Quote from: nelson4lov on October 17, 2021, 09:06:23 PM

I'd like to admit that when I first got started with crypto, I was big on the whole privacy and anonymity thing but over time, I think that took another direction. I mean, I've a couple of jobs that required me to do a video call with people and a couple of other thing that revealed a thing or two about me. I think many people got into crypto for privacy but everything changes at some point. I know those people that were big on privacy projects have, at some point,compromised themselves too.

When you say that you took privacy and anonymity very seriously when you started with crypto, that also implies that you fully understood how privacy and anonymity in the crypto context really plays out! I would argue that most of the people getting into crypto, even those who joined pretty early, didn't 100% certainly know how this sector would develop and what is required to really, really stay anonymous and leave zero trails.

When I thought about that topic, I frequently asked myself: "What is required to really stay anonymous in this game?". The fact alone that this answer has changed over time, clearly reveals that I would have fucked up in the beginning anyway if I intended to stay anonymous back then. I learned so much new stuff so quickly and realized again and again that staying anonymous forever is almost impossible for literally everyone. Nobody really knew in 2011 that obfuscation protocols would show up soon. Mixers were around pretty early, but it seems that some of them can be cracked by Chainalysis and so on and so forth. I am just saying that staying anonymous with steps required today doesn't mean that measures taken today also ensure anonymity in the technological context of tomorrow.

Those who can anticipate even that and understand how the future most likely plays out with technological advancements in relation to certain capabilities of protocols, seriously, that is a very very small number people being able to pull that off.