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Comment by camjohnson26 | Hacker News Reader

This is the real killer app of cryptocurrency. Monero is a decentralized, untraceable digital cash that preserves privacy. All the arguments against cryptocurrency can also be applied to cash, but that doesn’t take away their main value proposition, which is a mathematically secure way to send payments while protecting the sender’s privacy.

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>Monero is a [...] untraceable digital cash that preserves privacy

Not exactly. A single transaction might be untraceable but over repeated transactions it's possible to deanonymize people with a high degree of confidence. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s3EbSKDA3o the good part starts at 10 minutes.

See the Monero team's response here: https://www.getmonero.org/2018/03/29/response-to-an-empirica...

Full original paper here: https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2018/3/arti...

>See the Monero team's response here: https://www.getmonero.org/2018/03/29/response-to-an-empirica...

I skimmed the response and the linked paper. It looks like the paper and the article was mostly talking about deficiency in the decoy selection algorithm, whereas the video I linked was talking about the wider problem of taint trees on repeated transactions. That aspect doesn't seem to be addressed in the response.

As a monero contributor, I can say one problem differentiating it still from the capabilities of cash is the inability to give Monero to someone who doesn't already have a wallet. there's trust involved in every solution we know of so far.

I get what you're saying of course, but as a fun counterpoint, I gave my brother $50 worth of Monero for Christmas and he has absolutely no idea how cryptocurrencies work, had never heard of Monero. I simply wrote out instructions on a piece of paper, the seed, basic opsec, and there you go. He probably put it in his drawer and forgot about it. But he'll remember and learn how it works real quick if I ever tell him it's at $50,000 or something in a few years haha.

That doesn't sound like a cash replacement to me, it sounds like an investment vehicle. The reason cash is cash is that there's no inherent benefit to sitting on it. No one is going to be able to trade 10 $5 bills they put in the drawer this year for 5 $100 bills in a year or two, and we all understand that and operate on that shared understanding. If there's a hope and a real chance that I could get rich by just sitting on a cryptocurrency, I'll have to weigh its divestment against holding it. And the people or entities that have the biggest counterweight to investment are likely to be those who get some additional benefit besides its monetary value that they'd have to pay mightily for with cash anyway, like anonymity for practical rather than political reasons.

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