Bitcoin & Privacy: A Critical Love Letter 🔐⚡️
I love Bitcoin. Not blindly, but deeply, the way you love something flawed yet revolutionary.
Bitcoin gave us sovereign money. The ability to hold value outside the banking system, to transact without permission, to opt out of monetary debasement. That's genuinely world-changing.
But let's be honest about where we've fallen short.
The Privacy Problem We Don't Talk About Enough:
Bitcoin's transparent ledger is both its strength and its Achilles heel. Every transaction, forever visible. Chain analysis firms tracking your coffee purchases. Exchanges reporting to governments. Your financial life laid bare.
This isn't what cypherpunk money was supposed to be.
We got censorship resistance but sacrificed privacy. We can send value anywhere, but everyone can see us doing it. That's a partial victory at best.
Default privacy should be the standard, not an advanced technique
CoinJoins and Lightning are steps forward, but remain too complex for most users. We need better privacy tooling that doesn't require a CS degree. The community often dismisses privacy concerns as "criminal thinking", this is dangerous.
Why I Still Believe:
Despite these critiques, Bitcoin remains our best shot at separating money from state. The base layer's transparency, while problematic for privacy, gives us verifiable scarcity. The trade-offs were deliberate, even if uncomfortable.
The solution isn't abandoning Bitcoin, it's building better privacy layers on top and demanding more from our tools.
Privacy isn't a feature. It's a fundamental human right. If you care about both sound money AND financial privacy, we need to push this conversation forward. Not with toxic maximalism, but with honest assessment and better solutions.
#Bitcoin #Privacy #Nostr #Cypherpunk #GrowNostr
