Privacy is not a just feature, it is the foundation
censorship·@frdem3dot0·
0.000 HBDPrivacy is not a just feature, it is the foundation
Many people think that privacy is not a desirable feature and that it mainly protects the criminals. A network of honest people should be public to get rid of bad actors. But there are several flaws to this idea. Especially when applied to money. # Who should be able to look into your bank account? In bitcoin when I pay a company I dont really care so much about privacy. But when I pay people I know in crypto, then I do not want to show them my account. For this reason I have 3 BTC addresses depending on who I want to pay and what they should see. This is already annoying, but it becomes worse. Because when my small spending address runs out of funds I need to refill it. And that would link it to my other accounts. This then mans that I need to go through some technical steps to make it unlikely that the receiver will be able to figure out the history of the coins. But a normal user will not do that. And for that user that simply reuses 1 address this quickly becomes an issue. When I pay a friend a few bucks for an old bike I do not want to show them my whole bank account history. Public addresses discourage crypto adoption, because even people that claim the have nothing to hide will think again when they want to pay their friends for the first time using crypto. # Privacy is not protection for criminals, its protection from criminals When random people can see your bank details, you may put a big target on yourself. There are multiple stories of children and partners of bitcoin millionaires being kidnapped for ransom. And all that it takes is you putting a BTC QR-code for tips somewhere and from there anyone on the web can try to follow and correlate payments to find out how much BTC you likely have. And chances are that some will. And this problem is much worse for online assets than offline ones since anyone in the internet could potentially attack you.  [source](https://pixabay.com/en/cyber-security-protection-technology-3400657/) The best way to protect yourself is by others not even knowing that there is something to steal in the first place. And the way to reach that is simply by keeping silent and having privacy already on the basic chain-level. Privacy really is Security. # Censorship Resistance Money is an important technology and just like speech is should be free. It needs to be usable by both good and bad people. We do not stop the bad people by compromising their money, we stop them by fighting their criminal actions. Control over money is too powerful and the possibilities for abuse are just out of proportion to the gains that could be made by fighting crime. Crypto is thought to be censorship resistant, but is it really? The US government has blacklisted 2 bitcoin addresses making it illegal to accept payments from them. It is very questionable how effective this could be and what it actually means? Could US miners get into trouble for mining blocks with 'illegal' transactions? Could people get into trouble for accepting coins that passed through these accounts? For how many hops and what about US operators of coin-joins that would automatically process them. Even though this censorship attempt has little practical meaning, there could be real consequences and uncertainty for miners and people using crypto. Especially if China would ban some addresses and crack down on their miners? Then what if they have more than 51%? PoS systems are even worse. Steemit is essentially a democracy and recently a code-fork was done on github where the keys to the steemit accounts were changed, threatening to lock them out of their accounts. Even though this is very unlikely to be supported by the witnesses, when the community comes together and elects witnesses that support this, then it would happen. Now this is unlikely for steemit, but what if there is a push to remove accounts that are associated with pedophilia? Certainly 99% or more are strongly opposed to child molesters (including me). I am quite sure we could find the support to ban these accounts and confiscate their money; but should we really have this power? Which accounts should be banned and which should not? Where do we stop? At pedophilia? Scams? Conspiracy theories? Sexism? Non-PC? Questionable Humor? The best answer is to state that it does not matter, because we do not have the power to censor anyways. We do not deplatform people, we hold them accountable for what they do and not for their expression of that. But how can this be realised in PoW or PoS? The only way is by having privacy even from the miners. If a miner does not know who pays whom, then there can be no censorship. Only privacy is the guarantee that you will be able to spend your coins no matter what. And when the government comes knocking on your door telling you to censor some evil people, then you say yes thats a great idea, please help me identify their transactions so I can exclude them :) # GRIN Right now out of all blockchains the most private one is GRIN. It is not only that you do not know where and how much you send, there are not even addresses in the first place. The chain information is not enough to understand what happens. The only people that can decrypt what is written are the sender and the receiver because these have off-chain information that nobody else knows. And as long as they keep that safe there is nothing anyone can do. Here is a block, nobody but the people involved can understand anything. But we all can verify that these are legit transactions and nothing more than that.  [source](https://grinexplorer.net/block/000000cacf5a04488c47e812c7e9a7a77b8bf1abb2fda032891b1255da9b77bc) GRIN is truly censorship resistant and private. And that is something that everyone benefits from.