Is a privacy coin even good for the world?

@vegycslol you are the one who feels attacked. Grinyin is defending Grin privacy and decentralization.

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Well, we are questioning privacy as if there is something we can do to stop it :joy:

The cat is out of the bag, so privacy will be an option whether we like it or not.

The real question is how easy it should be to obtain privacy.

A good argument in favor of it is that the governments want privacy for themselves but not for their citizens. Criminals will use privacy regardless, so why not law-abiding people too?

Ultimately, I just want basic consumer protections like I want to be able to track my money if it is stolen.

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Well, telling people how they should think and call them deceptive or fake accounts if they dare to think otherwise doesn’t seem like the most constructive way of presenting your views. I don’t think any of the opinions above really take in the depth of the world complexity; anything we’ll do will at best be an overly simplistic view of reality. To be fair, we do this all the time because we have to dumb them down to some simpler concepts. As for being an insult to those that fought, please correct me if I’m wrong, but even Zimmermann doesn’t think it’s good to have perfect privacy or anarchy.

These debates can go in perpetuity. The best we can do is to listen to the opinion of others and improve our views over time. We don’t have to all agree on everything to get along. Everyone here believes privacy is important and we shouldn’t be giving it away as simple as we have in the past decades. That’s a good starting point from which we can navigate over time.

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@vegycslol Why would anyone feel safer with tighter gun regulation when the bad guys are going to use them anyway? If not guns, there are many other options available. Having lived in countries with polar opposite takes on gun and knife control, I can’t say I feel more threatened, it’s just a different social dynamic.

There are a few problems. First, it is very easy to over regulate and create cartels and oligopolies. Secondly, the world is full of people who feel there is some kind of responsibility and strategy needed to tell others how they should live their lives, in the name of “safety”. Injecting fear and greed, that we need protection from ourselves. History has shown what a slippery slope this is. Just 40 year ago, CCTVs were going to “eliminate” crime… never happened. Every conceived solution demanding further solutions. Layering, refining, plugging endless gaps. This is the real problem of today.

Today there are countries requiring mobile phone SIM registration and there are plenty of politicians demanding further KYC for other non-financial activities, such as social media. Should we conclude that the world today is a more hostile place or a safer place because of these deeply layered draconian measures? But I digress, just a little, because in today’s landscape there is little privacy and dignity.

I feel you should reconsider how much emphasis you place on the need for regulation and “moderate privacy” against the priority of those living under more hostile conditions. The needs of whistle blowers and political activists are just as important to uphold.

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Because there are strictly way less guns. The bad guys are not the only ones who are problematic, mental health problems are increasing a lot and it helps if it’s hard for them to get guns. Now sure you can always kill people with trucks or whatever, but i believe it still helps a bit. In my country guns are not allowed and police officers are generally not afraid of someone pulling out a gun on them.

I agree, it’s very hard, especially if the regulators have some other goals.

I don’t think it’s possible to eliminate crime, you can only try to reduce it.

I would say more hostile because they have too much data about everyone which gives some people a lot of power. So ofc i’m against collecting data that’s not needed to prevent very bad things from happening (which is vast majority of data collections).

I agree that it’s extremely hard to create good regulations, but to me good regulations are needed since without regulations we basically go back to survival of the fittest. Whistle blowers should be praised, but people need to think carefully whether they have enough information to know what’s right or wrong and make sure to protest in a normal way (not glueing themselves to paintings or something similar).

Whose, which regulation you talk about. It is nonsense to talk about regulations for a decentralize currency. I dont see any argument about this within Bitcoin community.

Anybody can regulate himself if he likes regulations.

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For what it’s worth, 40 years ago a mugger would stab you and they’d never catch the person who did it. Now it is much more likely that they will catch the person (even if the District Attorney lets them go free afterwards :joy:)

Because there are strictly way less guns. The bad guys are not the only ones who are problematic, mental health problems are increasing a lot and it helps if it’s hard for them to get guns. Now sure you can always kill people with trucks or whatever, but i believe it still helps a bit. In my country guns are not allowed and police officers are generally not afraid of someone pulling out a gun on them.

It’s not to say no rules but the absolute minimum.

I do not understand the logic that it’s better to be killed by trucks than guns. Not least that 3D printers can make guns, a process that will undoubted become easier and safer. I’m guessing you also want to license the use of 3D printers too.

I’m not sure what you mean by “guns are not allowed”. I thought you was talking about criminals, the kind of people who DO have access to guns, regardless of law. Or did you mean the average law abiding person that is also, somehow, simultaneously bad?

Herein lies the flaw in your logic, that it’s okay to ban guns and at the same time conveniently disarm your average law abiding person. You seem to say it’s okay for authorities but not okay for their minions.

And it is this, the very same argument as it is for privacy. Government overreach to have full unfettered access to big data about you, while simultaneously stripping end users of similar tools in the name of “data protection”. Governments regulating search engines and now AI. They say they are “protecting us” but I say the delta is in what you don’t see. People willfully accepting filters as the only truth.

If you want to know the true intention of government, look no further than the former FBI director, Louis Freeh, whom in 1995 said,

We’re in favor of strong encryption, robust encryption. The country needs it, industry needs it. We just want to make sure we have a trap door and key under some judge’s authority where we can get there if somebody is planning a crime.

But the quotes I really want to highlight are those by Whitfield Diffie whom deeply understand the implications of his work. If you value perfect privacy then you value perfect money, for it is one and the same.

Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.

If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can’t protect their conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a totalitarian society.

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This depends, but yes I understand this PoV because this is the MO of government; to ensure there are always breadcrumbs in everything we do. This is why governments reluctantly accept bitcoin, because it leaks so much information.

When you have breadcrumbs, you get to cherry pick which “crimes” are priority. You get brownie points for picking low hanging fruit and it gives you job security. You get to control the narrative and you get to make examples of a few to tame the majority.

The problem with this approach is layers. New excuses for new “crimes”. Mixing coins (Tornado Cash?) should in itself not be illegal because no social moral code has been broken and there are legitimate reasons for obfuscation. But authorities hate it because it eases tax evasion. The “funding of terrorism” is just the excuse.

I think we can all agree with this. It is important not only for conversations, but also for money to have decent privacy to promote freedom, diversity and to be able to exist under political repression.

Regarding gun control. There is no major country where it is impossible to own a gun. However, what we see that in countries where gun control is strictly regulated such as in Europe, there are simply less deaths by guns, less violent robberies, less “accidental” overuse of violence by police and overall higher well-being. In the US the police as well as private gun owners are trigger happy by necessity, since if they were not, they would simply get shot themselves. So more guns is never the answer to a problem with guns (kind of logical if you think about it :thinking: ). Statistically, the more guns you get in a country, the more deaths and violence by guns you will see. Also, owning a gun significantly increased the chance to get shot yourself.
If there are less guns around, there is less need to own guns for personal protection. If you are concerned about the ability to protect yourself from robbers, you can more easily switch to non lethal alternatives like stun-guns if you know the robber most likely does not have the ability to obtain a gun. Especially there is no case to be made for allowing automatic or semi automatic weapons for personal protection. These only enable mass massacres such as school shootings, terrorists strikes or zombie doomsday scenarios :man_zombie: .
In summary, if we simply looks at properties such as happiness, safety, crime and mortality by gun violence, the statistics will always support the case for strong regulations on gun control.

Similarly, arguments can be made for financial regulations. No one wants a big-brother like situation like its moving towards in China where freedom is oppressed by over-regulation. However, basic financial regulation de-incentivizes nefarious behavior and wide scale tax invasion. If tax evasions and criminality gets out of hand this mostly benefits the wealthy, the selfish, and it would mean the end of social welfare states that depend on taxes. Overall, such unbridled freedom leads to the powerful getting more powerful, the wealthy getting more wealth and greater poverty for the masses - which in turn lead to more violence and lower security.

I think it is most important to see and appreciate the balance in the arguments for the need of privacy and freedom as well as the arguments that support some regulation. There are good arguments to be made for both and a balance between the two leads to the best efficiency and overall well-being of a country and its citizens. Where each of us puts the balance between freedom and protection/regulation, that is for each of us to decide.:balance_scale:

When defending oneself and their family, you should assume they have no gun because you live in europe, is that it? Does that not sound a little ridiculous? Good luck to you, just hope you never have to test that theory.

Focusing on “gun deaths” is missing the full picture. I think most people can understand, violent people use whatever means they have at their disposal, whether that’s a gun or a rope. This is not a regulation issue, this is a people issue. The Philippines, for example, has high gun ownership yet has nowhere near the violent gun crimes you speak of.

F* the politicians imposing their madness on others. One law for them, another for us. First we deal with people face to face, our family, friends and neighbors. No need to defend politicians for whom we have never met or know, while they ask for compromise with one hand while stealing our liberties with the other. The world does not fall apart without nameless and faceless central government employees. Many people can not see what is lost when the thieves of the highest order steal our time and money.

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You are ignoring the benefit to the victim.

Having said that, when someone steals your bitcoin, they just mix the coins and they’re gone anyway. So there’s really nothing that can be done with stolen crypto no matter what :confused:

I am afraid you are misinformed. Gun deaths in Philippines are incredibly high, around 35 times higher than in the United States:

These are only the recorded cases. If you know something about the country you know that ‘disappearances’ of people are high. Entire villages have been massacred just because of opposing political views and corruption:

You are right that using crypto with poor privacy such as Bitcoin does increase the need to boost ones own protection. If a bad actor knows you have millions in BTC, you are not safe, even in a safe country.

This might sound contrary to your intuition, but if you live in a country with proper security using crypto or money with proper privacy and without there being any specific reason to be targeted as an individual - you are safer by not owning a gun. That is what the statistics tell us, and again, statistics do not lie.

Statistics are used to tell the biggest lies. For all the stats you produce, it wouldn’t be difficult to use stats to paint a completely different picture. Politicians do this ALL the time. That you link to outdated and nuanced content kind of makes the point really. I’m fortunate enough to of travelled a little and lived in some of these places on that list and I can tell you the facts on the ground are very different. Every country has it’s no-go neighborhoods… that’s not a fair or reasonable representation.

The free will to execute blockchain instructions is one of the finest examples of free speech I can think of. It doesn’t need regulating and no one dies.

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“Is a privacy coin even good for the world?”
one of the most stupid statements i have heard in the privacy coin space.

Members of grin community talking about regulating privacy and gun control LOL.

Not only its interactive system but it looks like its ethos will also discourage the privacy community and the overall free market to adopt it.

Oh !!

No wonder Grin is in such a state.

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What benefit does your post bring? Why not talk about what made other privacy coin communities successful. Oh wait…

If you read his whole post you will see that he explicitly mentions perfect privacy. I feel like people just don’t like to think about privacy, they assume that we should have as much privacy as possible (because at first sight it seems to make sense and it’s something that we would want). The same could be said about freedom. What does perfect freedom mean? It means anyone can kill whoever they want. So while having freedom is important, it’s also important that it’s limited. So perfect freedom is not something we want, i believe the same is true for privacy.

Let’s try to keep things civil and provide counter arguments to whatever we disagree with.

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I hope grin can be used freely. If someone doesn’t care about privacy and prefers convenience, grin can provide this convenience. If someone cares more about privacy, grin can also have strong scalability to meet this requirement.
In short, the goal of grin should not stop at privacy. Freedom, convenience, and scalability are more important.

It can be if govt will not control major part of mining pools to introduce KYC/OFAC rules here or hardware to mine Grin, decentralization is a key here. P2Pool software must be created before they will try to do it. Things are changing fast in this space, time will tell, Grin is just experiment :slight_smile:

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P.S. Grin target is rather scalability than strong privacy. MimbleWimble main point is no addresses, no amounts and no IP addresses. So 2 parties can use money safely, the most scalable zero-knowledge tech is here. Privacy is current trend for crypto btw.

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