I wonder if we are going to reach a sort of singularity with regard to encroachment on privacy in western countries where we both take it for granted that privacy is a right, and live in societies where actual privacy is clearly trending somewhere just above zero.

I don't think this is really about cryptocurrency particularly. This is about electronic transfers generally. My read on this was that the government is basically saying "big transactions can't be in something we can't feasibly track."

Australia seems quite aggressive in this regard; also openly banning encryption.

I used to be up in arms about this stuff. Now I am older and mostly trust (for my threat model) off-the-shelf end to end encryption for basically anything I consider private.

But I also don't care about the privacy thing anymore. I kind of hope the people 10+ years younger than me still care about that stuff. Google reading/mining the dick jokes I've been sharing back and forth in a dying g-chat window for the last 10 years? Whatever. I'd still keep the conversation there just for intertia's sake; even though I also assume its adding to google's model about me.

I don't think, at least in countries culturally similar to the US (the one I know the most), any populous will embrace the idea of "let the experts of the government see everything so you can all be safe"; but, it also seems that we will just trend toward that and kinda pretend like its not happening.