675b8 - 1d
Yeah I tend to agree with your last paragraph there. Idealism is needed in the world, and has significant benefits "below the surface" of one's life. And he's right in the general thesis of "it's inevitable that there is a straying from the original principles". But the original principles never disappeared in Linux, nor Bitcoin (heavily overlapping in FOSS ofc)
2nd paragraph: I think it's just debatable. The basic mechanism you point to is clearly something that has to be taken into account (anon set size). The ecash one is particularly interesting because, many years ago I used to be fond of pointing out: if you want information-theoretically perfect privacy, you need to use Chaum's ecash type scheme (digicash), except, it absolutely didn't work because it was centralized and so it just stopped existing. Clearly systems like zcash and monero made different, more nuanced tradeoffs. I continue to be doubtful about Chaumian mints. The new extra ingredient is Lightning, but debating the merits of that hybrid is more about LN than Chaumian cash imo. Imo the value of Chaumian mints is in more in scenarios where anonymity is valuable for an ephemeral client server relationship. Examples: Tor, Lightning routing nodes, coinjoin servers or generally buying digital services from a persistent online entity.
I've never believed that the community is what counts. Anything that works as a currency is functioning to overcome the limitations of human community at larger scales. A currency that depends on community will eventually fail.
675b8 - 23h
Thanks! I am mostly talking about custodialness, and central control. And it is also true that claims of really strong privacy are really hard in any system; in this case, since there is a central coordination point, that can be a reason those claims fail. I think coinjoin is a natural fit with Lightning (dual funding, but not only that, e.g. batched opens).
