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No we don't, the ability to have and hold value without monitoring is an inalienable right afa I'm concerned and i think everyone should hold that belief.
I agree. In addition privacy and anonymity are needed in order to ensure fungibility in crypto currencies, and fungibility is is a necessary requirement of money.
Then there is of course the adaptive blocksize in Monero which ensures that there is no arbitrary limit on the number of transactions per second.
People in this scene don't know how important and rare this is.
I have a question about adaptive blocksizes. What if Monero becomes truly successful and the active users reach 100,000,000. Will 50gb blocks be possible if transactions reach the touted Visa standard? If yes then how will the blockchain be maintainable?
Block 1206356 contains 10 transactions in 31655 bytes. That's 3165.5 bytes per transaction (there's different ratio in each block and I'm not sure about the mean. With CT the ratio will change, I suppose). 50GB per block are about 17 million transactions per block (510 million transactions per hour). At that rate a single 4TB HDD could store less then 3 hours of blocks. We can't keep that rate at decentralized manner currently.