The option is certainly there for people to use Bitcoin in the correct manner if they wish to. They'll be the rare fortunate ones to gain the privacy and security benefits. I'll always advocate for taking this approach. But I think the number of people actually doing it will remain relatively small. Even if it is safer and more beneficial.
One problem. Due to every body else happily abiding to Know Your Customer and all other sorts of policies and regulations, us who choose to benefit from Privacy and Security are starting to suffer. The option to use Bitcoin as it was meant to be used is still there. But this option is slowly becoming not an option any more if only few of us can spend and receive without giving up personally identifiable information.
By restricting us, every body else kind of enforces the Know Your Customer way into every body. Realistically speaking. How difficult is it today to buy and sell Bitcoin with no Know Your Customer compared to five years ago? The people who were abiding before and who did not care is not affected in any way today. On the other end of the stick, we are affected enormously.
It is nice that we still get a chance to use Bitcoin the way we want. But while that is due to the lack of Censorship in Bitcoin, restrictions make it almost impossible to use it the way we really want nowadays.
True. But there are good reasons why KYC rules have been enforced. It's the reason why those rules exist in the first place.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that exchanges run by companies have to comply with financial laws. Only reason that didn't used to be the case for crypto exchanges is because the industry was new enough and small enough that govt wasn't even paying attention.
But for sure as a community we need to get more/better options of keeping privacy through decentralized exchanges and stuff. Though then you get into the quandry that if Bitcoin DEXes actually grew large enough to be very useful for people, that means they'd have enough volume to be useful to criminals and terrorists and the like who want to sell large amounts of money. So then, any moral creator of a decentralized exchange has to be like ok how do I stop bad people from using what I made to be used by regular law abiding people who just want to take advantage of bitcoin's privacy. But it's literally KYC/AML laws that do that, which are what take away privacy haha.
I don't know what the win-win answer for that quandry is. It's the age old privacy vs security question. People want both, but kind of like blockchain's decentralization vs capacity issue, increasing one tends to weaken the other. Only thing I can think of would be local bitcoin networks spread all over the world so you can exchange fiat-to-bitcoin and vice versa locally instead of having global large volume DEXes that are beacons to criminals. I guess that's basically what LocalBitcoins was back in the day but I'm pretty sure they closed up shop years ago.