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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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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You're phrasing it as if there is a solution people are purposely not adopting, but there isn't one. There is ongoing research to find privacy solutions that /do/ work
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It's news to me that the existing privacy solutions in the space such as Zcash shielded transactions, Monero, Tornado Cash, etc. aren't usable. I don't see much innovation or research in that space coming from the Bitcoin world. If they are, who is working on it and where is it?
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Don't consider it to be the same class of approach as shielded transactions. Monero is not quite based completely around encryption and still relies on obfuscation to an extent but they're very slowly working towards it. I don't really see any progress towards it for Bitcoin.
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Being able to generate static addresses and privately receive money many times including directly to a hardware wallet and then being able to use the funds normally to privately send any number of transactions to any number of addresses is also a lot different.
Self-custody with layer 1 on Bitcoin is already pushing the limit of what most people can be expected to handle. Safely managing their own keys with split backups and then sending irreversible transactions is a lot for most people. Can't make it 100x harder. It won't be adopted.
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Strong on-chain privacy would mean having the same usage pattern as existing layer 1 Bitcoin usage but with everything being completely confidential via encrypted. The technology for shielded transactions exists. If privacy was a priority it'd be deployed and regularly improved.
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