It wouldn't be surprising. Aside from potentially hindering Bitcoin adaption, privacy feature usually leads to higher TX size or longer verification time. In addition, gmaxwell propose Confidental Transaction back on 2015[1], but it was never added into Bitcoin protocol and added into Monero protocol (as part of RingCT) on 2017.

[1] https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/1085273.0

What is Jameson implying by that statement. Does he mean that Bitcoin developers don't see eye to eye on this?

I'm definitely not skilled enough to be called a 'developer', but I think you're just totally underestimating how difficult it is to achieve this without potentially fucking up the entire protocol. Bitcoin is already gigantic enough that we can't afford to move fast and try to just push upgrades under the sun.




He's implying that things look far more difficult and complicated than most people think.

bitcoin is a public ledger on purpose so the network can audit that the value transfer is real to avoid new/fake/unruled currency unit injection and avoid double spending and other financial security failures which can happen in other systems of lax financial security

tricks like gmax/a.backs' CT are not true privacy of the users involved. but just appearance of randomising the amounts within the group of who received what within a small set group, and done in a bloated wasteful data way, thus not really achieving anything, because child transactions upon leaving the set group later reveal how the amounts are then distributed.. it only works if the group stay together and keep spending within the group.. for outsiders to not know who received what(research 'federated transactions'/multisig groups). as soon as they leave the group to take their shares it then undoes all the effort and outsiders then see who took what.
in short it only hides the spend amount of that moment not the end net result of who gets what when they go their own way outside the spending event

the funny part is you dont need anything complicated at protocol level to achieve CT, it can be done at a groups own wallet level of agreeing to use a agreed signing process. without needing all the added bloat

hence why CT didnt go far

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bitcoin already doesnt request human identifiers to move value.. and if we start messing with the auditability of the value itself where its no longer easy to see value being spent did originate from a real blockreward. or which address authorised value transfer it owned.. it then breaks financial security, thus breaking the purpose of bitcoin as a whole.
id rather have sound money, not mumbled deaf money

That is simply impossible because Bitcoin was not designed that way. If we add privacy features into the existing protocol (eg. though some weird soft fork) that won't fix anything because opt-in privacy is not improving the whole system.

The alternative is a hard fork that fundamentally changes a lot of things about the Bitcoin protocol. Why break what is already working fine and risk the whole system crumbling down? Most importantly why do it when something like Monero already exists?

A better solution is to work on privacy improving techniques that are more decentralized and get people to use them more. But solutions that are built on top of Bitcoin (like decentralized CoinJoin). It would still be opt-in and won't improve the whole system but at the same time it won't require any kind of fork and change in the protocol that could break things.

Monero is cool and has better privacy, but we need something that is easier to implement in Bitcoin protocol, maybe privacy sidechain would work great for this, without increasing TX size.

No.
Real problem is that certain someone doesn't want to have any privacy on bitcoin, and on anything else that people use for that matter.
There are other coins that have much better privacy, so it's possible to do it and we don't need a century to do that.

Honestly, I don't consider Snowden an authority, considering that he's been living in Russia for over a decade now, and got Russian citizenship, awarded personally and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by an internationally recognized war criminal Putin.
I support leaks in the interest of civil society, and I respect privacy, but that's not the same as what Snowden's been up to for a while now.
For me, Bitcoin is private enough, with the pseudonymity and non-custodial wallets requiring no private information.

This would lead to a mass exodus of miners, which means way less hashrate, therefore it would take ages to mine a new block before the difficulty readjustment. Do we really want that?

Even Satoshi himself hadn't envisioned such a doomsday scenario... he took it for granted that hashrate would always go up long-term.

Truth be told he had envisioned Monero-like features in Bitcoin:



And no, it's impossible to implement RingCT with a soft fork, you need a hard fork (good luck trying to convince 90% of the miners):

https://jonasnick.github.io/blog/2016/12/17/a-problem-with-ringct/

If Bitcoin add the same feature like Monero, it has been banned by most of countries because privacy coins was been delisted by many big exchanges. So far Bitcoin is already very good, it give a freedom to choose whether people need to use privacy tools or not.

Edwards Snowden think he's Satoshi Nakamoto, so he has a huge power to make the developers listen to him, while actually he's just an Average Joe in Bitcoin...

You definitely don't understand Bitcoin if you really think Satoshi Nakamoto has such a power/influence over BTC devs.

Hell, BTC Core devs have zero power/influence over miners... miners have the final word, since they possess the hashrate.