When I discovered Bitcoin and blockchain.info several years ago I said to myself that public blockchain is even worse than any surveillance, surveillance at least requires a court order. After this conclusion, every payment or tip in crypto space from known and unknown people went through a temptation to wash everything just in case.
It's not about paranoia, it's about how lack of fungibility hurts. You remember recent theft from BitFinex? Thousands of eyes now looking for those addresses where stolen money locked. Yes, locked and will require a titanic work to make them spendable. Now imagine that guy will send some dust to a thousands of people addresses on exchanges and that "joke" can result in a wide ban of innocent people around the world on exchanges with AML/KYC policy enforced and full blown witch-hunt. This is rough and just out of ass example of how traceability can hurt.
Something Real?
You paid for a service using BitPay? Congratulations, BitPay and Coinbase are known to have used chain analysis to spy on people. You are innocent Coinbase user and you made a jar for you and your LocalBitcoins friends for a drinkup on next weekend? Now you are in a trouble. Reddit is full of real stories.
It's All About Fear to Accept or Spend Money
When such fear takes place system is broken. It's all about how innocent people might suffer. Crooks, scammers and thieves are not affected because they are smart enough to avoid fungibility problems.
Monero is Here to Protect You
Monero is an out of the box solution for your financial privacy. Consider XMR coins are all tainted or clean. It does not matter because no one will ever know who, when, how much and to where.
Monero coins are always fresh like newly printed banknotes from Treasury Department but without serial numbers. By its nature. Guaranteed by protocol.
Even if you bought Monero on a KYC/AML enforced exchange, once coins were withdrawn all traces are lost. Because each XMR transaction is like a faster than light jump of your money to an unknown place in a deep space called The Internet of Cash. Monero community and developers decided to completely ban non-anonymous payments.
Need more reading and math? Thanks to @luigi1111 for his awesome articles:
Understanding Monero Cryptography Part #1
Understanding Monero Cryptography Part #2
Or like me you are not a scholar enough for close to the metal reading? Check out On Fungibility, Bitcoin, Monero and why ZCash is a bad idea.
Treasure your privacy, guys. Stay with Monero.
I followed the link to the "real story" on Reddit. It has nothing to do with bitcoins or Localbitcoins, same would have happened if selling Monero, this specific problem is all at the banking side of things, so it's an extremely bad example of "bitpay and coinbase spying on you".
Some traditional payment methods are just unsafe, particularly credit card payments.
I've experienced the same problem with the Norwegian mobile payment system "Vipps" (install a "mobile app" and transfer money from a credit card to a bank account - the provider takes all the chargeback risk) which is heavily promoted and slowly becoming the domestic de-facto replacement for cash - my access to the said system was revoked without any notice. I thought I had simply forgotten the password. Months later I learn that it's because someone had bought bitcoins from me, paying it through the "vipps" solution using stolen credit card information.
You accept monero or you not accept monero. There is no way to censor XMR.
The scenario you linked to was "buying bitcoins using reversible fiat". The same thing would happen if "buying monero using reversible fiat".
I was right.
Nice post. Is there a a guide for Monero mining for noobs?
There is mining section on a forum.
What wallet would you recommend for Monero?
http://mymonero.com
Also it would be cool to see Monero on bitwa.la, if your teem will ever consider it feel free to join #monero-dev IRC channel on Freenode and ask your questions. Monero community of users and developers are one of the most literate in crypto space.
Privacy is a good thing - for citizens it's important to have the possibility to use untraceable money.
Wrg of public spending, it's the opposite. For public organizations (including NGOs, and probably some publically traded companies) I think it's a very nice property that the blockchain is open.
Company can publish view key to make its transactions transparent.