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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bitcoin won't just magically add privacy. you want something added to bitcoin, open a pr. its open source software.
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People submitting high quality pull requests implementing protocol changes isn't how Bitcoin works at this point. In the early years? Sure.
Solving it is almost entirely a political issue, not a technical one. Zcash already made the technology needed to deploy this for Bitcoin.
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There was just a soft fork last year to add support for Schnorr signatures. Why couldn't a PR to add Zcash-like encryption follow a similar path to get merged and activated in bitcoin?
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I mean, if it won't get in with a high quality PR, what do you think it would actually take to get it in?
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An outsider submitting a new protocol feature with a high quality PR and then having that get reviewed and then accepted by a few other developers is really not how Bitcoin works in 2022...
Can still happen for implementation-specific Lightning extensions but not Bitcoin itself.
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I don't think you seriously believe that someone can simply submit a very high quality working on-chain privacy implementation to Bitcoin Core and have that get reviewed or accepted. It would take them years of wrangling with politics and getting many people on board with it.
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The first step to making a significant protocol extension is definitely not implementing something and submitting a pull request.
Do you think Taproot, a dramatically smaller and less controversial change, was done that way? No, it has years of discussions, planning, etc. first.
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Took years of people willing to deal with not just code but playing politics and getting not just developer consensus but community consensus for not just the concept but a specific approach and implementation once that was created. Is it everything planned? Not even close.
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In a few more years, another round of improvements may land with the low-level tooling needed to build more efficient decentralized mixing services, etc. That wouldn't be strong privacy with encryption.
It will only get harder to make protocol changes, especially larger ones.