The worst part of cryptocurrency transforming into dragon-level wealth is witnessing good people emotionally devolve into dragons themselves: so intellectually paralyzed by the fear that everyone they see threatens their hoard that they lose sight of the world beyond their cave. https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1390918071217360896
1) This is such a profoundly misleading TL;DR of a privacy-focused talk that it's hard to call it anything but intentionally deceptive.

2) To the extent I own crypto (unless and until it has been lost in boating accidents), I own more bitcoin than anything else—but
...despite the theoretical risk of harming the value of that ownership, I continue to criticize Bitcoin's (and other cryptocurrencies I hold) failings because the public cost of doing otherwise would be orders of magnitude greater than that individual private gain. Moral compass.
3) Bitcoin's disastrous privacy is the "missing stair" of cryptocurrency. Every expert understands it's a problem, but—as experts—they themselves know how to compensate for the risk in their own personal interactions with Bitcoin, and therefore feel no urgency to actually fix it.
4) Privacy coins are great, but they're too small and too easy to smother via regulatory actions like de-listing from exchanges. Only Bitcoin has immunity-via-dominance to delisting. It adopting privacy-by-design instantly normalizes financial privacy. Ultima Ratio Cryptum.
The central property of cash is fungibility—meaning a dollar spent by a plumber is honored equally to one spent by a sex worker: they are indiscriminable. Adversarial chain analysis of Bitcoin's public ledger reduces its fungibility over time. Only privacy guarantees fungibility.
You can follow @Snowden.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: