[arcticbull]

... promoted by old money.

I didn't know old money was defined as anyone who didn't want to get attacked by well-funded terrorists. In the future, I'd avoid this kind of conspiracy theory advocacy as it weakens any argument you staple it to.

AML/KYC and the OFAC list aren't there because the acronyms make you sound fancy. They're there because society agrees payments should be censorable.

[feanaro]

Does it agree? Or is the average person just too uninformed and powerless to do anything about it, particularly because sinister effects of such procedures are long-term and hard to see?

After all, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are also a product of society.

[arcticbull]

If you don't want to have an OFAC list I suggest you petition your congressperson and see how far you get. Or take your case to the people! Tell me, who do you want to pay that you can't right now, because they're Syrian/Iranian/North Korean?

[feanaro]

I don't have a congressperson. I like having privacy in my payments even though I (to my knowledge) do not fund criminals. I do find that I share this sentiment with many people I talk to about it.

[arcticbull]

Bitcoin payments aren’t private or anonymous, they’re pseudonymous and consequently if it ever actually catches on beyond the seedy underbelly of scamming investors, automated deanonymization will be standard, and you will somehow enjoy even less privacy.

[feanaro]

I doubt routine, automated deanonymization will ever be the standard for Bitcoin, but even if so, there are better alternatives when it comes to privacy, such as Monero. I have no doubt others will appears too.

In any case, the point is that privacy of financial transactions is a good thing.

[arcticbull]

You say that like it's self-evident, but it isn't. You haven't presented a compelling argument for why absolute privacy in financial transactions matters, let alone is an objective good.

However, my argument isn't just against private, it's also against trustless. Censoring transactions to entities deemed by society as harmful (terrorists, sanctioned entities) is a good thing. This cannot be implemented with a trustless system. If Monero were totally private but had a way of determining if the payees were sanctioned entities, that would be one thing, but it doesn't. Auditability matters. How can you track down the next Enron if you can't see their transactions? How can you follow the flow of stolen money? It's fantasy.

Default-hidden, available on subpoena is the middle ground all law and order societies have deemed to be the right place to draw the line. You need to have a solid basis for why this should be thrown away, and how you plan to address these things.

This feels like a software engineering "this system is too complicated to modify, let's throw it out and start over; thus solving the problem once and for all" type deal.