Mass adoption of Bitcoin would be a mass surveillance dream due to the lack of on-chain privacy. It also won't be censorship resistant without privacy.
Still not too late for Bitcoin to add serious on-chain privacy via encryption rather than obfuscation, but it's getting there.
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Zcash shielded transactions are the gold standard but they need much better adoption for shielded addresses including hardware wallet support. Could be bolted onto Bitcoin and the community could heavily push for adoption, but there will be people who viciously fight against it.
It's unfortunate many people would now be against it because they want Bitcoin frozen in time and heavily adopted by institutions. It becomes harder and harder to ship it. It would be a lot easier to ship improvements than an initial implementation which many would fight against.
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I think this misrepresents the argument against more frequent changes in Bitcoin. It's an issue of centralization. A project that changes easily is more cenralized and an easier target for the state and other bad actors, not to mention attack surface and introduction of bugs.
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Does zcash have any solution for KYC/AML among its public privacy goals? I understand the desire for privacy, but I'm not sure at scale trading it for loss of safety is a fundamentally good outcome.
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Looks like it does, and has sponsored some research too. Interesting :-)
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There's been a number of inflation bugs in the shielded pool. Also, last I checked, it required insane amounts of RAM and CPU time, and couldn't even do multisig. Bitcoin will adopt a solution when there is a real one
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There have been inflation bugs in Bitcoin. I'm not sure how that's relevant.
Bitcoin leaking people's entire transaction history to the world is a serious privacy weakness and should be treated as one. It'd be terrible for privacy if today's Bitcoin was actually mass adopted.
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Through time I learned that privacy by option is worse than no privacy at all, because people get confused about having that choice.