To be honest, when I saw @MidnightNetwork forcibly combining the words 'compliance' and 'privacy', I almost spat out my morning coffee.
This logic is like saying, I want to give you absolute personal space, but on the condition that you leave a peephole in your wall for me to bring regulators over for 'routine inspections' at any time.
I've been staring at their 'selective disclosure' agreement for a long time, and this design is actually quite heartbreaking. In the eyes of pure privacy players, a chain that cannot be completely hidden is basically crippled.
But I also found a quite ironic reality, those projects that claimed absolute anonymity are now being delisted by exchanges one by one, becoming islands of liquidity.
I just checked my old wallets again, and those pure privacy coins are now hard to exchange for basic necessities, which makes me start to think:
After all this time, do we want a perfect utopia or a commercial tool that can actually work?
Midnight introduces Google Cloud as a giant to run nodes, I think this is a disgrace for privacy advocates, but in the eyes of capital, this is a signal that it is 'stable.'
This leads to a very divided situation: if you seek a kind of freedom that is not tracked by anyone, then Midnight is definitely not for you; but if you just don’t want the neighbor Wang to see your balance while wanting to buy a pizza in the real world, then this 'compromise' has become the closest solution to reality.
As for the DUST fuel mechanism, I think the project team is quite clever. Making fuel non-transferable effectively strangles the speculators.
I guess there might be an awkward situation in the future: a lot of institutions hoarding DUST that can't be used up, while retail investors find that they need to buy NIGHT first to slowly 'hatch' when they want to use it. This sense of disconnect raises a question mark for me regarding its ecological activity.
My personal judgment is that Midnight might become the 'intranet of banks' in Web3. It is very secure, but it does not belong to geeks.
If you expect to find that kind of anarchist romance here, I suggest you wash up and go to bed early. Although I miss the pure privacy era, looking at the current regulatory trends, I think projects that are 'dancing with shackles' are more likely to survive the next winter.
Don't treat it as a savior of privacy; think of it as a financial transit station with encryption features. Keep seventy percent and reserve thirty percent for those old-timers who dare to confront regulation.
