Is this really what you want?

I've been engaged with the cryptosphere since almost the very beginning: immediately seeing bitcoin for what it was, a way to securely store wealth outside of the banking system, freed from relying on a middleman who, it became clear over time, was more interested in policing my (and everyone else) actions to make sure their ass was covered with the increasingly noisy regulators, and due to their financial irresponsibility, always coming up with new and progressively more ridiculous fees.I was fed up with the old system already, having explored the black magic of infinite inflationable monies, centralized, communist-style administration of entire economies, and all the suffering, surveillance, corruption, and centralization of power that such things necessarily entail.Some Rothschild or Rockefeller said it best, "give me control of a nations money supply and I care not who makes the laws" - or something to that extent.Anyway, the allure for the very early adopters was being able to sidestep the massive fiat scam, put personal financial destiny squarely in our own hands, and not rely on third parties as much as possible.In the beginning Bitcoin was almost completely ignored. Only some ubernerds and a few drug dealers and drug users (who would like nothing more than peacefully transact between each other and mutually benefit from the exchange by the way, but are forced into dark corners of the internet because of arcane, politically-motivated, outdated drug laws that FINALLY appear to be crumbling to pieces after DECADES of propaganda and lies organized by major world governments and their lackeys) knew about it.Unfortunately most people lack imagination and, the nerds being mostly quiet and the drug-related activity soon being used as a justification to slam bitcoin with the "only for crime" label, most people thought nothing else of it.They could not see, and to this day still don't see, the immense potential that cryptocurrency can bring the world.There are more of you out there now who can, this is self-evident. Although frankly too many of you are here for gains mostly/only, and fail to see what cryptocurrency is really all about.Much like how so many people think the Internet is facebook and instagram and twitter. Which is so shockingly ignorant it almost makes my blood boil.Look, gains are nice, and of course we all want to make some money. I won't even fault you for taking profits, to me this seems like a sensible hedge, even a full decade into the cryptocurrency experiment, nothing is guaranteed, nothing is certain. So it makes sense to diversify, even - gasp - into fiat money that we can - hopefully - put to good use, today, in the "real" world.But to get back to the story - quickly then, from a very underground thing that almost nobody knew about, Bitcoin was attacked as being "only for criminals", and there was a palpable sense of apprehension and fear from international organizations and governments.Here was this thing that entirely sidestepped the financial system that keeps their funny monies going, and people were using the technology to emancipate themselves from arbitrary limitations and appalling mass-surveillance.And once a state gets used to mass-surveillance, it is very hard to get it to stop. The power is simply immense.Can you imagine? A database with the social connections of every citizen, what they like reading, the sites they like visiting, their physical location logged nonstop, painting very detailed pictures of peoples' lives.All of their posts online, neatly tucked away in some searchable massive database.Almost no one protested. "Well, I have nothing to hide", they said. And thus the surveillance state grew and grew, almost entirely unchallenged.In the name of "fighting terrorism", "catching pedos" and "removing drugs from society" (I could write volumes on this last one alone but this is not the time or the place) we saw our liberties and privacy being steadily eroded, particularly after the perfect excuse happened on September 11 2001.Boy oh boy did we see a destruction of civil liberties since then.Another part of this mass-surveillance was, and is, the banking system. Put simply, every transaction you make is under surveillance, recorded indefinitely. The reasoning? It could be related to financing terrorism.That appears to be the great corrosive thought behind all of this.You could be making a transaction to fund terrorism.You could be spewing "hate speech" (who gets to define it? apparently these days it means expressing right-leaning opinions - tomorrow, who knows?) on social media, so better record everything you write.You could be visiting "extremist" sites online, and because clearly this means you must be an extremist-in-training and not just some curious human trying to understand why on earth someone would have such wicked ideas, your internet activity is logged and analyzed.You use Tor or a VPN? Oh dear, now it's really clear that you must be a potential criminal. Otherwise you would have nothing to hide.Right ?Do you see the pattern?To bring it back to cryptocurrency, Bitcoin users, it is known, were also targeted for increased attention by certain intelligence agencies. Same logic - you were not happy with using the mass-surveilled financial system of yesterdecade? Probably a criminal in the making.Eventually though, that air of fear and apprehension more or less vanished. Regulators actually begun to realize that bitcoin is entirely transparent!All you have to do is require KYC at strategic points. People thought you were crazy for saying KYC would come to crypto. But it was so obvious.And you know what else is obvious? Once exchanges are keeping KYC, global regulators will require that they exchange information with them. This, recent news tell us, is already set in motion and will soon be a reality.Given the transparent nature of most blockchain projects, the implications are so obvious that the fact that almost no one sees what's coming next is almost enough for me to lose hope in humanity.Once there is a centralized record of who owns which addresses, several things become possible.You can now put people under surveillance in real time while they do their transparent chain business (.. shocking, right). You can tell who they transact with, and how often. You can censor their transactions, if not at the network level, at the merchant and exchange levels.And you can do something else too, which is to automatically treat any and all bitcoin addresses not associated with a known real identity as potential money laundering (remember the pattern?).All of this information being available will inevitably create a reality where you will be asked questions about what you do with your money. And this time it isn't the bank, it comes straight from higher up. Because every transaction is fucking PUBLIC!.Who did you send 0.5 BTC to on day X ? This address is not known to us. Please explain (or else).Why did you attempt to mix your coins? Have you got something to hide?Do you enjoy swapping coins in accountless sites like morphtoken ? Well, enjoy while it lasts, because it is a certainty that they will soon be forced to force you to put your identity at risk of being stolen, or else - you guessed it - they are helping with laundering funds.You think tools like wasabi wallet will help? On a transparent chain?If by now you cannot tell that the only thing this will accomplish is an automated blacklist of your coins because you must be trying to hide something but not allowing the State to track your every financial transaction on the chain, there is not much hope left for you. That is simply a massive failure of the imagination, and I lack the words to make the consequences of your ignorance any more obvious.I'm one of those "privacy nuts" you sometimes hear about. 15 years ago I was telling people that it was a really bad idea to be donating so much personal information to some company, but nobody would listen. Already too hooked on getting attention and feeling validated. What's sacrificing a little privacy to feel good - who cares if the tech company is making millions selling your every weakness, your private thoughts, your tastes and opinions, to third parties who somehow, for some reason, are very very keen in acquiring this data.Baffling how people could not see how valuable this data would become. Today it seems they are beginning to wake up.Meanwhile, the entire Internet has been boobytrapped, and in the unending fight to get rid of pedos, drugs and terrorists, we all live under mass-surveillance and almost everyone pretty much accepts it without questioning things too much.After all, there don't seem to be many consequences.But that's just a failure of the imagination.By accepting, uncritically, that transparent chains are a good foundation with which to build the new financial system, you are all voting for more surveillance, the automatic criminalization of privacy, suspicion by default, and subjecting yourselves to 24/7, algorithmic mass-surveillance.Physical cash is already on the way out in some parts of the world, and this is no accident. It is much harder to trace cash, and at this point the fourth excuse to do away with that pesky stuff - civil liberties - comes into play.The digitization of everything financial, the accompanying mass-surveillance and mass-ingestion of the data is necessary, you see, to catch tax evaders.After all (and you will remember the pattern for sure), if you desire some financial privacy, if you would prefer to keep your economic activity to yourself, you are a potential tax evader.It should go without saying, and even including this paragraph I suspect there will be many comments by people with short attention spans who will accuse me of encouraging tax evasion. Ah, how deep the brainwash goes.To that I would say, just think about the fact that up to until only a few decades ago (in thousands of years of history) it was not even possible to do financial mass-surveillance.And somehow roads were built, civilizations thrived, and there's a direct ancestry right to us.And yet we are told that only by stripping everyone of privacy could the state ever hope to collect tax.Bullshit.Look, you have to ask yourself, is this really what you want ? A world of mass-surveillance where all aspects of our life are neatly categorized and searchable in some state-controlled database (that will never be hacked, right ? hint: shadowbrokers)Can't you see it? Have you been anesthetized?Are you too numb to see?This is totalitarianism. Pure and simple. It's happened so gradually that somehow it seems the world has failed to notice.It is not right for things to be this way. If you would stop distracting yourself with social media, tv series and porn (and whatever else young people distract themselves with these days) you would come to develop this notion.Cryptocurrency was all about personal freedom. I am sorry to say that the technology has been almost entirely successfully adapted to do the exact opposite.Rather than offer us freedom, it serves as perfect, immutable evidence of all of our economic activity, whatever little privacy it offered crushed by off-chain measures like KYC and guilty-until-proven-innocent techniques that would have made the STASI proud.But not all is lost, yet.Fortunately we already have the technology to make on-chain privacy a reality. It's called Monero and it works today.I'm not going to babysit you through this and I'm not going to tell you to just trust my word for it, but I am going to tell you that if you care about a future where financial privacy is a reality, a future where the state and powerful corporations don't keep tabs on every transaction you make, every cent you receive, from whom and how often, with perfect accuracy, where automatically they know where you spend your money.. if you care about a future where you are not a slave to some financial master who insists on its right to observe to the most minute detail every aspect of your financial life (and as we have seen, many other aspects of life too - financial mass-surveillance is after all a subset of mass-surveillance itself)..Then you owe it to yourself to read about Monero.Transactions cost less than a cent, and on-chain privacy is a reality. Today.Will it be the ultimate financial privacy project? This I cannot know. I can tell you that it is the best chance we got today.Ultimately it does not matter to me which project makes financial privacy a staple. All I care about is that we, the peoples of the world, are able to transact with each other freely, without the assumption of wrongdoing, without being asked questions about or dealings and who we decide to do business with, before there is any evidence of foul play.That is what is happening today, and it is a very palpable thing that outside of certain niches like VPN providers, Monero adoption is very lackluster.They are afraid. People hear "privacy-preserving money" and think "headaches from the state". This is a shame.This cowardice will, unless reversed, soon enough plunge us into a world where our masters know everything about us, and can with the press of a button blacklist, deplatform, defund, and otherwise shut us up.Applied knowledge is power, and so is information. If you know everything about everyone, you have tremendous power over everyone.This reality must be stopped at all costs, if we want freedom and individual liberty to survive.Surveillance coins (99.999% of them) are not the answer to this most concerning of trends.Stand up for your rights. Use Tor, use VPNs, encrypt your email, encrypt your communications, and use privacy preserving cryptocurrency such as Monero.Don't be afraid. There's strength in numbers.Never forget who ultimately gives legitimacy to laws. If enough people come to think that weed ought to be legal, then in countries where the government is still somewhat under the control of the people, it will be so.You are probably sitting at home reading this. In the privacy of your home. That should be sacred. And yet, if you decide to visit certain sites like torproject.org or getmonero.org after you read this, automated actions behind your back will be taken. Increased scrutiny will be placed on you - "who is this person, that wants to protect their privacy?It is hard to convey in words just how evil, misguided and stifling this is. You may say I'm exaggerating, in which case only one word for you: SNOWDEN. And by the way, it was pretty damn obvious before his revelations that something of the sort was happening.Like it is obvious now with surveillance coins (transparent blockchains).Today it's KYC, tomorrow is automated chain analysis, the day after it's endless questions about who you're transacting with (updating the central registry based on the answers), and when your debt-ridden, socialist-leaning state finally pulls a Venezuela on you, it's open season.Let's try to put a stop to this while we can, shall we? The beast will not grow tamer if we keep ceding ground.The beast sometimes needs to be reminded of who's really in control.Privacy is not a crime. It is our birthright. We have the right and the basic dignity to transact with one another, without the Eye of Staton gazing upon us.No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.http://bit.ly/2JDgMo0 is on us, and future generations will hold us accountable, if privacy falls worldwide and the state controls every aspect of our life, and comes uninvited to ask questions under threat of force if we refuse on principle to comply.Stop getting distracted. Educate yourself, never stop learning, and do what you can to make this world a better place.More state control ain't the way.

Submitted May 25, 2019 at 03:24PM