RE: Part 2 of Our Plan to Onboard the Masses
There is one huge elephant in the room: the open wallets.
There are many reasons most people wouldn't want their financial transactions on Steem to be exposed to the whole world. The number one reason is probably taxes. I'm guessing most Steemians are not paying taxes on their Steem income. Whether or not any taxes should be paid on Steem income until cashed out into fiat, until used for buying goods or services or cryptocurrencies external to the platform may be unclear, depending on jurisdiction. In any case, there is a great deal of uncertainty to this which is one reason most Steemians use a pseudonym and/or employ a number of alts that cannot be proven to be theirs. People join social media networks when they are invited to join by friends and family. This is not taking place very much among Steemians as they wish to keep their Steem identity and their walking world identity separate.
Because it is too late the redesign Steem as privacy blockchain using protocols similar to those used by Monero or Zerocoin to keep all financial transactions secret, second-tier solutions are the only possibility. It would be entirely possible to use anonymous voting accounts and placeholder posts posted by placeholder accounts and privacy chains as intermediaries to make the financial layer entirely private. The other possibility is demonetizing the Steem experience for the masses. I actually think they might prefer it that way.
IMO anonymity is already an illusion in the modern world. Data-collecting corporations know just about everything about us already. If for some reason CIA/FBI/MI3 etc. takes an interest in you, they can find out every single detail about you. The only reason they may not have the information ready at hand is that anyone who's not at least a billionaire is somewhat irrelevant for them.
Anonymity is not a binary thing. It is very, very far from it. Have you heard of the letters the IRS has been sending to crypto traders lately? Only about 10,000 Americans have received a letter from the IRS asking about their unpaid taxes. Only 10,000! And those people are probably Coinbase customers who have large volumes of trades. There are millions of Americans who own crypto. 10,000 sounds like a very low number. I'm betting a small fraction of crypto-owning Americans have reported all of their taxable crypto income to the IRS.
The internet is a vast ocean of data. Going after one person with the tools available to the likes of NSA/CIA/whaterver is expensive. I seriously doubt data collecting companies know every bit of our online behavior. Throwing care completely out of the window because "anonymity is already an illusion in the modern world" is overreacting. Not everyone potentially interested in what we do with malicious intent is as powerful as one of the alphabet organizations.
To each their own; you certainly make some good points.
True.