It's intentionally designed this way. For a number of very important reasons.
- It's more difficult to secure your property if it's secret than if it's hidden.
People will be able to tell if you have money, simply by how much money your posts are making. They won't need to have the next step verification of what's actually in your wallet.
Having everything transparent can actually secure your property better. If there is theft you know exactly what account it went to and would be able to call upon developers and witnesses to rectify it, and have verifiable proof of fraud.
- Nothing is ever secret from everyone.
Hiding account balances only hides it from some people, not all people. It's a public blockchain, and it would be impossible to completely hide account balances. This creates a situation where some have knowledge others don't. This knowledge could be used for a number of nefarious purposes.
- We're working towards a more open, transparent and abundant society.
This space has the ability to radically transform our society. A society where there is more transparency. Lack of transparency, especially financial, is at the root of our oligopolies. Building in anything less-transparent would be a devolution.
- It's not the transparency that is the problem.
If you're concerned about extortion. We need better systems of returning funds to proper owners. Being able to petition the community in a decentralized manner to arbitrate disputes of fraud or extortion.
We need to keep evolving the system so that it can be a viable alternative to a world gone mad. Not bring it back to the literal dark ages of opaqueness.
You make logical points, but you’re missing a fundamental factor that trumps all else—and that’s freedom & tyranny. Crypto and blockchain technology, if and when implemented correctly, has the ability to free us from the world’s abusive power structures, which ultimately makes the world a better place for all of us. “Full transparency” is not a virtue for freedom when you’re referring to THE PEOPLE. It’s only virtuous when applied to a power structure. Citizen privacy is completely essential in order to have freedom. Without it, what’s to stop a tyrannical government from strong-arming me after they lookup my public net worth?
um, the government strong arms people now, and no bank data is safe from them.
" Without it, what’s to stop a tyrannical government from strong-arming me after they lookup my public net worth?"
Not having a tyrannical government... Privacy is only important if there is said government. If we're creating a world beyond one, then we don't require that. In the meantime, if you require privacy, use one of the multitude of privacy centric coins.
Yes - which means we never got to vote on it for concensus. It was there from the beginning. However it does not need to remain that way.
If you want to display your money in your livingroom window, and I want to put my money in a safe - does it matter that we want options?
I call for a vote
Therefore I vote...
you voted when you joined. if you didn't like it, you shouldn't have joined.
Right, I completely understand what you're saying. A vote is great. But, it's also important to understand the intention behind it. This is precisely the problem many scholars cite when it comes to democracy. That people may be susceptible to ill-informed decisions.
I was simply attempting to mitigate this outcome by providing the reasoning for its existence.