Honest question: how many hackernews people are cool with all their purchases being on a blockchain forever that is accessible ad infinitum to whichever party has access to it (and potentially all of the public) ?
It's amusing (to me) how the cryptocurrency community has managed to convince its members to accept ridiculous amounts of commoditization and middlemen in exchange for anonymity properties that are strictly worse than cash, and arguably worse than payment cards.
Tornado Cash is a decentralized protocol based on zero knowledge proofs. Its smart contracts are immutable, have no admins.
Besides that, let us not forget that the Mastercard/Visa middlemen charge us large fees for using their services and knows everthing about our purchase habits.
(unless you're living a cash based life, but that would make you an exception)
> Besides that, let us not forget that the Mastercard/Visa middlemen charge us large fees for using their services and knows everthing about our purchase habits.
This is a common refrain, but it isn't quite accurate: the payment card networks charge merchants to use their services.
And sure, they know what you buy. But my Aunt Susie doesn't, nor does the next person who I pay using my payment card. Privacy as a concept is described by the security or threat model one is trying to conform to; cash and payment cards both protect me from unrelated prying eyes. Cryptocurrencies can also protect me from prying eyes, but they charge me for the privilege. By default, both my Aunt Susie and my neighborhood restaurant can see that I've been unfaithful and tried a new place for dinner.
[1]: https://torn.community/t/fee-how-much-does-it-cost-to-use/68
Privacy is difficult on the blockchain but not impossible. The tools continue to get better. I anticipate the privacy tools in the blockchain world will improve faster than any semblance or hope of privacy in the traditional financial world.
I do not operate under the delusion that I will stop my bank or payment card provider from seeing my transactions, or that my government can't obtain a lawful order to inspect the details of my finances. My interest is in protecting my privacy from people who are not in those domains: my local bodega owner, a bored Internet denizen who decides that They Just Don't Like Me, a snooping relative. I do not want to live in a world where those people, by default, get to see and evaluate my financial behavior. That, so far, is the only world that immutable public ledgers currently offer me.
Thus far, privacy in the blockchain space seems to have become more expensive, not "better" in either the statistical or colloquial sense of the word. I'll believe it when I see it. In the mean time, the dollars I use to buy my morning coffee are about as anonymous as they were yesterday, last week, and last year.
Once we have layer 2 payments using zk-rollups, transaction costs will fall to a few cents and many apps could easily integrate these technologies to tumble your wallet (taking all funds and send them through this tech into a new wallet) any time you want for a dollar or two. Or they could automatically do this after every transaction.
Then everyone will have access to easy completely anonymous payments in any currency they like.
We're just in the early days of this tech, like the internet when we used http everywhere and no one knew what a VPN was.
Not with the same volume as on mainnet, but still gradually increasing.
If the current trajectory is any indication, it's more likely that everyday users would mostly hold custodial accounts at organizations (e.g. Coinbase, like banks) and use stablecoins that way, which control aggregate wallets, and trackability stays within the org level (also like banks). Probably not as easy for the public to access (possible in data hacks) but just as easy for government access.
When people say “unit of account” basically what they are saying is:
Cryptocurrency is an Open Source rewrite of the banking systems that currently run on Cobal. “Banks, please start using them as your database and reconciliation layer instead of your legacy software.”
Meanwhile, users continue to use credit / debit cards as they do now, and they continue to see some number on their bank accounts going up and down regardless of where the “money” actually is. Which is the same as today. That’s why we see “Pending” across so many of our transactions.
It's worth going through eary adopter hassles if the eventual result is better, but crypto won't ever be better.