I believe where Molly goes astray is in saying that she has a solution. But her link is to the E-Cash act (https://ecashact.us/), which promises, with a wink and a smile, privacy-preserving electronic cash, with "government-approved" hardware.

Look, we all build on American Internet rails, cryptography rails etc. But this is a step too close to the sun for me, personally.

While I appreciate that the Mastodon crowd have an interest in end-to-end encryption and open source, I do think that it will take a few years of seriously adversarial government for them to understand how they should update their threat model - something that people who protested against pandemic restrictions and people in more adversarial jurisdictions like Myanmar/Hong Kong/Russia/Ukraine have experienced firsthand and know.

It is bizarre to see such a split in the FOSS community. But I believe it stems from some FOSS people believing the collective good is better than private profit - yet it also, I think, stems from some FOSS people never having lived the hard reality of a truly determined adversary, one that doesn't shrink away from imprisonment for code/speech or debanking/going after people's livelihoods. I actually hope for all of our sakes that this doesn't come to pass in our lifetimes, but in say, a war between the major poles, I think we are going to quickly figure out that you can't have "social goods" and your cake ("trust in government") and eat it too.