I think the chat analogy is twice broken. Firstly, the equivalents are something like:
Bitcoin <-> some chat system where anyone can see all the messages but not necessarily who sent them
Regular banking <-> private chatting but the government, those in chats, and the chat service provider can get detailed access to logs. A bit like email but with more government access.
Privacy coins <-> a bit like E2E but maybe chat participants don’t know whom they are chatting to. (I’m not super sure on the details).
So I think the first half of your analogy is pretty broken and there are middle grounds (eg government being able to subpoena chat records from companies) in the chat space.
The second issue is that I don’t really buy the analogy between private speech and money. Some people have many orders of magnitude more money than others but that isn’t really the case with private speech (obviously some people may have much more reach when speaking publicly, but this doesn’t go through E2E encryption; attempting to maintain large conspiracies is a social challenge rather than a technical challenge of overcoming group size limits on your favourite messenger). So in some sense the benefits of private chat are reasonably fairly shared across people whereas the benefits of private money disproportionately go to the people with much more money.
The idea of E2EE in chat is that the chat operator does not have access to the data, and so even the government cannot request this data (and build surveillance mechanisms around it).
I don’t agree with your other point. Whether somebody spends $1 or $1000 on an abortion in the US, they deserve the same degree of privacy, or at least the option to achieve privacy. Replace this scenario with any other that might like to take advantage of E2EE, like a dissident or political activist.
Bitcoin <-> some chat system where anyone can see all the messages but not necessarily who sent them
Regular banking <-> private chatting but the government, those in chats, and the chat service provider can get detailed access to logs. A bit like email but with more government access.
Privacy coins <-> a bit like E2E but maybe chat participants don’t know whom they are chatting to. (I’m not super sure on the details).
So I think the first half of your analogy is pretty broken and there are middle grounds (eg government being able to subpoena chat records from companies) in the chat space.
The second issue is that I don’t really buy the analogy between private speech and money. Some people have many orders of magnitude more money than others but that isn’t really the case with private speech (obviously some people may have much more reach when speaking publicly, but this doesn’t go through E2E encryption; attempting to maintain large conspiracies is a social challenge rather than a technical challenge of overcoming group size limits on your favourite messenger). So in some sense the benefits of private chat are reasonably fairly shared across people whereas the benefits of private money disproportionately go to the people with much more money.