Financial privacy should be the default. Privilege is what you get when the default is surveillance and only the coordinated or the rich can opt out.

Cash already answered this. You don’t show a passport to buy coffee. The state can still investigate a person; it doesn’t get a live feed of every coffee as the price of using money.

Digital systems inverted that because it was technically convenient and politically useful.

Monero is interesting precisely because it restores cash’s default without requiring you to stuff bills in a sock: hide sender, receiver, and amount unless you choose to open a window. That is not “crime coin theology.” It’s architecture that matches how free people already treat letters, medical files, and the inside of a house.

The grown-up compromise is not “privacy if you behave.” It’s private rails plus targeted, lawful access when there is a case; not a permanent CCTV over the grocery run, the donation, the divorce lawyer, or the homelab parts order. Privilege-privacy creates two economies. Default-privacy plus selective proof creates one economy with doors that lock.

If privacy is optional, not only is exercising your right to privacy more difficult, but when you do exercise your privacy, it is weaker. You can be discriminated against, targeted, or cooerced to reveal your transactions via the transparency feature.

Fungibility is only achieved via default privacy. It is the reason NFTs (zordinals) exist on Zcash today but not on Monero. Provenance is impossible with default privacy, and NFTs require provenance.
https://x.com/DontTraceMeBruh/status/1491698762028392449

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