You must be ignorant to how crypto currencies and Monero in particular as a project is structured.
Monero as a financial system is not as you say "completely opaque" - that's laughable. All the code that runs every Monero client is completely open source.
Now some more savvy people will still complain: "If we can't see any of the balances then how do we know """they""" aren't minting coins out of thin air or defrauding other users?"
The truth is that you can simply read the code and determine that that is impossible. Or more accurately, someone very smart can (I for example can't give that guarantee first hand). But that's why open source software is beautiful - the code is not obfuscated or unclear, if there were any flaws in the system a single white hat could easily sound the alarm.
Long story short, you are confusing transaction privacy with protocol obscurity, the genius of Monero is that its protocol is completely in the open but it retains privacy for its users - that's the genius your ignorance is taking for granted.
Clearly they are not questioning the ingenuity of the authors of the source code, that seems like an attempt to misrepresent their position. In fact, they are directly calling out the "transaction privacy" component as a net negative for modern civilization, since it effectively facilitates transactions among criminal enterprises.
Monero as a financial system is not as you say "completely opaque" - that's laughable. All the code that runs every Monero client is completely open source.
Now some more savvy people will still complain: "If we can't see any of the balances then how do we know """they""" aren't minting coins out of thin air or defrauding other users?"
The truth is that you can simply read the code and determine that that is impossible. Or more accurately, someone very smart can (I for example can't give that guarantee first hand). But that's why open source software is beautiful - the code is not obfuscated or unclear, if there were any flaws in the system a single white hat could easily sound the alarm.
Long story short, you are confusing transaction privacy with protocol obscurity, the genius of Monero is that its protocol is completely in the open but it retains privacy for its users - that's the genius your ignorance is taking for granted.