Absolute privacy for layer 1 financial transaction is very interesting but unlikely to be allowed should the system become widely used. It could of course be a technological wedge where the ruling powerful will be powerless to stop it, but that's a whole other story.
I'm most interested in the construction of a global, decentralized, scalable and private system for establishing and maintaining trust in data. From what I've come up with, layer 1 privacy works against such a system. Bitcoin is an extremely useful system for creating a global reference clock that ticks roughly every 10 minutes. It is also an extremely useful system for storing small amounts that can never be changed. By using cryptographic accumulators and off-chain micro-ledgers called "provenance logs" implemented using the STROBE framework, it is possible to build a fully decentralized system for tracking digital ownership of data. A truly universal NFT system without each piece of data tied to a cryptocurrency token.
I'm tooting my own horn on this reply because I'm always looking for like-minded people to chew on ideas with. I think what you've been saying over the last few years is spot on. In my opinion we share a lot of the same idea. I started with the principles of user sovereignty [0] and a unified theory of decentralization [1] then mixed them with accumulators and provenance logs to get the authentic data economy [2] where individuals can truly own their private data and trust can be transmitted through them. Then I threw in the verifiable computation (zkSNARKS/Halo2/etc) without a trusted setup to achieve absolute privacy [3] in digital transactions. I call it zero architecture [4] and it is critical for understanding digital gates [5] and avoiding a global social credit system while also unlocking huge opportunities for trust-based solutions for e-commerce and other trust-hungry systems.
