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Comment by ursuscamp | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people in the bitcoin community regularly mix their coins out of principal.

The big problem is that people have a fundamental right to financial privacy from the public, but not (in many places) a right to financial privacy from their government. But, in the crypto world it has been difficult to achieve the first without the second. You can send funds to an exchange and then send them to a different wallet but there's the risk the exchange won't let you withdraw funds, and this type of activity is flagged as an AML risk and could be cited as actual evidence of money laundering, despite it having a very clear legal motivation behind it.

I'm adding to your comment and not trying to argue (unless you want to!): There's no distinction between the public and the government. The government is made up by the public. And corporations are usually first in line anyway. Much more "public" in the cake mix right there alone.

It's hard for me to think in terms of rights. I don't know what the word even means. Legal rights? Moral rights? God-given rights? You can say I have a right not to be murdered, but that doesn't matter very much if in fact I just got murdered. All I know is that some people feel they have a "duty" for lack of a better word, to keep all their dealings as private as possible. If I were such a person, this would mean using cash, metals, and cryptocurrencies like Monero as much as possible through decentralized services. It would even mean using things like credit/debit cards to maintain a "good person" public persona. Going grey so to speak.

Not even just from the public, but imagine if making a payment to someone for $whatever, and that allowed that recipient to see whomever else you paid money to, and who paid you.

Lots of people would say "no thanks" to that.

Doesn't that risk making them tainted and unspendable?

Neither I, nor the article, were talking about BTC privacy fundamentalists.

I'm talking about the actual IRL usecase of commercial secrecy amidst competitors.

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