take on ver arguing AGAINST privacy at the protocol level for cryptocurrencies?
Seems to be an ongoing debate about that in the cryptocurrency space... ie: whether selectable privacy, or privacy-only, would be advantage yielding faster take up and toehold to adoption thus introduction to voluntary themes, which would shift later on their own to privacy-only [1]. If you find other debate / interview / talks on the cryptocurrency privacy subject, please post them here for others. It could be that this question is evolving, that people may flip [again], ending up settling on privacy-only... many believed early on BTC could be used privately. Note the US exchange coinbase (and maybe others) does have Zcash ZEC pairings. So what are the statist plots there? There's probably still time in the race left to push all coins into having some privacy modes. You'd also have to study the adoption and rationale of ZEC and XMR and a few others closely. What is needed for sure also right now are TLS for all coins, select privacy modes in some or all, bulletproof anonymous exchanges / P2P DEX's, plausible deniability such as income generating apps / mixes / resource rental / compute nets, blockchains and clients that do not store anything but UTXO's, etc. Central Banker State Coin will certainly not be private, nor suit your privacy needs, at all. Build privacy into the emergent ecosystem from the start and drive adoption united, hard, and fast. Seems necessary to have if you expect to win the game. Public talking heads in the cryptocurrency space should have been talking privacy a long time ago. The void there makes them all look stupid. [1] Similar debate to the: Whether voting for Libertarian parties is faster, better, "play their own game against them" route, now today, adding more pressure from multiple directions, to whatever goal, than not voting at all and waiting for some kind of global awakening. See also: Free State Project. Either way you still have to introduce and educate a lot of people. The answer may be: Both, not Or. The list is here, you all talk and decide.