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In my little corner of the universe DASH, Monero, and similar coins ARE fully legal. I don't know where you live where the so-called authorities have proclaimed that they are punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.
All the regulation that such a coin needs is accomplished by its algorithmic rulesets.
I guess you just misunderstood me. Pseudo-anonymity is definitely something that has helped Bitcoin become regulated or even classified as a currency in some places. Governments are definitely going to be against fully anonymous coins because of the dangers of money laundering (some are even against Bitcoin for this very reason). When I say that they can't become legal, I did not imply that they were illegal (now). I thought that things weren't legal unless declared so, thus being in a neutral stance?
I was talking about regulation in legal norm. Algorithmic rulesets are irrelevant to this.
I thought Monero wasn't able to be transparent but I remember reading Monero also had an inbuilt feature to make payments transparent if the user wanted. I think this is a good thing. I don't think Bitcoin the way it is now, would be a good idea to be mainstream, it needs to be more anonymous. Greg Maxwell has commented on this, he said he doesn't want to live in a world with a global transparent ledger, that's why he wants to introduce the confidential transactions BIP. I think he is right, and a global transparent ledger like we have now is NSAs wet dream. We need a more obfuscated way to deal with transactions in a standardized way.
I'm not aware of the exact functionality that Monero offers. I've been trying to stay away from things that shills promote out of their respective section.
Well this suggestion might be actually a good thing. I looked around and it is related to Blockstream. However, I think that there should be no change to the default anonymity of Bitcoin, but rather just add this functionality.