A consideration on the future of anonymous, decentralized blockchain financial applications:
Since the end of World War II, rogue regimes and nations, including dictators, be them right-wing or left-wing despots, terrorist states and extremist groups were, until now, kept in check through economic sanctions. Though arguably better than chaos, this "system", like so many things in life, isn't perfect, and it has been abused more than we might have wished for in the past, unfortunately. However, the advent of distributed blockchain financial technologies is disrupting that paradigm. It is, fundamentally, a shifting of power away from those who dominated the world post-WW2, mostly the modern democracies.
I ask you to do the mental exercise of imagining what the end-game of all this might be, to please stop being naïve by assuming that everyone out there is well-intended and all they want to do is to just hide their finances from "big government". You must go further than that. Because history has so often been unreasonable, you must think of much, much larger scales, and take the concepts to their apparently unreasonable limits. Contemplate all possibilities, from all sides.
By the very nature of this technology, it is available to anyone with internet access, organized or not, large or small, good or bad, sociopaths, psychopaths, misanthropes, religious fundamentalist extremists, you name it.
Can such fringe entities now have access to the means of mining, or secretly benefit from cryptocurrency technology? How many covert warehouses full of mining equipment do tyrants now control? Additionally, all over the world, there are thousands of infiltrators, spies, and secret agents, they can easily bypass the hurdle of KYC through their double identities, and accumulate and siphon cryptocurrency. Think of the scale; a nation has the budget and manpower to manage thousands, maybe millions, of separate cryptocurrency wallets. How many of these "whales" are owned by such entities?
Can rogue countries now find funding for their weaponry? Can Iran now fund its nuclear research program without outside interference? Can North Korea modernize its military and, who knows, twenty years in the future forcefully annex S. Korea? Russia's been doing that lately, will it get even more daring with the new found source of funds? What about Venezuela, can the elite keep on abusing the impoverished population by simply hitting defi loans and liquidity pools? And, can they now all help each other by easily, and surreptitiously, transferring money using anonymity coins, like Monero?
What happens once they realize they don't even have to sell crypto back into fiat, that they don't need to "cash out", that 'on' and 'off-ramps' are redundant, and that they can just handle everything among their shady allies by bartering crypto and privacy coins?
Are we, in our quest for personal financial freedom and privacy, not aiding the wrong kind of people as well? Keep this in mind: these tools are not only available to the little guy.
History repeatedly shows that catastrophes often begin with seemingly harmless beginnings. Remember, World War I began with a single shot, by a single man against another man. I don't see crypto bringing about a prosperous future for mankind. I see crypto as an expression of the dark side of human nature: a disorganized, self-centered, chaotic force, structurally unbalancing the powers that be on this planet, and ultimately, possibly, lead to WW3.
What do you think will happen?
Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/o8zqf8/a_consideration_on_the_future_of_anonymous/
