I agree with you, but that is the future, not today's reality. Mining will one day be done almost entirely by datacenters. You may not know exactly where they are, but they will be well protected by very large guns. Bitcoin doesn't need jurisdictions because you know you can't trust anyone, you can only trust the protocol and how it is engineered to balance mathematical security and networking limitations. If a major mining firm is going to overtly attack the network, it will destroy their investment. If they attack an individual, then it is best that you remain as anonymous as possible.
And if they attack you
because you are anonymous? That doesn't actually seem like it should be a hugely challenging technical problem if there was sufficient pressure to do it (such as the forfeiture ones mining gear for example.)
If you are anonymous, they wouldn't know about your mining gear now, would they? Cancelling an anonymous payment might be a hospital bill for a child with cancer. That would not bode well for the miner that signed that block.
Anonymity for users (against miners) and anonymity for miners (against regulators) are two different things. Both are interesting but they are far from interchangeable.
In both cases, knowing with some precision what is happening on the network is quite straightforward. The protocol makes no efforts to be discrete. Yes, it would be fairly trivial to encapsulate it but endoints don't grow on trees and would add notably to the complexity and expense of system design. And only solves certain parts of the theoretically possible problems.
If "forget about anonymity" then can you tell me what it is about Bitcoin that makes it particularly worth supporting or using.
Who are you quoting? I presume it is Mr. Strawman. Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Anonymity is a social construct. It's not part of the protocol, but how it is used.
Clearly this is no strawman for those who know what a strawman actually is. It's an effort to save a go-around for efficiency reasons. See the "If"? Wanna answer the question?
My answer would be 'counter-party risk protection' but to say the truth there would be so little else that I would pretty much be forced to move on to more promising pastures (which also provided counter-party risk protection as a minimum.)
Your strawman attempt at leaving wiggle room is in vain. You cannot have counter-party without trust in an authority. You Sir, are a Statist.
Asserting a strawman where it doens't exists then excusing yourself from a losing argument (or one which has exceeded your capabilities) is as old as the hills. It pre-dates the http protocol at least and I know this for a fact.
