Neither do I, I do think it’s one of those necessary evils at this point in time at this stage of growth.
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No amount of transparent only address, ultra transparent address, exchange only address, backdoor address pandering will work for regulators.
Like i said they hate you all and want to end you all.
The Moment you display weakness and centralization attempt in protocol they will only escalate the situation in their favor.
Even if exchanges only address are implemented (which will only waste dev resources)
They may ask if that can be implemented at protocol layer so fast with regulation warning next will be mandatory KYC wallet transfer only transaction mode with unique ID
and even then that may not be enough until all transaction are either in KYC transparent chain with KYC transparent wallet with unique ID or backdoor chain with joke level privacy.
Best way to move forward is get rid of all dev fund set master-node reward at 50% miners reward at 50% and being actually decentralized with mandatory default privacy at protocol layer like Monero.
Only then the Free market will respond well and the community will grow more and be stronger.
Otherwise well everyone knows how much half ass privacy coin are valued in the open market.
Same thing is being discuss here on zcash forum
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You speak as if Firo has huge bargaining power. We are a small humble community project that has done world class work. There are plenty of other coins that have been 100% PoW and mandatory privacy that have done poorly ‘price wise’. Monero is the sole outlier. Beam, PirateChain, Grin all have mandatory privacy.
On this list, of those ranked higher than Firo with mandatory privacy is Monero and PirateChain (which isn’t that far ahead either): https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/privacy-coins
Monero’s situation cannot be emulated today and even then while Monero can survive a couple of exchange delistings there would be significant effects.
And there is a line we draw. For e.g. the full view key method was something we were not comfortable with (but neither were the exchanges) but was originally suggested by the Zcash representatives to them. We aren’t going to bother with protocol KYC.
And I would like to say that all this talk about ‘dev tax’. If you take a look at the actual stuff we built, a world class trustless privacy protocol from the ground up with little outside support and limited funds compared to VC funded projects, the work we have done is pretty amazing and not that far behind in terms of capabilities. Heck, I mean even Monero has benefited from our research and despite us being a much smaller project that would stand to gain from being more guarded about our work (like the route Zcash went), all our work is open source and published. I would even say that sometimes we don’t even get the appropriate credit we deserve for the work we do.
Firo is here not just for Firo’s sake but for building useful privacy tech for everyone. None of us at core team are getting paid amazing salaries, in fact they’re way below market rate when compared to US.
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The value of firo is much higher than its current value, if it is five times higher than the current price, ten times higher, that is the price of the coin should be
IMHO you must stay listed on CEXes, so to leave the choice to people to stay fully transparent or mixed isn’t questionable 
Thanks for your work 
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Btw this topic has also been brought up in the Zcash forums (referencing our discussions too).
Good read.
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Just wanted to comment here on the thread above. So some of the suggestions in the Zcash thread I had considered and also discussed and doesn’t address realities.
However it correctly notes that MiCA’s reach in Europe is just the beginning and is likely to happen in other jurisdictions as well hence finding a solution is important.
- Get users to embed a return address so if the exchange rejects it, they can return it to the return address.
We considered this and this wouldn’t work out. Users can put in someone else’s address and actually use Binance to ‘clean’ funds and serve as an automatic money laundry.
Also if you knew it was going to be rejected, why would you embed a return address? If you tied a transparent address somehow cryptographically to a Spark send and tried to enforce this on a protocol layer, then you’re also losing privacy. Unacceptable.
- View keys
This was addressed before. Asking someone to disclose their entire wallet history to an exchange is unacceptable unless you expected them to maintain a separate wallet for each exchange. This is even worse UX and privacy and also would require the exchanges to adopt custom tooling.
- Push the onus to exchanges to do the return manually.
Expecting exchanges to use their customer support to deal with potentially hundreds if not thousands of users who deposit wrongly and go through e-mail back and forth doesn’t make sense. It imposes tremendous cost on the exchange and it would be easier to delist. This is also not practical.
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Flexibility is an impeccable development ability. If regulators want CEX to work only with open addresses, give them such addresses. At the same time, develop privacy and DEX. And when regulators understand what’s what and take appropriate legislative measures, time will pass, and this will no longer be important for FIRO.
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I am still of the opinion that firo should maintain transparent wallets in the near future (only in the case of “firo”). I believe that other cryptocurrencies may be able to withstand the exclusion and re-boost themselves on Dex while MICA continues to gain ground.
However, a really crazy and demanding idea would be for Firo to propose holding a large congress, bringing together all cryptocurrencies (in this case privacy cryptocurrencies) to globally address the issue of MICA regulations and all government actions that may arise in the future.
We are dealing with this issue in isolation, each from his own perspective, but what would happen if the CEOs of privacy cryptocurrencies decide to address the issue as a single force? Would the projects be losing decentralization? Can this body become a consultative body?
That is, can a central cryptocurrency body be created (like the United Nations Organization, Cryptocurrencies Organization, something like the United Cryptocurrency Organization)?
Among the statutes of this great body, it could be highlighted that the representatives of each crypto meet from time to time and/or under situations such as the current one, to discuss issues and propose solutions that they consider viable.
But, to maintain decentralization, all decisions must reside in the community, a large consultation should take place in each community and the result obtained in that consultation would be the decision that must be made.
Certainly the decision not to comply with the requirements of the regulations will impact the project that decides not to comply with them. But what would happen if all cryptocurrencies decided not to comply with these MICA requirements? Certainly the CEX would feel the impact of this decision and the objective for which cryptocurrencies were created in general could be maintained, in addition to the inevitable growth of the dex ecosystem.
What would happen if all projects decided to work together to improve the Dex ecosystem? Many questions arise from this vision.
Firo alone cannot currently fight against MICA regulations, but if a massive wave of cryptocurrencies decides to confront these regulations, the landscape could completely change. Because as many users have highlighted, MICA is just the beginning (or continuation) of government attempts to control the power of cryptocurrencies.
I think it’s highly likely that some currencies won’t comply for e.g. Monero.
But most other projects have purposely shied away from privacy or even removed privacy features from their product to avoid being categorized as privacy coins.
There is little incentive for other cryptocurrencies to take this road especially since it only applies to those with ‘inbuilt’ anonymization whatever that means.
Bitcoin won’t care. Ethereum won’t care. Vitalik, whom I respect greatly, in fact suggested the use of “proof of innocence” privacy pools which presents its own set of challenges and goes against the philosophy of innocent until proven guilty. The issue with “privacy pools” is who decides which transactions are good or bad? This is a centralizing force and actually gives too much power while still not solving some key issues.
There are some privacy alliances such as BPSAA (which we are a member of) and PriFiSyndicate and some that Zcash is a member of. But the issue is that even then it’s a very small subset of the entire crypto market and many of these have different focuses such as US centric or conflict of how we should navigate regulatory issues.
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The privacy community is too weak, we can not compete with the government unit, a regulation of the government unit can easily eliminate us
Yes, that’s true. But remember that the worst defeat would be to lose the essence with which this crypto universe was created. All privacy coins would not go unnoticed if they decide to face such regulations. Not because of the impact on the market that these may have, but yes, because of the firmness of a decision of such magnitude. If governments could end cryptocurrencies they would have done so already. Crypto is not an easy nut to crack.
The government unit would face a big dilemma if it tried to eliminate crypto, that would “facilitate” or force the way to decentralized exchanges where they do not have control. That’s why they “only regulate.”
I clarify that in an ideal scenario we should go to mandatory privacy but under the current circumstances Firo must follow the path outlined with transparent wallets.
they cannot, or would have done already
Due to the urgency of this decision, we’ll be closing feedback to this in one week. Please ensure you weigh in your opinion please!
Firo should abandon its privacy coin project. Instead, artificial intelligence should focus on areas such as web3. The idea of privacy seems a bit unnecessary to me.
Firo is Web3. Web3 privacy is also a thing. Actually why are you here?
Id be ok for now with having a transparant address that needs to be used when interacting with fiat/exchanges … and for everything else private transactions/balances
We will just be kicking the can down the road, but its probably the best thing to do at this moment.
There will be a day where they will consider everything that isnt 100% transparant a no go.
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We need to insist on privacy to the end, the world needs us, we can not change their original intention.
Yes definitely this is kicking the can down the road. But note that even Bitcoin is having this issue with the proposed FinCEN rules. Note that these are proposed and not even in force yet.
But take a look at Swan’s announcement and you can already see the strange direction that regulators and exchanges are going which is not for funds to come from anonymization mixers/pools ‘directly’ into an exchange address. What they are implying is as long as there is a hop or two in between, it’s still okay which is what exchange addresses also do.
To us crypto natives this doesn’t make much sense and one might ask, “Well, what if they now say, it needs to be 2 hops or 3 hops?”. This again, just adds additional ‘steps’ without really doing much and once you go down that path, within a couple of hops you’ll find that most coins (and I’m talking about Bitcoin here) have passed through an anonymization service at some point in time which makes it very hard to enforce since almost everyone would be implicated.
But if I hazard a guess, it’ll be a while before they realize how silly this all is. Hopefully by that time we’ll have much more reduced reliance on CEXes or that privacy is now kosher.
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Still have a lot to discover about FIRO, but my thoughts are identical with any privacy preserving aspiration where increased awareness, adoption, and usability is paramount.
I think it’s important to maintain integrity that both preserve strength of privacy, and give way for growth potential working with regulations as much as humanly possible. Optimal future involves being widely accessible across many CEX + DEX.
Might there be a way FIRO becomes one of the best in both worlds! Transparency and privacy deserve to work together in serving their own purpose. As truthful it is everyone is not the same, people have different needs and desires. Good idea to leave open the window for everyone capable of benefit and prosper. The more flexible the FIRO is best, but do not break.
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