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.
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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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I'm not talking about people who want it to be hard to introduce these kinds of major features but rather people who are against introducing them in principle regardless of them going through years of review and revisions until there's widespread consensus to merge and ship them.
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There's no major ongoing effort to add on-chain privacy to Bitcoin. It would take years if there was one and there's no guarantee it would be accepted even if it did anything right. I think it's increasingly unlikely it will ever happen and yet Bitcoin without it is a failure.
True. If it was implemented, there are still people who would stay on the original fork. Bitcoin Private is an example of that, but Im not sure if that was ever a viable project from a privacy perspective.
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It seems most agree that scalability isnt feasible on layer 1. So if payments are built on layer 2, Id argue privacy is more important and more achievable on layer 2.
Still, were far away from layer 2 being as reliable as layer 1.
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