aminoche

tl;dr: Blackpass is a proposed tunnel between Bitcoin and Monero—fully atomic, trustless, and GUI-free. It has no token, no custody, and no middleman. It’s not an exchange. It’s a cryptographic handshake, invisible unless it fails.

It allows anyone to swap BTC ↔ XMR using HTLCs, adaptor signatures, and relayed offers over IPFS, Nostr, or Tor. No UI. No pooling. No compliance.

Bitcoin regains plausible deniability. Monero gets trustless liquidity. Surveillance becomes uncertain.

Not a mixer. Not an exchange. Just a tunnel.

> No token. No roadmap. No return address.

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If you're thinking about who benefits and who loses if something like Blackpass is deployed, it helps to look beyond the protocol itself and focus on how it reshapes the incentives around traceability and liquidity.

Who benefits?

Bitcoin users who acquired coins through KYC exchanges and want a trustless way to break on-chain surveillance without relying on mixers or custodial swaps.

Monero users who need liquidity or optional access to broader crypto infrastructure—but don’t want to expose themselves in the process.

Liquidity providers who want to earn yield passively without custody risk. They become sort of “stateless FX desks” for private capital.

Privacy-focused wallets that want to integrate trustless swap functionality without hosting anything custodial or regulated.

And, in a broader sense, the entire userbase of crypto: even if you never use Blackpass, its mere existence weakens the default assumption that "everyone is always traceable."

Who loses?

Chain surveillance firms, whose analytics pipelines depend on deterministic transaction history. Even low usage of Blackpass creates taint ambiguity and weakens risk models.

Centralized exchanges, especially those who rely on KYC containment and re-identification. If you can exit and re-enter with plausible deniability, control surfaces soften.

Regulatory systems that lean on compliance-by-design. Blackpass doesn’t break laws—it just sidesteps chokepoints. But that alone may draw scrutiny.

The point isn’t that Blackpass “breaks the system.” It doesn’t. It just forces the system to assume less. And once assumptions weaken, control strategies have to change.

Would love to hear from others: what do you see as the second-order effects if something like this were widely available?

Totally fair skepticism. To be clear: I’m not selling anything. This is a strategic framework for digital autonomy—nothing more.

In a world increasingly hostile to financial privacy, the worst-case scenario isn’t getting pitched. It’s not realizing you needed a fallback system until it’s illegal to build one.

That’s a fair point—Monero is superior for peer-to-peer payments in terms of latency, fungibility, and privacy. But I’d push back on the idea that Bitcoin is useless outside of L2s.

The post isn’t claiming Bitcoin is better for transactions. It’s saying Bitcoin anchors legitimacy in a world that increasingly demands auditability—whether we like it or not.

Think of Bitcoin as the externally visible proof-of-reserve layer, and Monero as the privacy-preserving execution layer. One gives you credibility. The other gives you cover.

The stack isn’t about outperforming each other. It’s about asymmetry across contexts.

I’ve been deep in the Bitcoin vs Monero debate for years—but the deeper I go, the more I see this isn’t a rivalry. It’s a false binary.

Bitcoin’s transparency made it credible—but also legible to power. Monero’s privacy made it resistant—but also institutionally sidelined.

The post argues that Bitcoin is the best vault humanity’s ever built—and Monero is the best disguise. One is how you store sovereignty. The other is how you move without being mapped.

Together, they form a complete personal monetary stack.

Would love to hear what HN thinks: can privacy and auditability coexist—or are we locked into choosing between legitimacy and liberty?

i didn’t name founder mode. but when i read PG’s essay, something cracked open.

this post isn’t from someone who’s made it. it’s from the middle—caught between vision and noise. trying to build something real without losing myself in the process.

i’ve felt the drift. when smart decisions start to feel off. when alignment leaves you out of your own company’s soul.

writing this was how i clawed back signal. not to sound wise. just to remember why i started.

What’s better: a bulletproof safe that nobody locks or a well-worn disguise that everyone wears?

Grin prioritizes scalability over privacy, which is fine if you don’t actually need strong privacy. But let’s not pretend optional CoinSwap is a real substitute for built-in, default anonymity. Privacy that depends on extra steps and high network usage is fragile by design.

Monero doesn’t need payjoins because every transaction is already private. And calling 4 effective decoys “deficient” ignores that Zcash’s superior privacy is irrelevant when 95% of transactions don’t even use it.

If privacy is optional, it’s just a feature. Monero makes it the foundation.

Grin stays small by sacrificing privacy. Hiding amounts and addresses isn’t enough if transaction linkability depends on network conditions. If privacy weakens when volume drops, that’s a design flaw, not a feature.

The extra step isn’t robustness, it’s friction. Payments should be fire and forget, not a back and forth process. Monero works because it just sends, no hassle.

And Zcash? Please. Over 95 percent of its transactions aren’t shielded. What good is stronger privacy if almost nobody uses it? Monero may have only four effective decoys, but every single transaction is private by default. A privacy coin that relies on opt in privacy isn’t a privacy coin, it’s a compliance coin.

Grin adds friction. You need extra steps to finalize a transaction, which makes it clunky compared to Monero’s simple send-and-forget model.

Its privacy isn’t default—linkability depends on high network usage. If volume drops, transactions become easier to trace. Monero doesn’t have this issue because every transaction is private by design, no matter what.

Yes, Monero’s blockchain is bigger, but that’s the price of real privacy. Grin stays lightweight by cutting corners on privacy guarantees. If privacy actually matters, Monero is the clear winner.

Grin is like a private chat where both people have to be online. Monero is like sending a sealed letter that’s always private. Grin’s privacy depends on network activity, while Monero makes every transaction private by default. If privacy is the goal, Monero is still the best choice.

You’re absolutely right—Monero XMR is arguably the closest thing to Satoshi’s original vision in terms of actually delivering private, censorship-resistant transactions. But that’s also exactly why it’s under fire. Governments don’t need to ban privacy coins outright—they just have to make them inconvenient, illiquid, and unprofitable to use at scale.

Your hesitation is understandable: betting on XMR feels like betting against the trend of ever-increasing surveillance. And right now, surveillance is winning.

But here’s the thing. Privacy isn’t just for criminals—it’s for everyone. And yet, it’s being pushed into the fringe by design. If we accept that surveillance is inevitable, we lose by default. Governments thrive on inertia—on people shrugging and saying, well, that’s just how things are.

Monero doesn’t have to win completely to be necessary. It just has to exist—as an option, as a hedge, as a last line of defense against a world where every financial move is monitored.

Maybe XMR never goes mainstream. But what happens if it’s erased entirely? That’s the real nightmare scenario.

You're absolutely right—it’s dystopian overreach, but it's happening in slow motion. The real concern isn’t just "black markets will always exist"—it’s that the window for lawful, private transactions is closing faster than most people realize.

Governments aren’t just tracking major criminal activity; they’re normalizing total financial surveillance under the guise of “anti-money laundering” and “counter-terrorism.” But let’s be real—this isn’t about crime. It’s about control.

- Europe’s AML rules are already targeting self-hosted wallets. - Canada blacklisted Bitcoin donations for protests, freezing accounts without due process. - The U.S. Treasury treats every crypto transaction as a taxable event, requiring constant disclosure.

The endgame? A financial panopticon where every transaction is linked, traced, and scored—making cash obsolete and forcing people into fully permissioned, state-approved transactions.

Yes, grey/black markets will always exist, but the bigger question is: Will there be any legal, mainstream way to transact privately? Right now, privacy is being framed as a “red flag,” and once that stigma is fully ingrained, opting out won’t just be difficult—it’ll be criminalized.

The time to push back isn’t when financial privacy is illegal. It’s now.