For those of us who have been around for a few years, it seems all but certain that blockchain technology is set to revolutionize the financial sector.
While the rest of the world hasn't quite caught up to this, for anyone remotely involved in this movement, the advantages and technological supremacy of this technology are, quite frankly, patently obvious.
HOWEVER.
Especially since the events of September 11, 16 years ago already, we as a society have been on the fast lane to a mass-surveillance society, where if certain forces in society had their way, ordinary people would have next to no privacy in their day to day lives.
Anything they do on the internet, cataloged and stored in a database somewhere.
Everything they buy online, sold to some company to build a database.
Wherever they go, with their trustworthy personal tracking device (I believe they call it a cellphone), their location tracked, to say nothing of built-in cameras and microphones, and untrusted baseband firmware.
Their closed-source software, phoning home and betraying their privacy online.
Voluntarily signing up for services provided by companies more than happy to make the user their product.
"I have nothing to hide", most of them say, without really realizing what they're losing.
Against all of that, there is nothing that blockchain can do.
However, in the field of financial privacy, this technology can either level the playing field once again, by putting financial privacy in the hands of the people, or it can greatly accelerate the trend towards a totalitarian all-knowing state, by not protecting the users' privacy.
https://shouldhaveusedmonero.xyz/I strongly believe that a society where private purchases are made public for the whole world to see is a dystopian society, where people will self-censor, in much the same way that people self-censor when they know that
they are being watched.
Fortunately cryptography was developed, and savvy people have that last line of defense against powers that be hellbent on knowing everything about as many people as possible, "just in case" -- how this is not self-evidently a terrible and unfortunate idea, I truly cannot understand, because even before the days of Utah datacenters and bombastic Snowden revelations, all of this was pretty obvious already.
And thus users of cryptographic technologies are free to engage in as much thought crime as they desire, safe in the knowledge that the mathematics shields them from the intruding nature of Big Brother. Imagine that, being able to read whatever you want without being tracked..
Unless this concept is carried forward to the blockchain revolution, as far as I'm concerned, we're really just enslaving ourselves with pretty fancy bleeding edge technology.
The ability to transact private has always been present, for THOUSANDS of years. We live in a time now that is an EXCEPTION, where slowly it is becoming accepted that unless some banker or politician or figure of authority can see what you are up to, then you must be up to no good -- this must be resisted and fought against, not celebrated and embraced, for it is our very freedom that is at stake here.
Relevant YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy-7lzt3alsRelevant propaganda:
https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.htmlFinal wordsMonero is the only cryptocurrency, that in my analysis, has the right ideas about what a widely used cryptocurrency should be designed like. It is what Bitcoin was meant to be. True digital cash, anonymous, untraceable, just like cash has been for thousands of years.
Now, I see the big potential for Bitshares, or I would not be around still (though frankly I retain only about 10% of my position since this summer, as it became clearer and clearer than privacy does not seem to be a big concern in the project roadmap -- indeed, if it wasn't for TITAN (flawed though it was), I probably would have never even joined the community).
I would like to "hear" everyones' opinions on this very important topic, let me know what you think.