>Making pervasive tracking illegal would do so much more for purchase privacy than cryptocurrencies.
Considering governments are not going to give up their panopticon-like powers without a fight, how about making pervasive tracking technically impossible?
That's not how it works at all. Suppose those two options were equally likely to happen. Would they be then equally likely to actually accomplish this goal?
In my mind, one option basically goes like this: get so many people outraged that they demand the goverment to do something. What happens next is lawmakers introduce some half-arsed legislation (like the self-defeating GDPR banners), companies budget for enforcement and keep violating user privacy.
The other goes like this: get so many people invested that they incentivize more and more businesses to accept crypto that has privacy baked into the actual transaction mechanism. And then what happens next is uncertain but I'm willing to bet on the tech and not on the bureaucrats.
So far most of businesses that are incentivized to accept crypto do it through a middleman and all the privacy is ruined. So even if they're equally likely, I think the legislative path would work better, in part because the average person doesn't have to understand and act on nearly as much nuance.
Also I like a lot of the mechanisms that credit and debit cards have like dispute resolution. I would like to continue to get those benefits, even in a world with easy cryptocurrency support. So privacy legislation would protect me more universally. Especially if I'm buying something to send to my address, where all the cryptography in the world doesn't help. Or if a store tracks who I am even if I'm paying with cash.
>So privacy legislation would protect me more universally.
Fundamentally, this is where our opinions diverge. You are simply more accustomed than I am to the idea of rule of law working as intended.
If we're looking to make an objective judgement, we should not state what we like, what we want, what we're accustomed to, etc., but we should simplify alternatives so we can compare things that are commensurate.
Let's assume elected officials bring into being the perfect privacy legislation (which contains 0% failure of democratic process due to corruption, misunderstanding of the subject matter, etc.)
That legislation would nonetheless protect you only as far as it is enforced. I would argue that the only way to enforce it at sufficient scale is to integrate the capability to reason about the correctness of transactions into the transaction medium itself.
Once transactions enforce their own validity (e.g. with regards to the desired level of privacy), if a central legislation is still necessary it can be implemented on top of the selfsame transaction medium.
It's either that, or paper over the complexity of the digital world with blanket bans and the like
Considering governments are not going to give up their panopticon-like powers without a fight, how about making pervasive tracking technically impossible?