Why Privacy Coins Matter
Why Privacy Coins Matter
It almost feels like it doesn’t even have to be said anymore, but it always needs to be said. Governments and corporations in the technological age have become obscenely oversized and surveillance of citizens around the globe has never been more pervasive. We all know this, and many of us don’t care because we trust our government and regulated corporations, rightfully or wrongfully so. But with the inevitable digitization of all government currencies, known as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), one can start to hypothesize reasons why there will be a lot of growth in the privacy sector of cryptocurrencies.
Essentially, if a government can create a digital dollar, or a digital yuan, digital euro, digital pound, etc, and removes paper cash from usage due to biological concerns for example, then all transactions on these government protocols would be surveilled by the states that run them at all times, in real-time. Maybe you’re still okay with this as an American citizen, but can you imagine how important a decentralized, permissionless digital money protocol might be to people trying to evade oppression in a world of CBDCs living in places like North Korea or other highly oppressive regimes? You could also imagine governments starting to play God with their own money by allowing certain transactions to process or not, allowing certain wallets to be open or not, and as always, simply shifting the number of decimals in the total supply in the currency. In the worst of cases, it would take a simple press of the delete button for a dictator to make your balance go to zero in this government-controlled digitized-monetary world.
Even on the Bitcoin and Ethereum protocols, your pseudonymity can be linked back to you as governments have learned to watch these open public databases in real-time. Again, everyone can watch so this is okay, this is a feature that makes them trusted, but this is just another reason why privacy technologies in this space are one frontier that will inevitably be explored.
Aside from all the humanitarian and 1984-evading reasons to advocate for privacy, one can also imagine there is an extensive network of money hidden from governments already in flow that will need a place to hide in this fully digital money future. Not to condone any of these activities, but from tax-evading offshore and Swiss Bank accounts to cartels and organized crime, there are trillions of dollars in today’s analog money world that will need a very private home in the digital world of tomorrow.
With Monero being the largest and most private decentralized cryptocurrency at a market cap under $3 Billion, there’s a fairly large addressable market yet to be captured by what I predict will be a basket of privacy options in the future including options built right into Bitcoin and Ethereum and a handful of other coins of preference. Still to date, nothing is offering the level of stability and anonymity as Monero is, which is why I view it as the Bitcoin of privacy markets.
You can get $xmr at kraken.com
Then download Cake Wallet on your phone and store your coins there.
