There is a real cohort of libertarian folks who really do want digital anonymous cash replacement.
Also I would like to point out that the idea you can ever be fully anonymous on the internet is a lot of bunk. Regardless of what kind of cryptography you use or how many obfuscation layers you put things through you're still generating a great deal of identifying data just by accessing other servers. This is a problem I have with most of the marketing behind any privacy technology, it's not just these privacycoins that are making false promises.
This statement is false. Zcash's shielded transactions hide both the wallet ID and the transaction via zero knowledge proof.
If they in fact worked like Bitcoin, with balances & account-numbers transparent to everyone, I might believe as you do. But I know the tech obscures both amounts & recipients, so I don't.
Your 2nd paragraph, that people are spraying all sorts of privacy-destroying info with every interaction, is mostly true. But it's not essentially true, and with education, & software, & further technical advances, far more privacy than we have now is possible. Especially, far more privacy from criminals & abusive regimes that would persecute/imprison/kill people for dumb reasons.
>But it's not essentially true, and with education, & software, & further technical advances, far more privacy than we have now is possible
Yeah and that's a huge headache most people don't want to go through, very few even in the privacy community want to have their money tied up in that kind of system forever because it's so cumbersome to use correctly.
>Especially, far more privacy from criminals & abusive regimes that would persecute/imprison/kill people for dumb reasons.
I have seen no evidence that this kind of technology actually helps those people in any disproportionate way, the same technology can be used by criminals and abusive regimes to conceal their activities and in fact it is being used that way right now. Long-term I think it's unwise for them to use it for that purpose, for the same reason it's unwise for others to use it for the purposes of evading them. Remember that the human factor of people making stupid yet honest mistakes is the biggest vulnerability in any system of this kind.
I could give you my Zcash z-address right now, & there's no way known to cryptographic science for you to know its balance, when and how much ZEC it has received or sent, from or to whom, or even if it's ever been used at all.
None of the metadata thrown off gives any hints to that. Even godlike omniscience about my every interaction with the internet, or a man-in-the-middle attack against all my connections to other Zcash nodes always, would only indicate that I have interacted with the network, and likely sent transactions at cerain times. You'd still know nothing about my address's activities. (The case is somewhat weaker for Monero, though savvy Monero users can start to approach Zcash's privacy with some extra steps like 'churning'.)
If you keep spreading falsehoods, you're harming people who have a right to know what's technically possible, whether they like the implications or not.
And while I'm unlikely to convince you, any other lurkers who want to do their own research, and confirm my claims, should take note: I am providing truthful, reliable info here, under my real name, which you can use to discover many other facts against which to calibrate my credibility (including the fact that I'm a compensated advisor to Electric Coin Company, the original developers of the Zcash software). A anonymous account is spreading falsehoods that will mislead you. Proceed accordingly.
This is a general problem with zero knowledge proofs by the way, you can use them all you want but they ultimately mean nothing when some other party that actually has the knowledge leaks it. And since the blockchain is required to be public there's going to be so much publicly generated metadata available that it eventually makes no difference what you hide behind a ZKP, the information leaks are built into the system. The weirdest and most self-defeating part of your comment is this:
>would only indicate that I have interacted with the network, and likely sent transactions at cerain times
Sorry but this is identifying metadata. It gives away a lot about you depending on who you are. I don't know why you wrote this and then wrote the rest of your comment trying to claim that I'm promoting falsehoods, when you refuted yourself in your own comment! I hope you were honest and forthcoming about these problems in your advisory position.
Your insistence, wordiness, & goalpost-shifting can’t cover up that you’re trying to assertively bluff knowledge of things you don’t understand, like a child trying to pretend they’re an adult. The adults aren’t fooled!
If your impression, based on what you've seen, is that "crypto is generally dominated by marketers and pump and dumps", well I suppose you're the expert about what's in your junk info-diet.
But even if most email, by count, is spam or promotional, people with good filters see little of it, and it'd be a total misreading of the transformative social/economic value of email to say it "is dominated by marketers".
I have good filters against seeing, or spending any attention, on the carnival-barker & naive-speculator froth. (And, any truly momentous economic shift is often wrapped in a phalanx of such pretenders & hangers-on. I don't mistake the lampreys for the whale.)
And looking at tangible measures, like total market cap, real innovators with interesting tech & growing histories of stability are a comfortably majority of all value.
For 100+ years, the most fervently 'socialist' regimes have promised various utopias but actually delivered famines, prison camps, pathologically dishonest & oppressive police states, and even genocides on a larger scale than famous 'fascist' regimes.
I can see why you might get into bickering if you find those situations analogous!
Here:
Socialist governments have been a mix of successes & failures, among the very-privileged who can afford to take risks, for just the last ~100y. Everyone involved knows there's a lot of things left to solve, but sees reasons for hope.
For 13+ years, the most fervently 'crypto' fanboys have promised various utopias but actually delivered scams, fraud, pathologically dishonest companies, and even financial ruin on a larger scale than other technologies.
(please note I am not comparing genocide and financial ruin as being analogous)
Of course you can always do a MadLibs-style search and replace on rhetoric.
But are the resulting linguistic similarities relevant in the real world? Isn’t all the real impact on people - who aren’t mere language models - dependent on the relevant magnitudes, & other salient distinctions?
We real people suffer financial losses, or bleed, or starve, or die in revolutionary purges & prison camps. Of those 4 outcomes, only the 1st one can be blamed on some subsets of the 13yo cryptoeconomics movement. For the last three, you've got to wage a "socialist" war on other traditional economic arrangements over decades.
Crypto believers don't have "limitless patience". If after 100y, the fiercest crypto zealots have killed tens or hundreds of millions, they'll update their beliefs. (Probably, much sooner.)
But hey, thanks for at least describing Zcash's privacy-protecting-qualities accurately in a sibling thread.
ETA to make my point clear, it's an inverted "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
Many of us still have hope in crypto because in 13y, it's made amazing progress & hasn't yet done mass murder – and we're suspicious of those who rally under a banner of "socialism", without reservations, because there's now a long history of that having a large body count. If 100y from now, those patterns reverse, check with me then. YMMV.
It is not, because people are not angels. Everyone has their own goals and wants to have something only for themselves. Soviet Russia and Maos China are great examples of cool idea that has no possibility to work in reality. Because people are people, not because they "did it wrong".