In late August, I wrote this post (which I just shared on Hive) about PayPal enabling some privacy features for their stablecoin, and how they would lead the way on how privacy would be mass adopted.

I was right.

Now Circle is following suit, pushing CT (Confidential Transactions), which still show who sends to whom, but which hides balances and amounts. The same as PayPal has been doing for months.

They're now creating a new term called "confidentiality" to contrast with "anonymity", basically saying the former is necessary but compliant hiding of some information (in this case, amounts), where anonymity is much stronger and can be used by bad actors to hide illicit activity.

Of course I reject this characterization, and believe that the strongest privacy that exists should be available to everyone, no questions asked. But I'm just pointing out the narrative shift in the space.