Quote from: jdillon on November 14, 2013, 04:04:20 PM

Gregory Maxwell made an excellent post on this subject, emphasis mine:

Quote from: gmaxwell on November 13, 2013, 11:52:14 PM

We're not going to be able to prevent well funded business people from attempting to promote horrific architectures against the long term interest of Bitcoin and the public... if we could, the same stupidity would have been prevented in the wider world and there would be less need for Bitcoin.

It's hard to count the number of times newbies have made proposals which would have centralized Bitcoin completely in the name of some fool result or another. Powerful businesses interests are now reliving the same history of bad ideas, but this time the bad ideas will be funded and they don't care if luminaries tell them that they're horrible ideas, they don't necessarily care about any of the principles that make Bitcoin a worthwhile contribution to the world.

It's not, of course, a question of "anonymity": thats silly. If you have "good" and "bad" coins, that destroys fungibility, rapidly everyone must screen coins they accept or risk being left holding the bag. Fungiblity is an essential property of a money like good and without it the money cannot remove transactional friction. Privacy is also essential for fair markets: Without privacy your counter-parties and competition can see into your finances get a raise and get a rent hike, and as long as there are power imbalances between people privacy is essential for human dignity.

To stop this nonsense we have to make it impractical to pull off by changing the default behavior in the Bitcoin ecosystem: We consider the lack of a central authority to be an essential virtue, which means that we can't be protected by one either. We must protect ourselves. This means things like avoiding address reuse, avoiding centralized infrastructure, adopting and funding! privacy enhancing technology.

Miners can play a role in this as Bitcoin users, but also by supporting mining pools and methods that promote privacy. They want to force people to use identified addresses so they can blacklist? What happens when miners start deprioritizing transactions that use addresses that have been previously seen?

Gregory Maxwell gets it the Foundation should be nothing more than a privately funded public lobby and leave development to the community.