⭐ Merited by suchmoon (7)
All in all, wasn't also Bitcoin "advertised" by media as drug money and so on? But time has shown that they are wrong.
I've always been a fan of Andreas Antonopoulos' response to the argument that bitcoin is used to buy drugs, which is essentially along these lines: Drugs are the second most traded commodity in the world, after food. The entire definition of money is that it can be traded for goods and services. If you can't buy the second most widely traded good in the world, then what you have isn't actually money.Yes, it's a very nice and common sense explanation he made, but most don't care / ignore it.
The Bitcoin-as-drug-money ad was trying to make people believe that buying drugs on darknet is the only use for Bitcoin.
I don't like people to look into my pockets and Bitcoin allows that too easy. Mixers fix that. Monero also fixes that. Is that illegal, I don't feel so.
Not at the moment, but I can see a future where it is. Governments the world over are prying more and more in to the lives of their citizens. Wikileaks, Snowden, etc. have shown the world that mass surveillance is commonplace. William Barr and other high ranking officials keep pressuring companies like Facebook to build backdoors in to WhatsApp and similar apps to allow the government to snoop on encrypted messages. Governments regularly request data from Google, Apple, Microsoft, health insurance companies, etc., who hand it over in the vast majority of cases. Surveillance states are growing in both number and reach, and it won't be long before governments start using blockchain analysis to ascertain exactly how much bitcoin everyone is holding, if they haven't started already.That would be a sad future if it'll happen. I hope it won't ever happen.
The fact that they try to keep everything under surveillance is not new and the phenomenon is expanding at a very fast rate, although in some cases common sense starts to prevail (CMIIW, but I think that public face recognition postponed in Europe until the software gets more mature and harder to be abused).
ToR is not illegal. So I can hope that Monero will also not become illegal. It's just a clever software after all.
(There's also a very odd reverse-psychology explanation: they'll always allow into existence some tools that - among other features - allow illegal operations too to justify the existence of the law enforcement agencies and their funding
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