There are 3 votes for Against but not saying a word here. That says they need privacy just for voting

Anyway,  most probably because of what happened to Monero being delisted in some exchanges which if BTC has privacy features, may just be the basis for lawmakers to also ban the coin.

I don't really know much about the technical aspect of Bitcoin from the layman's view privacy feature has both advantages and disadvantages. One of the beauties of Bitcoin transactions is that in the public domain where anybody can access them. This makes the transaction transparent and easy to trace. Making the transactions private will cause people to lose the benefit of tracing transactions. Anyone who desires extra privacy can use other tools.  However, the attack on privacy services would have assisted interested Bitcoiners to remain anonymous is making this difficult.

Having a privacy feature in Bitcoin will increase government attacks on the sector. It will increase the claim that Bitcoin is used for criminal activities. It could lead to a ban on Bitcoin in some locations like the US. Bitcoin is been integrated into the financial system of the US because the country has developed robust policies and strategies to regulate the industry. The way they are attacking privacy services is the same way they will attack BItcoin if it becomes fully anonymous.

Nevertheless, I support the implementation of privacy features in Bitcoin but I am scared that it will attract more enemies to the sector.

I also agree with you on this, but let's think of it from the perspective of the government, seeing bitcoin as a terrorist tool. It has been long there, and they have been treating it as such, even as they are fighting against privacy tools that are preventing them from tracking down every transaction they want, with or without mixing services that believe the idea they already have about Bitcoin being used for criminal activities can't change easily.
 
If a privacy protocol can be implemented on Bitcoin, then it's a yes from me, and most people will support that. Even if countries like the US want to kick against it and ban it from being traded by their citizens, it will only be a matter of time before, with growing demand, they will still have no other option than to start accepting it again.

I miss an "optional" button in the poll, maybe even something like "off-chain"/"sidechain".

Because I would be very likely against implementing a mandatory privacy feature like Monero or Grin have, for the simple reason it would make Bitcoin less scalable, and it would also need a hard fork which would basically re-start the transaction graph. And I think that an optional privacy feature would lead to an anonymity set large enough - because it's Bitcoin and not some random altcoin.

About the tools I would like to see implemented: mainly my bet would be for better support for sidechains, because in this case sidechains can go fully private. Imagine a Monero-style sidechain with a token 2-way-pegged to Bitcoin. I think however that could bring some additional challenges, because of the need of sidechain users to monitor "unruly" coin creation. But anyway that would affect only sidechain users, not the mainchain users.

In general I would approve the Litecoin model with MWEB too, but I think extension blocks will unfortunately not make it into Bitcoin.

This would be ineffective for governments if the goal is to combat crime, because you could buy Bitcoin still via atomic swaps with Ethereum for example or any non-privacy altcoin. And atomic swaps cannot be banned nor prevented in any way - see also this thread. Yes, the ETFs would be probably gone in most countries.

Monero actually increased its usage even after it was delisted at Binance, as you can see in the last stretch of this graph (ignore the spikes, these were spam attacks probably):



Source: Bitinfocharts

It's price is also slowly recovering, compared with Bitcoin, even taking into account some more recent news (e.g. Kraken delistings in several European countries).

But see what I wrote above. I also think it's 99,9999999 unlikely that we will see "mandatory privacy" on Bitcoin. But better support of optional privacy would be cool. Taproot was already an improvement on that.

I'm generally pro-privacy (any that isn't is dumb), but things are more nuanced than vote no == against privacy. It's more of the fact that privacy upgrades in the base chain can be quite dangerous for Bitcoin stability wise as it would be such a huge upgrade that would put everything at risk.


I think we can love Bitcoin but at the same time criticize it.

If you look at his resume, you'd probably understand why he'd be talking about cryptography, he leaked the information that NSA or in extension, the US government is spying on it's people and I think that's already a valid reason to call out the dangers of not having a good privacy in bitcoin because he knows what he's talking about in terms of offensive security. Regarding the privacy feature, I think that bitcoin can probably benefit to a more robust and stronger privacy, I really don't like the idea that institutional investors and the government is already getting into the bitcoin market so I'd like to see that I'd still be safe from all of these groups that would be trying to look at what I'm doing with my bitcoin.

I guess Monero has sufficiently proven that it can be trusted on this. So, for me, there's really no reason why Bitcoin should be provided with the same capacity at the protocol level. After all, Bitcoin isn't designed to be a privacy coin.

And perhaps more importantly, Bitcoin might lose most, if not all, of what it has already achieved so far in terms of adoption. Integrating privacy features on Bitcoin might only make it an enemy of states which result to businesses and even individuals prohibited from using it. Everything registered or legally compliant that's linked to Bitcoin will be gone.

I'm against it because Bitcoin is working fine and without any problems, we don't need to apply such a major change in the protocol that has to be implemented through a hard fork that would fundamentally change Bitcoin and comes with a lot of dangers and unknown consequences.

Any such features should be added on top of Bitcoin with side-chains, second layers, other works like the CoinJoin proposal, etc. At the end of the day Bitcoin is not an anon-coin.

Neither "for" nor "against".

I don't want to see privacy features at the protocol level because it would make Bitcoin becomes privacy coins, then the government, centralized exchanges, banks start to ban Bitcoin.

At the same time, I didn't mean to make Bitcoin to lost it's privacy because I'm also a privacy oriented person.

Bitcoin is fine now, it offer freedom to choose, you can choose CEX to hand your coins, you can choose to get rid from CEX etc.

If certain privacy feature also manage to improve scalability (e.g. due to smaller TX size or faster time to verify the TX), i see no strong reason to against such privacy feature.


I'd rather see him made constructive critic Bitcoin rather than exaggerate what Bitcoin can do.