Why is barely anyone discussing the risks of the upcoming Carrot/Sepharis implementation?
The upcoming Carrot implementation honestly worries me enough that I’m considering leaving Monero altogether.
Edit: I explained the issue more clearly in this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/s/NUZuDQcPWU
The original wording about “clean” vs “dirty” Monero caused some misunderstandings.
Why is barely anyone discussing the risks of the upcoming Carrot/Sepharis implementation?
From my perspective, this could seriously undermine Monero’s fungibility — one of the core reasons Monero matters in the first place.
And if this direction continues, how exactly does Monero remain fundamentally different from Zcash?
The most common defense I’ve seen is: “It’s optional.”
But Zcash already has optional transparency, and we all know how that played out in practice.
Here’s the concern:
Monero introduces Carrot, allowing users to optionally expose both incoming and outgoing transaction history through enhanced view keys.
Centralized exchanges relist Monero, but require users to provide these view keys for compliance purposes.
The average user chooses convenience over privacy and complies without hesitation. Only hardcore privacy advocates — and likely illicit actors — avoid this system by staying on DEXs or peer-to-peer markets.
Over time, most exchange-traded XMR becomes tied to identifiable histories, effectively splitting Monero into two categories:
“compliant” Monero
“non-compliant” Monero
At that point, fungibility is no longer real in practice. Coins associated with opaque histories become suspicious by default, making them harder — or impossible — to cash out through regulated services.
That outcome sounds dangerously close to Bitcoin’s current surveillance-heavy ecosystem.
As someone who deeply values financial privacy, I find this trajectory alarming. I’ve searched through older discussions and still haven’t found convincing counterarguments addressing the long-term fungibility implications.
Am I missing something here, or are these concerns being dismissed too casually?