I cannot like this post enough. God bless joinmarket. Yes and I share the same concerns. Sometimes, if I really put on my tinfoil hat, the whole situation feels very strange... because in my opinion bitcoin should be a much more important MoE than it already is. I cannot go out to even buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin as much as I would like too... and I feel like I should be able to.

I can't help but feel that the ridiculous KYC and tax-reporting requirements are to be blamed for this... and to those who say 'oh just use monero' well xmr has been delisted from nearly all exchanges and is even 'less' likely to be available for commerce and to buy things (coffee, groceries, gas etc, I don't count dark-web drugs honestly) and every time xmr is used the same tax reporting requirements exist which I think are really really difficult to calculate.

I understand that the government wants taxes from the 'traders' and the 'longers' and 'shorters'... but it also implies that I have to calculate capital gains for a cup a coffee I buy with lightning it's ridiculous.

And were I to spend bitcoin on the 'base layer'... I have to use some combination of privacy tools not to dox my stack of bitcoin - those 'privacy tools' like a coinjoin are required for reasonable privacy. However coinjoining a utxo... especially if it's larger will I be able to sell it on a kyc exchange? Without coinjoins how will I be able to spend bitcoin privately? And if I do coinjoin will I be able to sell that bitcoin on an exchange (there aren't hard and fast answers to this from what I can tell). It's like you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't is the way it feels with the way bitcoin is treated.

It feels like shoehorning bitcoin in to a 'speculative digital commodity' box that is NOT to be used as a medium of exchange, even between consenting free people for lawful goods and services. And it's wrong and needs to change.