Someone detected the importance of privacy

[qwertyup23]

For someone who have spent his years buying on centralised exchanges only to have found privacy, passed countless KYC verification online, almost all their information is online, do they still have a choice at privacy?

What and what do you think they should start doing? Can such mess even get cleaned up?

The problem with centralized exchange is that most of them are compliance with government requirements per country. This means that almost all of these exchanges must comply with the requisite of asking your personal information in order to avail of their services.

To give you an actual example, in the Philippines, our local exchange (coins.ph) asked almost all of my personal information including the ITR of my mom in order to be rewarded of their last tier of deposits/withdrawals.

Does it defeat the purpose on why cryptocurrencies are created? YUP.
Is there a remedy for me to circumvent this requirement? There are certain exchanges that require less-KYC documents so YES.

[Webutxo]

For someone who have spent his years buying on centralised exchanges only to have found privacy, passed countless KYC verification online, almost all their information is online, do they still have a choice at privacy?

What and what do you think they should start doing? Can such mess even get cleaned up?

If you have done Kyc before in some exchanges, take your loss that it's normal thing we do outside. I'm sure many of us have bank account that we have done Kyc and nothing happened. Just assumed that the exchanges will not use your info for anything and since you didn't do anything bad while using the exchange, you have absolutely nothing to fear, so move on but make sure to withdraw your coins from the exchanges and start using custodial wallet.

From henceforth, avoid anything that will lead you to do any Kyc, there are plenty of other platform to get anything you want in centralized exchanges even the common p2p exchanges are available in decentralized exchange, it is better if you use one of these instead of going to centralized exchanges that makes people go through Kyc and many process before they allow uou to use their services.

[Kruw]

Coinjoin participants can consolidate their coins in a manner to reduce the anonymity set,

The implementation of direct payments in coinjoin makes this less of an issue, since this type of consolidation will further increase the spenders anonymity set.

while in Monero it is not possible. (There is no such thing as accidentally or purposefully consolidating a subset of the rings)

Doesn't the "shape" of a Monero transaction leak metadata about the spend? A 1 input 2 output spend implies a smaller value payment, but a tx with many inputs would stand out as likely sending a relatively large share of the origin wallet's total balance?

There are no "liquidity spikes" when a whale moves XMR.

True, Monero has advantages for large amounts.

[mindrust]

Monero is your biggest chance on privacy. Don’t get obsessed with its price. Focus on its fundamentals. It is the OG privacy coin and by default it keeps you anonymous. Even exchanges not accepting monero is a feature because exchanges force KYC randomly. When they don’t accept monero, they force you to use decentralized exchanges and that’s a good thing for you.

If you hold monero and try to do whatever you do with other cryptos with xmr, you’ll have good privacy automatically. It is hard, it is a painful path but nobody said privacy would be easy to acquire. Life is not ez.

You don't have to switch from Bitcoin to Monero, you just have to switch from a non-private Bitcoin wallet to a private Bitcoin wallet. There are coinjoin transactions on Bitcoin with much larger anonymity sets than Monero.

I never said “switch completely”. People always make the same mistake. It doesn’t have to be one or another as long as you are managing your risks carefully. People ask gold or btc? Btc or monero? Gold or silver? Usd vs stocks? If you feel the need, you can have all of those. Btc vs xmr? Own both if both are useful to you but I doubt it that btc offers better privacy than xmr. I mean, xmr exists just for this purpose. Btc has a public ledger so it lost that battle before it even started.

[Fivestar4everMVP]

For someone who have spent his years buying on centralised exchanges only to have found privacy, passed countless KYC verification online, almost all their information is online, do they still have a choice at privacy?

What and what do you think they should start doing? Can such mess even get cleaned up?

For someone who already have their personal data held up by several centralized exchages before discovering the importance of privacy and decides to embrace it,  I do not think there is anything he or she can do to clean up his private information from all of those exchanges he or she has kcyed on, because even he or she ask that his or her account be deleted, there is no way the exchange is also going to delete his or her kyc data from the platform..

So the best and only thing such a person can do is possibly try to keep his or her funds off centralized platforms now and try to keep as private as possible as well, but he or she should never think or believe that his or her information isn't out there.

But I wanna ask, is there anyone who actually believes they are living a private life? Like you are online, you use a smart phone with Sim card, buy data from time to time and even make calls, and you still believe no body in this world knows you exist?

[BlackHatCoiner]

Doesn't the "shape" of a Monero transaction leak metadata about the spend? A 1 input 2 output spend implies a smaller value payment, but a tx with many inputs would stand out as likely sending a relatively large share of the origin wallet's total balance?

No, I wouldn't say so. A 1 input 2 output transaction could spend a large amount of XMR, just as a 1 input 2 output transaction could spend a large amount of BTC, or just as a many inputs many outputs transaction could spend a relatively small amount of BTC.

Also, consolidating many XMR UTXOs in a single transaction does not reveal from which wallet they are spent, unless the observer has created many of those UTXOs that are selected as ring members in the ring signature.

[Emeraldo]

Personal data and information given out during verifications and kyc processes are not supposed to be public they should not be one that will be visible to everyone. Offcourse this verifications and personal data are helpful especially for the protection of your wallet against it being hacked but then it should be left private, this informations are basically to secure your account and or wallet from being hacked it does not give you control in anyway over your assets. If informations from kyc and verification processes are made public then it's not a good idea.