"Financial privacy" isn't a real thing, because you owe taxes on income and investments. Can you explain to me how your tax assessor is able, then, to properly identify your income and tax you on it as appropriate?

(Money laundering and tax evasion do not always go hand-in-hand. Many launderers pay taxes as a cost of doing business. Cryptocurrency mixers seem to treat tax evasion as a feature.)

For one thing, life imprisonment (LiP) is a pretty big deterrent, and among the few willing to risk it, defense tech and the surveillance state are generally winning the arms race against individual actors and small groups ("terrorists"). Lots of people want to kill world leaders and yet assassination attempts (let alone successes!) are quite rare. This leaves the question of less-defended people, and there it's more mixed: it's much easier to do but 10^6-10^10 fewer people want to kill them which makes it a lot easier to catch the conspirators simply by tracking who had motive. Finally, everyday victims don't usually have haters with enough capital to motivate someone to risk LiP - again, making it easy to track down the perps by motive.

But in an increasingly computational world it seems useful, probably inevitable, that digital programmable money will play a bigger part in the future.

So do we want p2p borderless networks, built on a history of foss and the internet, with varying mixtures of privacy and transparency? or do we want government digital coins that will likely be fully surveilled and centrally controlled?

which is more resilient? which is harder to corrupt? which provides everyday people with liberty and control? which removes power from rulers and pushes it to participants?

"We should keep cash" doesn't seem like a reasonable stance to take at this point. We need to defend our rights to publish free open source code, to freely associate over networks with other individuals and organisations, and to maintain/develop our privacy in our private interactions.

I dont see the version made by the government respecting those concerns, it is too easy to throw up a patriot act, to say "what about the paedophiles/terrorists/drugdealers" and suddenly law abiding citizens have their rights restricted and power becomes ever more centralised and hierarchical.

It is surprising to me to come to a site called hackernews, and see such little hacker spirit. It really feels that "crypto is icky" idea has taken hold so strongly that people are happy to give up their rights because the people they dont like will be less profitable. That is incredibly sad.

It seems if you post a SAAS website for finding rare sneakers you get HN praise as though that is peak culture, but if you choose to hack on money, ownership, provision of public goods, voting, borderless systems, and anonymous organisations, to actually address what power and democracy looks like in our future you are too close the dirty people. No we must stay as we are, we must trust the institutions, because everyone was happy before bitcoin, right?...

Also, Ethereum could adopt privacy by default some day, via their proposal process.

It's fascinating to watch regulators talk about "bitcoin" and "ethereum" as if they're "gold" and "oil", unchanging commodities that just need to be categorized and dealt with appropriately.

Ethereum is totally publicly visible today, but it does not need to be that way tomorrow. These are living projects.

Note I used "would" not "should", the latter is ideology, the former acknowledgement of reality.