"I’m not anti government, I’m pro freedom.” Said someone somewhere. Isn’t it interesting how the words Government and Freedom seem to find themselves on opposite sides of a spectrum these days?
The thing that one seems to exist for is the thing the other exists to take away. There’s certainly no way that this was how it was all meant to be.
We saw the Dutch government arrest a Tornado Cash protocol developer during the course of the week in Amsterdam, for simply writing code, most baffling thing is that the law makers are not allowed to be grounded in the knowledge of crypto, by design, so they are goofing, horribly…. It’s a shit show.
Regulators have shown that they’re ready to play in the mud, sadly for them, they will be playing alone, because what they’re presently doing is exposing the potential attack vectors in crypto, the centralized stable coins and entities claiming to be decentralized and aren’t, we’ve seen many of them involved with censoring wallets and we will move away from them.
The question had always been about the tools to ensure we have a shot at financial freedom and self sovereignty, people should be free to choose privacy, no one should be sanctioned for writing code to build a privacy centric protocol or any protocol, code is speech, speech is free. The sanctioning of Tornado Cash and the arresting of the Tornado Cash developer shows how low and rash regulators are willing to go.
The question remains the same, automatically, the importance of truly decentralized protocols in a decentralized ecosystem have become more evident than ever, a truly decentralized ecosystem needs truly decentralized money, the next most important thing is a truly decentralized means of exchanging native assets(money) across chains without giving up custody to centralized entities.
THORChainhas an headstart here and being the only one capable of providing a truly decentralized exchange protocol puts it on the radar of regulators. If they could arrest Tornado Cash’s developer and get away with it unchallenged, it means we are in a very horrible state as a society and it could happen to anyone.
How long would it take them to sanction THORChain’s devs and start locking people up for reasons like inability to enforce KYC? Just because the devs are in the U.S and that is why the best case scenario for the success of a decentralized economy will rest upon the shoulders of the anonymous society.
Anon Devs, anon node operators with out of reach infrastructure running full open source protocols that are truly decentralized with nodes distributed all over the world, protocols that are bereft of jurisdictional censorship. This is the way Maya protocolhas chosen to follow and as the only present fork of THORChain makes it a beast in its league. Hear me out.
Recent conversations on Twitter among the core THORChain community has been whether or not Monero which is a privacy centric protocol and other privacy protocols should be implemented into THORChain or not. Recent regulatory actions have shown us that there’s heavy scrutiny of privacy centric protocols.
Integrating a privacy protocol into THORChain automatically grants everyone that uses THORChain privacy which in turn puts the protocol on the radar of regulators. THORChain devs are known irl, personally, it sounds like too much of a risk to take. This is where Maya protocol comes in, as the perfect privacy layer fork of THORChain.
Maya will be the dark side of THORChain’s dex protocol, the rascal hybrid that implements operations that THORChain is too doxxed to implement. But this is just my opinion. Many of the community are of opinion that THORChain isn’t ready to take on privacy coins, while others claim there’s never a right time. Both have valid arguments.
The discussion will be open to a live session between the community on discord tomorrow but the final decision is with the nodes operators.
https://discord.gg/bmzRzjc9?event=1011705641418633368
This will be a pivotal upgrade for THORChain if implemented as it changes everything and takes on a far more greater challenge than being just a L1 dex protocol.
Kindly share your thoughts. Should THORChain take on privacy chains?
