RE: Importance of Crypto Anonymity
I'll go a little sideways from crypto anonymity, sorry about that, but I'm building on the idea of "I have nothing to hide". Such a limited perspective!
To keep it simple, if people have nothing to hide, why not make public their email password or private conversations, publish their bank statements monthly and of course live stream every move they make (even while they sleep)? As we know the last part has already been tried in TV 'shows', so there are people willing to do it and plenty willing to watch, even if that's only for show and money, and not the real thing.
But we can go further.
Let's just urge Warren Buffett to disclose his next plans before he sets them in motion, in the name of total transparency, to see how that goes!
In such a world, even the idea of keeping an innocent or a terrible secret comes in contradiction with total transparency. You should tell everyone that you're going to die the minute you find out, right? Post the results on FB or something like that. Or not? Ok, maybe I've gone a little too far with such an example, but we all know social media accounts are highly cosmeticised, to make us look good, and I don't necessarily mean the looks. Doesn't that go against full transparency or "I have nothing to hide" some think is doable and a good idea?
But you've described some more insidious ways in which total transparency can and has been used against people in the past. and I'm sure it's used today and will be in the future too. Excellent example with China's Cultural Revolution. I've forgotten about it.
Great points. It's not just about crypto for sure. I use that example here because this audience is obviously all holding some crypto, but really all of life involves choices we're making each day about how much we'll choose convenience over privacy. We have been trained in a very out of balance way. We now need to make a hard turn toward prioritizing privacy. Hopefully things like Brave browser really work. I know the govt. can crack VPNs if they're looking to. (Learned that by watching the Snowden movie.) And the military created TOR, so I always have some suspicion about whether it really hides anything from them. It's all so inconvenient though (aside from Brave browser, but that browser won't even let me log into airbnb). When we feel we aren't breaking any laws, it's easy to calculate that privacy isn't worth it. But we are forgetting that laws change.