The tweet author is not ridiculing them because Bitcoin has poor privacy and they think it doesn't. She's ridiculing them for wanting a censorship resistant for

The tweet author is not ridiculing them because Bitcoin has poor privacy and they think it doesn't. She's ridiculing them for wanting a censorship resistant form of money. It's the derisive attitude toward a reasonable desire that I'm criticising. >>This shows up in both examples you cited: if the Venezuelan government wants to enforce capital controls, the people who used Bitcoin are going to wish they'd smuggled suitcases of cash out of the country instead because they've left a durable paper-trail of their transactions behind. It does want to enforce capital controls but it is far more costly and difficult to do so against users of Bitcoin than users of against traditional trusted third party controlled intermediaries. It's not a simple matter for the Venezuelan government to determine which pseudonymous transactions on a cryptocurrency blockchain belong to which Venezuelan resident. It is also much more costly to enforce a law against many thousands of end users versus a handful of large intermediaries operating in the country. Do you really think it's equally easy for the Venezuelan government to enforce capital controls with the traditional financial system and with cryptocurrency? >>even if the technology eventually delivers they'll have the same problem that almost everyone needs to get real money out of the system and that's where the normal banking laws kick in. Yes it won't be perfect but it will increase the cost/difficulty of mass surveillance of financial transactions. Many of the measures that would be needed for a government to prevent private use of cryptocurrency would be politically unpalatable.