Why Encrypted Anonymous Transactions are More Important than Bitcoin Scaling
I recently heard that someone paid about $500 for transferring more than $10,000 worth of bitcoin to ensure that miners took the transaction due to the traffic congestion of the network. This sounds awful, but there is a much bigger problem most are not aware of. We live in a financial world where the criminals have complete privacy and good people are tracked. Why is this? Because KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti Money Laundering) are a religion.
Do these policies work?
No.
In fact, Andreas Antonopoulos calls these “Worse than Useless”…
(credit - Andreas Antonopoulos)
For thousands of years cash offered privacy. Why, in the early 1970’s, was it all of a sudden suspect to want private transactions? The banks still operate in that world of privacy and insist on it because they can’t trust the other banks. So why is it now frowned upon if you want to keep your transactions private? It’s not because we need to “think of the children”, or “terrorism”. These are emotional reasons designed to get you to surrender your logic.
The real reason is because a banking license is a license to launder money. It wasn’t until the 20th century that money had any “taint” to it in the first place. When people bought horses in the 19th century, they didn’t ask for your name, or say that you had to register the animal with the department of motor vehicles. Do you see now how you’re being controlled? Your politics and your vote have become a placebo for you to vent. Your money is not really yours, but an electronic leash designed to track your movements.
Meanwhile, the banking system and government agencies all operate on the dark web and they say that bitcoin is “dangerous”. Government and the banks have privacy and you live in a transparent bubble. It is the reverse of what should be. Governments and banks should operate transparently and the citizens are supposed to have privacy. This changed gradually over the last several decades but since 911, this trend has gotten a steroid boost. There are now even secret "FISA" courts that the public is not allowed to take part in.
Authority likes to turn this around and say that if you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about? You should throw this question right back at them and say, if you have nothing to hide, why do secret courts exist? What does government have to hide? National security is always their answer. A nation is kept secure by openness, not secrecy. Kennedy once said...
Bitcoin core is currently working on encrypted anonymous transactions. Some have taken advantage of the slowness of the network to bash bitcoin and say that bitcoin core is Blockstream which is a Bilderberg funded "banker" company. This misconstrues the truth of the situation which is that the code is open source and Lightning Network does not have KYC and AML attached (unlike Ripple and Stellar which do).
Scale is actually relatively easy to accomplish if you're willing to sacrifice your freedom to do it. Andreas explains why the “death of democracy” discount leads to a digital panopticon.
(credit - Andreas Antonopoulos)
This next year will be a crucial one for bitcoin and your freedom may very well be at stake. Most other coins don't have scaling issues because they don't yet have scale. The exceptions to this that seem to have solved the scaling issue while still remaining decentralized are Steem, Bitshares and EOS (all created by Dan Larimer).
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