This is where normalizing transparency inevitably got us into.

I only wish more people had seen the unavoidable outcome years ago.

Then again, it's quite likely the governments of the world would have come crashing much harder if financial privacy tech was quickly becoming the standard.

This much seems clear to me: without privacy and anonymity, all this was a gigantic (if highly profitable) waste of time: the tools of liberation would have become the tools of oppression.

The tyranny of the psychopaths and the apathy, ignorance and stupidity of the masses conspire to inch us closer and closer to a world where privacy and anonymity have become criminal.

I wish I had answers and I wish I could say I know we are going to win this.

But when even most people in bitcoin failed to see how a transparent transaction graph would come to bite them in the ass later, and where outside of our cute nostr nubble most people into crypto are here for profits and neither for the tech, the philosophy or freedom, I fear for the worst.

When the vast majority opted to centralize on/offramps at CEXs, when silly tribalism prevents many from considering alternatives such as #monero

You see, bitcoin onchain privacy "solutions" all suffer from the same flaw: the user is not erasing their history, he's writing a new history: that he attempted to erase the history.

This is much, much worse than everything simply being opaque by design with no opt out possible. It makes the user stand out. It is trivially detectable.

I urge anyone who has KYC bitcoin to avoid coinjoining them. You will be branded accordingly, and this information will be shared. Your reputation will follow you.

Your first mistake was acquiring KYC transparent coins.

Don't make coinjoining the second mistake. 

 This is not to say coinjoin is useless or undesirable. But understand the potential consequences. Be smart. 

 For better or worse, Bitcoin is an honest accounting of financial activity. I would like to force my government to operate in this manner. Imagine if everything they did could be independently audited.  

 Yes, that would be awesome, for their spending to be auditable and public (although you don't need a transparent chain for that).

But our finances must not be public for them to see: the power differential is already tremendous in the government's favor - being devoid of privacy towards them only adds to that dynamic, and not in an insignificant way.

Tyrants gonna tyrant however, and it's exactly towards full transparency from the plebs and opaqueness for the State and the elites that things are tilting towards at the moment. And not just in finance either, seems like every month now there is another mass surveillance scandal, they're still trying to kill e2ee, etc.

It's a war of attrition and it's unclear that the line will be held.

I hope so & do whatever I can to help hodl that line, but it's not easy, and it's not right: if we must have government, they should be our servants and have the general well-being in mind.

So why does it feel like it's government itself that's constantly trying to limit me, and treat me like a criminal, for the horrible crime of... wantinf to be left alone?