I guess the important point here is that there is not really any way to stop people from revealing information about their transactions if they chose to. So the devs may as well operate under the assumption that some people will. Hopefully we can at the very least create a social stigma against it and apply social pressure to help prevent people from doing that.

Based on some of the points you made up there, it bring up the point that perhaps we should encourage blocks to always be full. It would be a simple task. Just remove the minimum transaction fee and people would begin to use the blockchain for increasingly marginal purposes. Eventually the demand for space will overtake the supply of space and a market for space will appear. Just like that. Granted there is some pressure towards having some amount of fee or else it isnt worth it to miners to take the risk of getting their block orphaned, but none the less the argument remains just as valid even given this consideration.

*edit* im sure someone is going to point out that right now we are having to load the entire blockchain in ram so if anything, for the time being, the fee should probably be increased. But perhaps this will make more sense in the future when you guys get all of that mess figured out.

What are you on about .. ?

This is why we have a view key, which can be used as a simple proof of payment. We've literally mentioned it probably hundreds of times in this thread alone

You have the ability to choose to use multiple wallets, where you can use one to pay taxes, business, buy houses .. etc .. and then share the view key, or at least come up with some form of proof of payment.

You have the ability to choose to use one for your doctor, tickets, gifts etc .. and not share your key.

I think the devs are also working on additional ways to assist you with these efforts, but the point is that what you want is already addressed.

In the future, when the blocks are filled more than now, then some transparency transactions will not compromise the other anonymous transactions.

^This is not needed and will bloat the blockchain. In Monero a transaction is mixed with past transactions from the blockchain, so an empty block with just one transaction don't compromise the unlinkability at any way.

Anon136, I understand that you are person with substantial vested interest in XMR and that you are providing your input here in this thread.  Excellent.  What I wonder is: How are you helping the process of getting that "mess all figured out?"  I ask with complete sincerity, without contempt.  I imagine that you donate funds of some kind to the dev team, and if so, that is also excellent.  I pose the question because it seems to me that those of us with interest in the success of XMR could possibly better organize and collaborate our efforts toward the common goal.  So, you seem to be a good person to discuss this with.

I apologize if all this has been hashed out already in this thread, but with 500+ pages and daily activity, subjects are somewhat easily lost in here!

A lack of knowledge is the natural state of man, nothing to be embarassed about. -- Gregory Maxwell

why not just sell into bitcoin if you want traceability/transparency?

Ok so lets say that you want to buy some raw milk with out getting black bagged in the middle of the night. You can send the funds, they can look to see if you sent them and then send the product. So if you cant prove that the funds were sent than it is harder to damage the reputation of the seller but you still can. If one seller is getting more negative feedback in general, even with none of those claims having proof, it will still send a signal to people that perhaps they should use a different seller.

Anyway yea obviously there are advantages to being able to prove that a payment was sent. I wont dispute that.

Such as a certain 3-letter government agency? These are exactly the people we're trying to keep out. Otherwise we'd just stick to coin-join.

I cannot find any setting