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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

I have been a crypto evangelist since it was a weird nerd hobby nobody knew about for this exact reason. It should be nobody's business who I transfer value to or why. The corpo-state has had control of the levers and dials of currency for way too long. They can still enforce laws, and if I'm causing some illegal event to occur by paying money to someone, that event is still illegal. Arrest me for that. But get rid of the rent seeking and monetary policy that seems to just make the whole problem worse.

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I don't understand this assumption that crypto transactions are nobody's business. That's a feature of cash payments, which from what I understand can only be emulated in crypto by transferring control over a non-custodial wallet, which is cumbersome to the average person.

If you're crypto banking with a third party that muddles your wallet's transactions you've already added one of the institutions you claim to be against.

If you transact on the blockchain, you're broadcasting who your wallet transacts with on levels that are far more publicly transparent than how fiat is traded via institutions.

We need to change this perception. Setting up a hot wallet on a phone only takes a few minutes and is perfect for holding a small amount of crypto.

Projects like monero (https://www.getmonero.org/) ensure privacy and fungibility of the crypto you hold.

It should still be easier, but let's not pretend this is technology only available to those with deep tech experience.

The Monero download page requires me to choose my system architecture to get an installer, and insists that I absolutely must "verify the hashes" of the "archive". When I ran the installer, it first identified as "monero-gui-install-win-x64-v0.18.4.0" published by "Unknown", then as "Monero Fluorine Fermi GUI Wallet", and about 3/4 of the way through the setup my antivirus popped up to block it.

I don't think this is effectively available to anyone without deep tech experience, and any non-technical user who's willing to click through this kind of thing is definitely drowning in malware that will steal their crypto.

That is true in very unsophisticated systems. It's not true in zksnark based systems and it's not true on monero.

In any case, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying with crypto I need not ask permission to make a transaction. Whether that transaction should be open to government inspection after the fact is another matter entirely.

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