I have to be honest, barely a day goes by when I'm not frustrated by the completely false narrative being broadcast by basically every public speaker on the topic of Bitcoin:

* Bitcoin is fully traceable and not fungible

* Chainalysis works on bitcoin

Triggering me today 😂 .. was the "What Bitcoin did" podcast on the interesting topic of human rights in authoritarian countries. This narrative in full force there, too.

Is it completely hopeless to get people to understand better? 1/n

"Is it completely hopeless to get people to understand better?"

Pretty much.
Waaayyy too many people don't see/understand the importance of privacy ("I have nothing to hide" nonsense).
Yet there is this thing call the privacy-paradox in which ppl say privacy is important, but don't change their behavior to improve it. Most are not even willing and the ones that do, probably don't know how or do it incorrectly.

I'm comfortable with the CLI, but don't understand most of what you wrote


Right. I'm afraid on reflection people will have the wrong takeaway, namely "yeah bitcoin could be pretty private if you understand a bunch of bizarro-world tech jargon and can program your toaster in C", but that's not what i meant :) A lot of what I'm talking about is what you *can't* know, and a lot of it is also about how when other people do nonstandard stuff on the blockchain (like LN, not necessarily CLI stuff), it helps your privacy.



I do think 'normal' people can and should use privacy and fungibility enhancing techniques, just make it so that people use it without realizing or understanding it.
That LN uses Tor routing is brilliant imo.
I don't know if coinjoins is already part of going to/from L1 to L2, but it would be great if it was.

IIUC coinjoins with Schnorr makes it cheaper then normal txs. More of those things please (ie ppl have a financial motivation to do the right thing)


@patestevao on bird site has an amazing gift on making hard stuff (conceptually) understandable for 'normal' people.

My CLI remark was an attempted shorthand to indicate that I do/can understand several technical things (more then others)


Yes. And thanks for mentioning Schnorr. It was probably a mistake not to mention: Schnorr, taproot at least (and some other things) within the "you don't know what transactions mean" list of techniques; the only difference there is that they are not yet available. It may be a little while before they are.

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