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We must protect privacy, even in the face of cryptocurrency crime. As governments crack down on one of the most notorious tools for criminal money laundering in the cryptocurrency world, I’m worried about the ramifications.
Some who know me as a cryptocurrency critic may find these opinions surprising coming from me.
But if you are surprised, I have failed. And I think I have, because I think some of you will be.
@molly0xfff for me, you have seemed a bit over the top in attitude while reporting much factual information that I appreciate.
You're far from alone in seeming blanket anti 'crypto', whatever each person takes that to mean. The latter being part of the problem.
I'm interested to see what are your concerns, and to have less blanket, more detail on what you see as good or bad.
I've watched this unfold for over a decade and I do get it, but I'm not for throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
@happyborg I go into it in the piece, but: I don’t think there’s much good, frankly, even though I respect many of the goals. But I strongly believe that people should have the right to do things I don’t like. The focus needs to be on the fraud/scams/lack of consumer protection, not on cracking down on the technology or ramping up financial surveillance even further. Meanwhile we need to work on improving the sorry state of financial privacy.
@molly0xfff 
there are also less well known projects that are different but get lumped in as "crypto" or "web3" and are shunned because people don't care to look once they hear of a token for instance.
I get it regularly from people in tech, but as the project I've been helping for a decade gets out into the public I expect to get it there too.
When the reality is that Autonomi will be one of the best things to happen at a time when nothing is secure or private, and constantly getting worse.
@molly0xfff Do you follow @sarahjamielewis and Lyn Alden (she's on Nostr these days). They might change your mind on «I don’t think there’s much good».
@aerique @sarahjamielewis the former, yes. she's brilliant.
For what it's worth, I believe my opinion is very much aligned with the one shared by Molly.
I'm disappointed with how crypto evolved over the last decade.
There were a lot of promising projects but they were mostly strangled by communities full of people whose only concern was short term gains.
This led to some really bad decisions that ultimately harmed wider adoption.
Especially when combined with the other 99% of projects that were just outright scams.
I'm very much of the opinion that we need technical infrastructure that permits censorship resistant (and by extension private) payments.
But how we get there from where we are is a little less clear to me than it was a few years ago.
I wish there had been more effort spent on building up smaller, more integrated economies rather that courting exchanges / investment / ICO / etc.
The main thing that did come out of the last decade was cryptography research.
A ridiculous amount of money was invested in new cryptography, and we got some really cool new primitives and protocols - and a lot of understanding about how to practically deploy those kinds of things (and how not to deploy them).
My one hope is that as we all start piecing together all that work we might be able to learn from the past and build up something a little better.
What do you think about recent and accelerating work happening in ZKPs and FHE? It has been an explosively innovative space as of late, driven in large part for the succinctness and to lesser extent anti collusion properties that web3 networks are willing to pay a *lot* of money to work towards.
@sarahjamielewis @molly0xfff I wish I had both of your ways with words.
edit: Sarah, and to imagine I follow you for the occasional positive cryptocurrency / 'web3' news :-D