[pcwalton]

> From all state actions I’ve seen for a decade straight in the crypto space, this largely seems to be an education issue that makes the state’s ability to prosecute a brief privilege

Or, you know, they could come up to you in a San Francisco public library while your computer is unlocked and logged into your account, slap handcuffs on you, and image the contents of the laptop's RAM, establishing proof beyond a reasonable doubt that you had access to the Monero account in question. Just like they did with Ross Ulbricht.

If there's anything you should learn from the history of state actions in this space, it's that the USG is very good at overturning naive assumptions about the real-world anonymity of these technologies.

[yieldcrv]

What happened in 2013 has nothing to do with the time frame I mentioned, 2016 through 2026. The infrastructure is different now to the point that government's don't even try stunts like that and darknet markets are larger than ever - practically immediately since the takedown of Silk Road and onwards. Ross' plight was an instruction manual of both what not to do, and to implement what everyone already knew to do but was to lazy to in the face of only theoretical threats at the time. The government moved once and the whole ecosystem hardened.

Your recount of events is hyperbolic for emphasis about naive assumptions - attempted to rehash an XKCD comic strip - yet is a wholly unrelated attack surface. The imaging of Ross' laptop did not prove everything about the case, it did not prove ownership of some servers, and Ross was not using Monero which as several US court cases in the time frame I mentioned, specifically, for a reason, have shown, the US government has no access to Monero it believes it has seized in those cases. Doesn't even know the balances or whether its still there.

What you wrote isn't even a counterpoint to the concept of having basic privacy. This isn't a how to on how to deter the government, it deters everyone. If you're doing something that needs to involve the intelligence community, then do more or don't do it at all. But the gradient of actors from people that can't subpoena you, to ones that could but get nothing from said power, are all things to consider.