Thanks for your very clear last paragraph. There is nothing really to add, except that its a bit more challenging for hunters to keep up if momero et al is used for doing crime. But I m very sure that here (over a tracable internet) is always a way of tracing things - not so in fiat.
For LN I m not so sure since LN to work on big scale, it will centralize to few big lending + netting = clearing hubs. And so with lost censorship resistance fungibility is at risk again.
Its not hard to conclude I prefer bitcoin cash and there is more why.
You don’t need Monero or any special crypto variant to hide illegal transactions. Even bitcoin can be made to be secure enough for hiding transactions. All of these seedy developers attempting to make the perfect hidden private double super secret nerd money have always been a giant joke to me. The money isn’t what gets criminals caught.
Al Capone wasn’t caught because he used dollars. He was caught and sentenced because he failed to pay taxes. Ross Ulbricht wasn’t caught because he used bitcoin. He got caught because he let his guard down and made stupid mistakes. In both of the above cases the criminal organization was infiltrated and the money was put into mainstream legal activities.
In other words, Al Capone wasn’t caught because the government used a quantum computer to catch him selling a glass of gin and a hooker to Joe Blow. They caught him because he had too much money to launder effectively and never paid his taxes when he laundered the money.
The government doesn’t try catch every citizen that buys a line of coke and piece of ass. They don’t want to jail that many people. They bust a few of them and offer a plea deal so they can find out who sold them the pussy and coke. Then they focus (sometimes thousands of LEO’s and millions of dollars) on locating the dealer. If it’s the USA chasing him, the criminal is bad enough and he’s overseas they make the foreign government help them (like BTCe) or they drone strike him. If he’s domestic, they infiltrate his organization wait for a mistake and pounce. In either case, the money he used (yen, yuan, dollars or crypto) is inconsequential to the case.
There is no fungability between different cryptos. They are not all equally interchangeable. One BTC is not equal to one XMR or one BCH. Censorship of a single crypto is called blacklisting. That’s where you have one coin address that’s not equal to every other coin address. That keeps the coins from being equally interchangeable and destroys fungability.
All currencies require fungability (complete interchangeability between denominations) to work as currencies. However, anonymity is not required for something to function as a currency. If you have a one ounce pure gold ingot stamped in Canada and one stamped in China they are completely interchangeable and fungible but they are not anonymous. You know where they came from and can track them. If you have two dollar bills with different serial numbers you can track where they have been and where they were manufactured but they are still fungible because they are each always worth one dollar. There’s a site called “WheresGeorge” that tracks dollar bills (
https://www.wheresgeorge.com) but all of those dollar bills are still worth a dollar and are fungible.
BCH is just a bitcoin fork. People are going to side with one fork or the other at their own preference. If bitcoin forks too many times it will eventually dilute the value of every bitcoin variant so much it will make them all equally worthless. Be careful supporting forks that break away from core.