I was wondering what viewpoints and opinions this community has when it comes to cryptocurrency.
Personally, I’m not against it, but I’m not for it either. I like the concept of bringing back cash anonymity, and also decentralization (obviously). Although I don’t think it will be viable for at least another decade.
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They’re called Privacy Coins for a reason. Monero is just one.
It’s more complicated than this, and it gets more complicated every year, especially with lightning. It’s certainly not monero in terms of privacy, but it’s not the same Bitcoin it was 10 years ago where this was more or less true.
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I assume you’re talking about blatantly illegal transactions, like trafficking or drug deals, but if that’s not part of someone’s threat model, is Bitcoin still reasonable private?
As in, if we remove state-level actors from the threat model, is Bitcoin still safe enough? I’m more interested in not getting doxxed for my choice in VPN, email service, etc if I choose to run for office, and Bitcoin is accepted by enough places to be useful enough.
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Also note that lightning is an off-chain centralized approach. It loses a lot of benefits of decentralized layer 1 like bitcoin and monero. Privacy at a centralized entity is like having no privacy at all.
Look up a network map of lightning, it’s not centralized at all. Payments typically route through multiple hubs, just as many Bitcoin nodes may be involved in processing a main chain transaction. Anyone can run a lightning node, and you can choose which nodes you want to use, if you want. There are thousands of them to pick from.
The lightning channels are secured by the main chain. There is no centralized party who can rug you.