spanking works

mmmmmmm.... pretty sure the State is your enemy, unless you voluntarily pay your taxes, and I bet you do it begrudgingly. That's theft. That's an assault on liberty. That's what makes an enemy.

Death by some crazy person is 1000% preventable if the medical industry actually helped people instead of bankrupted them. If there was actual care instead of farming for co-pays and fighting denied claims.

Your local government would rather tax your Bitcoin at 18% than see you die with it, and get nothing. Or worse, to see you flee with it and pay another country's taxes with it. They're not going to kill you for it. The criminals will kill you for it. Protect yourself from the criminals. Privacy is only one means of protecting yourself. Be hard to attack in all ways. Be dangerous, not just hidden (be hidden too). Be physically secure, keys divided and distributed, be unassailable. Privacy is security theater. You exist, it will be known if you keep doing it.

I will admit though, that you can't go backwards and un-leak your identity and so you should protect it now, when it's not something that is a threat to you. It's just alot of work and the threats are so very fuzzy and hypothetical. Use all the tools you can to protect your privacy, but really, that goes for everything. Use every tool you can to protect yourself from an uncertain future. Guns, Farms, Solar/Off-grid, non-kYC Bitcoin, Bitcoin in general, encrypt everything.

As for your idea that they could just kill all Bitcoiners... That very much depends on where you are and who it is that might be coming for you. I think most of us already know if we live in a place where a gang might roll through and round us all up. If they're not rounding up whole neighborhoods, if they're actually trying to identify Bitcoin wealth and bury it, prevent it from being used, they will have a very hard time. A Bitcoin wallet can be accessed by multiple people across the globe from one another. Kill one, there's a backup key and person too. It doesn't work as game-theory to fix Bitcoin undermining the fiat printer. Its is very difficult to prevent Bitcoin slipping through your fingers if you squeeze it. This lack of friction is why it's better than gold shipments as payments, even though gold is more private and just as scarce for now. China banned Bitcoin and they're not shy about forcing their citizens to behave a certain way. They would like to ban holding Bitcoin, I'm sure. It's not feasible to enforce it, and doing so without enforcement would betray their weakness in this regard. If your local government is just performing a genocide, then Bitcoin and privacy is irrelevant.

You're not wrong, but that's not for Bitcoin to solve. Different tools for different threats. You don't resist the government with a pistol. But you can protect yourself from specific and real immediate threats. Bitcoin protects you from real and immediate monetary fuckery. But if your community is at war with you, if you're at odds with the political reality of your tribe or local mafia, you need much more than Bitcoin or private communication. You need to leave. You need to find allies. Private communication is a very important tool for resistance fighters and refugees and such. I was mostly arguing with Monero bots who think privacy is important enough to sacrifice some of Bitcoin's monetary foundations, auditability and scarcity, so we can bundle privacy ideology and sound money ideology at once. They're trying to get their private money on our sound money so they blend in better, and their privacy is improved. That use case is not the general one and it would make Bitcoin worse to bundle it with Bitcoin. I've learned as a long time software architect, you should not try to do 2 things at once, you'll do them both poorly and introduce many issues and ultimately you'll have to start over and do both things separately.

Signal is PGP over texts and now its simply a good UI on end to end encryption with PGP basically. We still have to build privacy tools, yes, but there's no friction to using Signal vs Messages. It's just people don't really care. That's the thing.... people don't care about privacy. They care about sound money. They care about having the power to decide, even if you know I have Bitcoin, try and get it from me. You won't be able to. Even the strongest government in the world will have to convince me to help them acquire that. Privacy is useful and some people want it. Sound money is essential and one is a slave if you don't have it. Priorities.

7 obviously

Trump's election was 4chan escaping containment. Nick Fuentez is 4chan attending your dinner party.

Privacy is your job. Bitcoin can be used privately. Bitcoin needs to be transparently and auditable non-fiat. It can't do that privately. We need to see how many sats are there, in all UTXOs, at any time. Lightning is quite private or could be very private without this problem impacting the base layer.

Perhaps not 100 years ago, but during the post-Roman Empire times in Europe, there was a lot of decentralization and many people were left to live their lives without large and funded authorities to bother them, to a large degree 'authority' was just a local ethnic chief or a general or noble/land-owner. Evaluating our freedom from the perspective of how many and how powerful of authorities exist to force your compliance. How much choice do you have in compliance? In purely technical terms, there were many fewer authorities enforcing anything upon people's of the past just because governments had fewer resources in the past because the GDP of the people was smaller and less effective.

There is also the pretty serious risk that enough money bet against something assures it happens by way of incentives.

Bro. Epic.