Topic: We are making the same mistake again. - page 2. (Read 3392 times)

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TL;DR

The internet was great, but was us sleepwalking into a police state. Let's not do the same with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is to money what the internet was to communication.

I don't need to remind everyone how great the internet is, but we all know the terrible things it has facilitated. It has been us walking into a police state. The internet was not designed with anonymity in mind. We are trying to develop privacy protecting elements within it, but we have not got very far. The internet helped us overcome the almost monopoly on information held by institutions that were manipulated by the few. It caught dictators off guard. It was wonderful.

In the same vein, BTC was not designed with anonymity in mind, it was designed to take money out of the control of banks, which it does so wonderfully, but as with the internet, hands our information to the upper tier in our society that have access to our information. BTC is described as anonymous, but after a little analysis, we see that this is not true. And within the closed system the bitcoin is, it will become steadily less anonymous every time a transaction is carried out. It will allow something cash could never allow, complete financial surveillance. This is us walking into a yet more sinister police state.

I don't understand the ins and outs of bitcoin, just like most people don't really know how the internet works. All that most intelligent people (myself not necessarily included in that,) have managed to ascertain is that if you do something online, you should NEVER have an expectation of privacy, because, despite what the policy of said website/server/isp might be, you will end up disappointed, and whoever had the most paranoid attitude will ultimately turn out to be correct.

Can this be a question of priorities? Banks are bad, I would love to supersede them. Privacy however is good, we need this in order to ever effect any social change. We all know this having realised that the "nothing to hide" argument is invalid. (I'm not going to explain why here, if you think that you have "nothing to hide" please post the password to your bitcoin wallet underneath this post before disagreeing with me).

Do we want to destroy our privacy in order to disrupt our current financial system?

Is it possible we can learn from the internet, and not make the mistake of creating something with such a revealing infrastructure? I do not understand "zerocoin" or the other allegedly anonymous cryptocoins. However, if they are anonymous, I would wager we solve two problems rather than one. The larger, and more important problem in my mind being the lack of anonymity.