First they came for Monero, and I did not speak out-- Because I wasn't using Monero Then they came for Zcash, and I did not speak out Because I wasn't using Zcash. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me!
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Good thing they can't really stop Monero.
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On a technical level they can't, but this undoubtedly pours ice water on adoption.
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This is a disturbing trend. Many might cheer the attack on "shitcoins", but the obvious next step is to attack mixing protocols and wallets like tornado cash, conjoins, etc. The stated goal is to ban "a type of Virtual Asset which prevents the tracing of transactions or record of ownership through distributed public ledgers and for which the [Virtual Asset Service Provider] has no mitigating technologies or mechanisms to allow traceability or identification of ownership."
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Lightning could get banned by this type of rule. It pretty much doesn't leave any trace in the "distributed public ledger", for the simple reason they it's impossible to do so and scale.
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An archive of the article is here. An archive has no paywall, no subscription requirement, and can be easier to read.
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I think we should discuss a declaration of independences for the United Open Source Network States.
We might not all agree on the same direction for monetary policy, official currency, but I'll bet 100K sats I have more in common with a monero user than my physical neighbor.
I wonder how they will greet Indranet since it will enable the elimination of nearby nodes propagating transactions by users there.
Also, the coinjoin technology is still young, relatively speaking, mostly being done by centralised or semi-centralised networks that match-make users for these transactions. What happens when there is a fast mixnet like Indranet and someone invents a distributed protocol for constructing coinjoins, and nodes of this network are available with client side privacy via Indranet?
And, obviously, don't tell them that only senders and receivers know where LN transactions are coming from and going to. Assuming they aren't concealing origins using an anonymising relay network, which a substantial amount are.
A transparent ledger does not leak user metadata if the users take steps to avoid it.
Monero's track record so far on avoiding inflation bugs with its simpler protocol is still holding, but its opacity makes it a target for attacks on privacy. Zcash, as the article mentions, is not included in the list of privacy coins. Probably because someone has the proving key's private part... But I'm sure nobody who has it is going to admit it, sorta seems like it might be worth a lot of money.
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"Then they fight you, Then you win"
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