s mildly annoying to work with, and it wastes some compute cycles (and thus, electricity). The impact is relatively low.
By contrast, the transparent blockchain is a major problem. At this late date,
in the mixer advertising ban thread, I argue that it’s a catastrophic flaw.
Ironically, it seems most Bitcoiners don’t understand that
blockchain transparency scares off banks and other big businesses, who don’t want their own transactions to be transparently published to the whole world. Duh. They’re not stupid. They care about their own corporate privacy.
And it's already shown with how some exchange that support Litecoin and Zcash don't support withdraw to stealth/shielded address.
AFAIK, most don’t. Though Zcash made a big deal of it when Gemini started to support shielded withdrawal
(note: my information is outdated; I don’t know the current status). That’s one of the most regulated exchanges in the world: USA, New York BitLicensed, KYCed and AMLed up the wazoo.
Think about that—and imagine if Bitcoin,
the original and the dominant coin, had had the same privacy either from the start, or added on the same timeline as Zcash. I keep mentioning Zcash partly because it
started as a Bitcoin clone, with added technology that was first proposed for Bitcoin! (Since then, it has evolved in a different direction; around 2022, I didn’t make myself popular in the Zcash community by arguing to keep it more like Bitcoin.)
The prehistory of Zcash consists of softfork privacy proposals for Bitcoin. Zcash’s transparent pool is (or was) a straight-up clone of pre-Segwit Bitcoin’s transparent blockchain (IIRC, codeforked from Bitcoin v0.11); even script worked exactly the same, and still mostly does. Technologically, at least, the shielded pools could have been,
and could still be more or less easily tacked onto Bitcoin by softforking in a new transaction type like Segwit and Taproot did, without disrupting the transparent pool.
Per my vague allusion in my prior post, I heard that Litecoin was suffering something like tainting of funds that had recently passed through MWEB. That is for CEX
deposits. I never heard of Zcash having any such problem; I suggest that shows the importance of having the privacy feature from the beginning, to set the precedent. For exchanges that have listed Zcash for the past ten years, even if they don’t handle shielded themselves, how can they suddenly start to make a fuss about the fact that ZEC can pass in and out of the shielded pools? It’s
always been that way!
On a not unrelated note, Zcash development’s former Electric Coin Co. had a contract with
JPMorgan Chase to add privacy to a permissioned bankers’ blockchain.
Banks want privacy, you see. What, do you suppose
banks want their own transactions published to the whole world on a transparent blockchain!? Banks are not so stupid. This is old news.
Worlds collide: JPM works with team behind anonymous crypto Zcash
By Marc Hochstein
May 22, 2017
For years, Jamie Dimon has derided digital currencies. Now, his company has teamed up with the creators of one of the most prominent “altcoins” to build privacy features for the bank's blockchain platform.
JPMorgan Chase’s partnership with Zerocoin Electronic Coin Co., announced Monday, is perhaps the most surprising alliance yet as traditional financial institutions co-opt a technology originally developed to route around them.
ZECC’s founder, Zooko Wilcox, was part of the 1990s cypherpunk movement, which sought to defend individual privacy through strong cryptography. Last year his firm released Zcash, a cryptocurrency designed to be more anonymous than bitcoin.
Just that phrase, “more anonymous than bitcoin,” might send shivers up the spines of some bank compliance officers, to say nothing of regulators. So, just to be clear: JPMorgan isn’t using Zcash. "This is solely a technology transfer agreement," Wilcox said.
Instead, his team will use the same cryptographic techniques to add a “security layer” to Quorum, the system JPMorgan is developing to run smart contracts.
As for Bitcoin, some exchange and blockchain analysis treat all known coin from mixer or CoinJoin as "risky", "dangerous", "tainted" or something like that.
Please take the long view. This fight started not later than 2011—perhaps earlier; a more knowledgeable Bitcoin historian would need to elucidate.
Forum bug: I can’t merit anonymous posts from the time when the forum allowed totally anonymous posts.If you see this as a good thing, you hate freedom.
See also (from 2013, linking back to the above-referenced 2011 thread among others):
Trust summary for Mike HearnTrusted feedback| User | Date | Reference | Comments |
| nullius | 2026-11-03 | Reference | In the world that Mike Hearn built for us, Bitcoin is not money. Money is fungible. Every Bitcoin UTXO is an NFT. ¶ Reference link from 2013 is in a thread where Hearn’s OP was proposing a coin taint scheme; it links to another Hearn thread from 2011, and gives more context of the broader discussion. Now, welcome to 2026, when it’s become normalized for Bitcoiners to run their own coins through “AML checkers” to see how tainted they are. |
| nullius | 2020-11-15 | | Together with Gavin Andresen, one of the two original insider attackers on Bitcoin development. Tried to pull off an effectual coup against Core development. Strongly anti-privacy. |
