Oddbean

Ever fewer can see that it'd been the CBDC from the very beginning and has normalized insane amounts of transparency! A bank account was bad enough, the bank can see all the transactions, the government can and does spy on the bank to spy on the customer, and the bank can and does sell customer data to third parties. And don't get me started on VISA/MasterCard being there in the middle so essentially a pretty good chunk of the world's financial data ends up at the NSA & co. And it's all neatly tagged (KYC). Then along come cryptocurrencies, and now it's not just an institution that can look into your shit, oh no! IT'S THE WHOLE WORLD! Forever, and retroactively! And people don't see a problem with it until about 15 years later, and even then they resist and resist and resist! Even more puzzling, they reject the tool that does the sane thing (#monero) (only you can see your transactions, like cash) because it's not part of their religion/football club! Amazing! But wait, it gets even better. They also rationalize why Bitcoin should not have privacy and anonymity baked in, because of inflation bugs, of which Bitcoin has had two whilst being as transparent as a Socialist's lust for other people's money! Sometimes I think I'm from a different planet. The whole thing just seems nuts to me. The way I see it, this is very simple. If we are spied on all the time we're being stalked and hunted by a giant parasite-predator that does not have our best interests in mind. This thing is infinitely more powerful than any one of us. We can try to limit its power, human history could be viewed as repeated attempts and failures to do this. An excellent way to keep it in check is enough of us not accepting constant pervasive mass-surveillance, because then we can't as easily be picked as targets individually (less data to make a targeted choice). It really isn't so hard to understand.