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.
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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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Apparently privacy on L2 isn't as strong as it is on L1.
Need full pm privacy everywhere for max censorship resistance
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What do you mean "as strong"? Lightning has significant improvements. Plus its being actively developed.
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Lightning channels are opened and closed on-chain and nodes only provide a much weaker variant of Tor-style privacy for routing payments through the network. It's not a replacement for on-chain privacy and if there was strong on-chain privacy it'd be significantly weakening it.
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Lightning nodes aren't automatically connected to every single other node especially with available liquidity. You can't simply do arbitrary random routes through the network. You're also not choosing a random entry point but running your own node (or trusting someone else...).
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Lightning is definitely compelling for scalability but managing liquidity and routing payments through it is a very hard problem that's currently not handled particularly well. It's also definitely not a substitute for on-chain privacy and brings new privacy problems with it.
The privacy of Lightning only looks good in comparison to Bitcoin's lack of on-chain privacy. If you were using Lightning with a theoretical future Bitcoin that had on-chain Zcash style privacy it would be Lightning that was the privacy issue rather than on-chain transactions.
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'Any wallet that interacts with this privacy protocol will get blacklisted'
is what is happening on $eth right now. Decent argument to l1 privacy being needed
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Definitely. That seems to be the trade off of having a supply auditable without cryptographic proofs. Which is important for an asset seen more as a store of value than medium of exchange.