The best case scenario would be a coin that seemed public and traceable, but that had good fungability/anonymity features.

We shouldn't hold back fungibility because we are afraid the gov. won't back us. They already don't support us, and they probably wont for a very, very long time.

who is holding it back? it is actively being worked on

Contrary to popular belief, i think mixers are secure enough for most people until real fungibility arrives. That is to say, as long as you don't face a capable adversary, your fine.

I wouldn't worry about Coinbase or whatever tracing mixer tx's to find out what your buying. But i wouldn't count on pissing off the NSA and getting away with it either.

Like most layman OpSec these days, it depends on your threat model.

Crypto gives me much needed hope for the future, but I do worry about its possible ideological perversion. However, I don't think we can shove it back into Pandora's box, which gives me solace

The fact that it is out of the box is the good news, and just in time as well as physical cash is going away and governments are starting to issue their ID-tied digital fiat (Like China).

The firewall and internet censorship that was prevalent in China and heavily criticized by the west in the mid 2000s are coming to the west now, China is just ahead o the curve.

Now China is doing Social-Credit where every purchase or sale you make will affect your social credit score, what good is money if you can not chose what to spend it on without consequences.

It's like that episode of Black Mirror where they use your social media to judge whether you can rent apartments and stuff like that.

It is way worse than Black Mirror, every thing you do at all times is recorded, there is no voluntary sharing.

Example, if you play video games, it is registered, and it will affect your social credit negatively the longer your play, there are some limits as well where you become a delinquent fo sorts

They do not crawl through your social media to check for gaming related posts, or "I played 10 hours today, lol" they get the data of your actions automatically by you being ID-tagged online.

As much as some of our Chinese friends like @Kokansei and @minkaminka praise or at least understand Chinese motivations and choices with censorship and such, China seems like hell to me.

And your wallet (mobile) is tied to your ID, and every transaction you make will be affecting yours score - and the score of those that are around you.

I could never live in a society like China's, and i know that's exactly where the United States is trying to go and follow in their footsteps.

Mainland China is a one-party communist party state, and the censorship and surveillance is in large part a way to solidify the position of the one-party system.

Like moths to the flame, we tread closer and closer towards authoritarianism under the guise of socialism and "progress."

The US may be following in China footstep, but at a snails pace compared to the EU.

@Bryce, funny thing is that all the praise that China has gotten the last 20 years has been because they let in a little bit of capitalism into their socialism.

Then they to a turnaround and say, look at the communist China, their socialist system has explosive growth.

All of those utopias people refer to are fueled by capitalism behind the curtain. Especially the Scandanavian "Social Democracies" that use the Nordic Model.

I think the beautiful thing about bitcoin is that it has been rapidly increasing in adoption, despite its anti-state ideological foundation.

Capitalism – Communism. What's the difference? They work so well together, I see no point in trying to separate them.

This discussion probably should be in the capitalism topic though