I think private/stealth transactions are heavily discussed, maybe not in this community, but in blockchain in general. When I spoke to merchants, banks, and SME they were very interested in keeping their financial transaction history private. On the other side, all transactions are documented on a blockchain forever and are full publicly visible for everyone because we all love transparency. Especially government and the public sector financial transactions should be more transparent in my point of view.
I agree with you on the government being more transparent, the big difference when compared to private companies and individuals is the tremendous difference in power between the government and these.
Making the government more transparent empowers us the people and lets the government know that obvious corruption will not be tolerated - the power balance gets a bit more balanced.
Forcing private companies and individuals to have total lack of privacy in their financial affairs, on the other hand, further shifts this balance of power in the direction of the government. This, I believe, must be resisted.
In my personal opinion, the bitshares stealth feature should be developed in such a way that it gives individuals the protection they seek for a reasonable small price. On the other side the transaction type "stealth" should be too expensive or "unattractive" for criminal activities so that they look for easier alternatives. In this way, we could keep the balance between the two sides.
I'm in complete disagreement - here's my reasoning.
Criminals (and let's use the term here to mean not just someone who is breaking the law, but someone who is being immoral/evil, or in other words, not committing a victim-less crime) become criminals because they are attracted to the high rewards from this high risk (imprisonment, bodily injury) activity. It won't be a few more cents or even a few dollars that will stop them.
Day to day people, on the other hand, would suffer from absurd fees for transferring value privately with such a fee structure: and this would hit the poorest people (think people who don't live in 1st world countries) disproportionately.
Whether it be sending my buddy 2k, or paying for a coffee, I want my transactions to be private.
Any other way, the system is leaking a lot of data, and it can't be said to be private at all. All stealth transactions automatically become targets of much higher attention if most transactions are not private.
This, I believe, is not the right path.
I want to avoid that the BitShares Platform and our company BitShares Munich is getting into any legal troubles for providing criminals a platform.
You or Bitshares Munich can't be held responsible for criminals using Bitshares.
Criminals use encryption all day long, no cryptographic researchers or open source developers have to answer for that.
The technology itself is neutral. If we begin tailoring it to only cater to the "good" guys, what ends up happening is that it ends up being no good for bad and good guys alike.
The bad guys, however, will find somewhere else.
The good guys stay, and have their privacy compromised.