One way to make something popular is to offer something that people ogle and get jealous if others have it and they don't.
Humans hate to miss the party. Humans are social. This is the game of life.
I suspect the reason my CoolPage reached 300,000 to a million users in the first 3 years (multiply by 10 in today's internet), was because people visiting the websites created with it, saw the little sky blue background with golden font advertising button that was on every page that used the free version. At the time (1998 to 2001), possessing a custom designed webpage on Yahoo Geocities was a status symbol of being really cool and hip with the new technologies. And we offered them "drag + drop creation and one click publishing". Later 100s of editors followed suit but we were (ahem "I" the one-man company was) one of the first to offer that in 1998 in an ad-button supported freeware download. And I put a lot of effort into making the GUI really user friendly and even added point-and-click DHTML programming GUI. Technically CoolPage sucked. I was so embarrassed I stopped developing it.
The filipino artist modeled the Cool Page surfer dude on me, lol. But I designed the blue button and the custom font for CoolPage.
Edit: I wrote upthread that anonymity could be unwound for ring signatures if authorities can require you to reveal your private keys (a.k.a. passwords), i.e. allow you to have privacy to the public but not to the government. Astute readers surely smugly ignored me thinking that if the authorities already know your identity in order to require your passwords, then you don't have anonymity. Well this unstated rebuttal falls apart on several levels. One as I said, you revealing your password lowers the anonymity set for those who didn't reveal. Secondly, you may wish to report for tax purposes some funds you bring from the non-reported anonymous world back into the mainstream fiat world, so then the authorities may require you reveal your passwords so they can verify the tax basis you claim for your capital gains. As you know the rulings for example in the USA is that mining is income and the tax basis for capital gains starts at the time of the coinbase transaction.
Humans hate to miss the party. Humans are social. This is the game of life.
I suspect the reason my CoolPage reached 300,000 to a million users in the first 3 years (multiply by 10 in today's internet), was because people visiting the websites created with it, saw the little sky blue background with golden font advertising button that was on every page that used the free version. At the time (1998 to 2001), possessing a custom designed webpage on Yahoo Geocities was a status symbol of being really cool and hip with the new technologies. And we offered them "drag + drop creation and one click publishing". Later 100s of editors followed suit but we were (ahem "I" the one-man company was) one of the first to offer that in 1998 in an ad-button supported freeware download. And I put a lot of effort into making the GUI really user friendly and even added point-and-click DHTML programming GUI. Technically CoolPage sucked. I was so embarrassed I stopped developing it.
The filipino artist modeled the Cool Page surfer dude on me, lol. But I designed the blue button and the custom font for CoolPage.
Edit: I wrote upthread that anonymity could be unwound for ring signatures if authorities can require you to reveal your private keys (a.k.a. passwords), i.e. allow you to have privacy to the public but not to the government. Astute readers surely smugly ignored me thinking that if the authorities already know your identity in order to require your passwords, then you don't have anonymity. Well this unstated rebuttal falls apart on several levels. One as I said, you revealing your password lowers the anonymity set for those who didn't reveal. Secondly, you may wish to report for tax purposes some funds you bring from the non-reported anonymous world back into the mainstream fiat world, so then the authorities may require you reveal your passwords so they can verify the tax basis you claim for your capital gains. As you know the rulings for example in the USA is that mining is income and the tax basis for capital gains starts at the time of the coinbase transaction.
I was too late. Our HTML editor few years later was not successful.
As you remember there are view keys designed to reveal transactions when needed. So the problem of alleged requirements to reveal private keys can be exaggerated.
Degree of anonymity is subjective. Very few people want full secrecy (ie off-grid), because to have a functioning society, there has to be government (read: civil protection) at some level. It can be Federal, State, County, Parish or Local, but human society is made of connected individuals.
All those levels of govt. are interested (and not interested) in various degrees according to their remits.