1. Their activity is too public, easily tracked, and their profits/losses easily reported to the various taxing agencies. In this sense BitShares is contributing to enslavement.
2. Attempting to do commerce with untrusted parties is still difficult (lack of simple escrow and dispute resolution).
3. Lack of tools for building reputations, bonding users, etc
4. Lack of tools to support and encourage civil disobedience and peaceful tax protests
While I agree with liberty, I don't endorse the "tax protest" part. I think the main danger or risk is not going to be from the government, it's going to come from cyber criminals who will find the rich list and then try to extort everyone on it. At that point the target list is going to be obvious, and the net worths for all to see, which puts people in danger not from the government, but from organized crime.
So basically while I agree with implementing privacy I think you have to market it more objectively. In a world without privacy everyone will be a victim to organized crime because anonymous currencies are going to exist regardless of if we want them to or not and privacy has to be used to increase the ability of the property owner to secure ownership of his or her property.
As for tax protesting and the IRS, I don't support tax evasion. It's better to pay the taxes in terms of lowering risks, than to not pay them. I'm talking about it from a risk perspective and not from an ideological or passion perspective. From a risk perspective, there should always be an option available for people who would like to lower their risk in a certain area or way, but if people want to increase their risks then that option should be open to them but it should probably not be directly connected to Bitshares because not every user wants to protest in high risk ways.
On reputation, on financial independence, I pretty much agree, because both lead to liberty, but both don't break any laws or increase the risks associated with using Bitshares. It's part of the job of developers to lower the risks the participants have to take to use Bitshares, so the design has to in my opinion be approached in such a way that the user is always free to accept or limit the amount of legal risk or any other kind of security risk they take.
So if a participant wants to be totally transparent, then they risk being targeted for extortion if they have a net worth too high. No reason to even mention the government because not everyone is more afraid of the taxman than they are of the local warlord, mafia or gang. On the other hand if a participant wants to be made safe just from the local mafia, gang or extortionist, they need to be able to program Bitshares to report to the tax agency and only to the tax agency, but not to anyone else, and only to report what is necessary to reduce their risk of an audit.
Can we have pursue liberty in the most intelligent ways possible? Can we manage risk for participants while also allowing participants to safely protest? Can we allow some participants to take more risks than others? We have to remember not all participants are in the same boat, not all have the same stuff to lose, and while everyone willing to take part in this experiment is taking risks, I do think we should take a risk based approach to determining design of certain features, or let the participants for example select the level of risk.
I'm not against KYC or AML, I'm not against paying taxes, but it's not because I always agree with the actions of my government or that I think the money is always well spent. The reason is because it reduces the risk of government interfering negatively in my life if I go along with the rules rather than if I don't. It's a matter of risk and consequence.
When it comes to privacy, the sort of privacy which lowers your risk with the least consequence is the programmable kind. The more you can configure it, the more you have access control, and access control is ultimately all privacy is. So if you determine the IRS can access your records but no one else, that should be an option, but if you determine not even the IRS can access your records, then you're protesting, and you should be able to make that decision if you're willing to accept the consequences. The point is the consequences faced by the tax protester have to be isolated and separated from the rest of the Bitshares network, in essence
compartmentalize the consequences.