Why Monero

Oh no, it works like cash!

People will do things with money that you're uncomfortable with. If it's criminal, then laws and enforcement and investigation will have to evolve. That doesn't mean "well, I guess we have to give up privacy now. "

Not your money, not your business. Privacy is important, and it's a binary proposition. It's either part of the currency or it's not. You can't have any gray area because people are fallible, malicious, and stupid. You design the system to disempower human foibles as much as you can. Monero does a good job of that.

There was a bug, with which the Zcash developers could have used to generate infinite coins for themselves, and it so far cannot be proven that this did not occur. I do not know how so few people are aware of it. I do not mean the trusted setup, but this: https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/zcash-counterfeiting-vuln...

The developers were funded by suspicious government organisations including DARPA and Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology.

It is centralised, with an organisation receiving significant coins directly from the protocol.

Opt-in privacy defeats much of the point and creates traceability issues - privacy needs to be the default for people to use it, for their coins to not be treated suspiciously if they turn on the privacy feature, and it is a requirement to have a large anonymity set.

Among other reasons, there are many...

There is one problem: freedom is necessarily also freedom for people you don't like. There's no way to make living free for good guys, and limited for bad guys. Limiting things for bad guys, you also limit them for everyone — hopefully to a lesser extent. By putting a lock on your door so that a burglar won't enter, you also prevent your friends from entering.

There is a certain balance of downsides and upsides of limitations on freedom. If you move the "safety" knob all the way to maximum, you will get a high security prison with creature comforts. Indeed, being watched and tracked at all times, and limited in what you do and where you go, you can definitely be kept out of the harm's way. If you like the motion towards this, welcome to mainland China. (If you want an antidote, re-read the Brave New World.)

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, that is, liberty is a somehow unsafe condition, else vigilance won't be needed. Some people prefer certain upsides of liberty more than certain upsides of safety. Such people founded the U.S., and it still shows here and there. (Not much, of course.)

Rule of law & democracy began when people had far more privacy than today. The founding motivations for the USA included resisting privacy abuses like 'general warrants' – the state peeking into everyone's business, without specific suspicion, to find criminals.

The modern level of financial surveillance – KYC, etc – is only a few decades old, and collects more info for the state than any 'general warrant' could. Even in fairly-free countries, the burdens & murky liabilities created by turning every financial agent into a part-time police informer has the effect of persecuting & impoverishing disfavored individuals & groups – even those who've been convicted of no crime. In unfree states the same surveillance helps quash all kinds of dissent.

A blind faith in authorities' use of financial surveillance ignores history & the current reality of billions living under untrustworthy regimes. Many hardly even pretend to offer "rule of law & democracy".

Yes. This is intentional and required to make it possible to opt-in to revealing transaction information. This is useful and enables compliance with current regulations.

Of course you can delete that key if you want, and perhaps run multiple wallets with which you can transact with yourself