Hello, I read your twitter thread. While privacy is absolutely important, your reasoning is fundamentally flawed. In the context of financial transactions, we know from a ridiculous amount of history with banking regulations that it's not ordinary people who benefit from having complete privacy and anonymity in all matters. It's criminals and fraudsters who lie and misrepresent themselves to conceal the source of their funds and their activities. They'll gladly continue to use their privacy as a weapon to disguise themselves and further rob and steal. There is no other group that benefits as much from being able to transfer large amounts of money secretly. This can be verified over and over again, ask any traditional company that processes international remittances.
It doesn't really matter what kind of political activism you believe you're engaging in: the reality is, these nasties are the main people that benefit. They absolutely love what you're doing. Anyone involved in cryptocurrency, even tangentially, is complicit in this fraud because it's the only way these currencies have any significant value to begin with. And it will continue to happen for the indefinite future, because even with this new move ETH will still have no capital controls to prevent any of the massive market manipulation that happened over the last few years, that drove tons more fraud and ransomware and also resulted in the recent crash.
A system that tries to give privacy but does nothing to stop fraud is just creating worse problems under the false guise of helping people. I ask that you please stop working on these things and please stop promoting them until you can dial the whole thing back to rectify this situation. Any kind of "censorship resistance" without fraud prevention is not going to work. If enough people put their heads together they can solve this, but it will not happen with any of the supposed "privacy solutions" you mentioned. Yes, I'm aware the traditional finance system also has many of the same problems. It's not helping to recreate the exact same system but with even more layers of technical debt around it, which is essentially all you'll be able to do with any of the suggested tools.
The system you have built specifically and explicitly provides much less cover to the Russian citizens than it does to Putin's regime, who will gladly adopt it and then turn around and use the proceeds to further oppress, murder and destroy. It is a net loss for privacy.
It doesn't really matter what kind of political activism you believe you're engaging in: the reality is, these nasties are the main people that benefit. They absolutely love what you're doing. Anyone involved in cryptocurrency, even tangentially, is complicit in this fraud because it's the only way these currencies have any significant value to begin with. And it will continue to happen for the indefinite future, because even with this new move ETH will still have no capital controls to prevent any of the massive market manipulation that happened over the last few years, that drove tons more fraud and ransomware and also resulted in the recent crash.
A system that tries to give privacy but does nothing to stop fraud is just creating worse problems under the false guise of helping people. I ask that you please stop working on these things and please stop promoting them until you can dial the whole thing back to rectify this situation. Any kind of "censorship resistance" without fraud prevention is not going to work. If enough people put their heads together they can solve this, but it will not happen with any of the supposed "privacy solutions" you mentioned. Yes, I'm aware the traditional finance system also has many of the same problems. It's not helping to recreate the exact same system but with even more layers of technical debt around it, which is essentially all you'll be able to do with any of the suggested tools.
Regarding the example of Russia, please see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32013981
The system you have built specifically and explicitly provides much less cover to the Russian citizens than it does to Putin's regime, who will gladly adopt it and then turn around and use the proceeds to further oppress, murder and destroy. It is a net loss for privacy.