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Comment by Casseres | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I hold Monero

In my opinion, this is an attempt at smearing a better cryptocurrency competing for the same recognition: true anonymity.

It could very well be the tip of a broader, coming attack. The developers of other cryptocurrencies are spending money for marketing and acceptance into exchanges, Monero is not.

They are willing to grease the wheels to success while Monero grows organically instead. This may or may not be a problem for Monero. If they run a smear-campaign on Monero, they could win with their inferior cryptocurrency.

There is a much better/detailed response to the claims made in the paper on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/65pon8/monero_linka...

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>They are willing to grease the wheels to success while Monero grows organically instead.

I'm curious about this. How is this at all a virtue? If you're not willing to hustle to ensure the success of your project, why should anyone make a bet on it? We've seen many times how the technically superior product loses out against the better positioned competitor. So what makes this different?

Honesty matters in money. Without it, you pay frictions for graft. Liquidity vehicles abhor frictions.

Zcash has been crashing for a long while, and stealing 20% of the economy outright is a large part of the reason. Yes, it motivates the miscreants, but that does not imply success.

Honesty matters very much.

Marketing also matters.

So honest marketing matters very much. The point of marketing should be to attract attention to useful features of Monero and increase its usefulness by promoting its adoption by third parties that add value (such as wallets, exchanges, merchants, etc.)

The seemingly principled idea that focusing only on tech, and not strategic promotion and collaboration, has resulting in the under adoption or stagnation of many promising technologies.

Regardless of the veracity of your allegations, this paper is a sound empirical analysis. It's a solid piece of research, and it's not surprising that folks from a competing blockchain would be the first to unveil real problems with Monero.

> the first to unveil real problems with Monero

It is not. The problems were previously identified and documented by Monero developers, and the paper acknowledges this.

The paper attaches specific historical numbers to those problems, which is good, though one can still quibble about how the numbers are aggregated and presented.

No it isn't, the paper is a re-hash of the work that the Monero team themselves put out in September 2014 and in January 2015.

https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0001.pdf

https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0004.pdf

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