Why Monero
benkaiser.dev
benkaiser.dev
Monero is a solid improvement because it has low fees (so far) and is very hard to trace. So it’s popular for criminals or intense privacy types. It’s still far too slow and hard to use to ever be accepted in your local grocery store. It’s also hard to buy with fiat because most exchanges are scared of it.
What’s really remarkable is how little any of this has changed since ~2016 which was two crypto boom cycles ago. Every single popular cryptocurrency still has the same massive flaws. They’re all either too traceable, too hard to use, too centralized, too slow, too expensive, or too energy intensive. Most of them are many of those things.
In 2010 I was a crypto believer. But the whole space has made so little forward progress in 10+ years. In fact there’s been a lot of backwards progress. Mostly all that’s happened is a lot of people have become obscenely rich from speculation, scams, or the intersection of those two things.
Those of us who hoped for a new way to pay for things in real life are still waiting.
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with guaranteed-not-to-change monetary policy and supply cap. That's because Bitcoin as a whole is uniquely hard to change.
Monero is great but easy to change and so not a reliable store of value.
Bitcoin and Monero need each other badly.
A cryptocurrency with a fixed emission of 1 coin per second forever is more guaranteed never to change, as it is already as simple, non-arbitrary and fair as possible.
Monero is changing (hard-forking) regularly, so your point is broken on arrival - and I am saying this as Monero proponent. I love Monero but it is easy to change.
BCH didn't win, but it could have. It is not clear to me that BTC will never change monetary policy.
People can hard-fork away with any monetary policy but that simply won't be Bitcoin.
Would Bitcoin remain dominant over altcoin with changed monetary policy - that is another matter - and indeed not 100% certain.
This is the kind of crap Bitcoin maximalists love to push, but there's nothing unique about Bitcoin.
Some community.
Regarding the speed, many believe that instant / unconfirmed transactions are safe for day to day activities up to 10000USD. It's very difficult to double spend or inject numerous conflicting malicious transactions in hopes that the victim sees a legitimate transaction but a fraudulent transaction gets mined.
Regarding the ease of use, have you tried featherwallet.org or mymonero.com for mobile?
No longer true for slow and high transaction fees, after the lightning network. With the lightning network, it is FAST and much LESS transaction fees.
Oh, and the lightning network is no longer a pipe-dream. It is here and actively in use. If you sincerely want to try it, try using the Breez wallet https://breez.technology/
I use it to pay for some things and it's always a pleasant experience. I recommend it. The only downside is that, due to the anonymity, the clients aren't as convenient (because the server can't know your transactions, it's hard to have "light clients").
MyMonero works really well, though: https://mymonero.com/
So perhaps the ideal is a sliding scale. The more powerful you are then the less anonymity/privacy you should be allowed, at least in financial or political matters.
Personally, I think it is, but I understand how others can have different viewpoints. I think the logical conclusion if you take the opposite stance is that you're against anonymity and/or privacy, though.
People are all for anonymity until law enforcement can no longer catch criminals. There's a balance there your statement is lacking. It's kinda like saying if you support anonymity, you must be clearly pro-crime, which I don't think you are.
E.g. Banking regulations don't allow banks to publish details of customer's accounts. But KYC allows banks to report questionable activity to FINCEN, say. And that seems to strike a balance between regulation and anonymity.
I think it's that, if you are pro-catching-crime, you're against anonymity, because that's a prerequisite. If you're for anonymity, you don't have to be pro-crime, because crime isn't a prerequisite for anonymity.
> People are all for anonymity until law enforcement can no longer catch criminals.
That is certainly true. I just think that it's used against morally-good causes much more often than it's used against morally-bad, or at least that the benefit we get for the latter doesn't justify the former. One salient example is the security theater we have to go through in airports since 9/11, which have eroded the liberty of millions of people and have probably caught (or even deterred) zero people.
I'm not sure it is. It seems to me you can be pro-hoodie without being pro-murder. It also appears that being anti-murder doesn't require you to be anti-hoodie.
> One salient example is the security theater we have to go through in airports since 9/11, which have eroded the liberty of millions of people and have probably caught (or even deterred) zero people.
I won't say the TSA is good at their jobs. But I will say that anonymity ends at the door of an airplane. Now whether the former can do the latter is another question entirely.
I didn't say anything about being anti-murder, though. If you're pro-catching-murderers, you must be anti-hoodie, otherwise you catch fewer murderers.
Maybe, but also there's other options. One might be that more cops on the street would probably have a more powerful effect than banning hoodies say.
So I reject your black and white reasoning outright.
Isnt that just for the little guy because there are always stories in the news that banks help cartels move money.
Remember, the Internet is only useful for porn and cat pictures, right?
What is lost if DeFi were more heavily regulated or outlawed? What is lost if shipping were more more heavily regulated / outlawed?
Ultimately we have to do many things, and solutions aren't mutually exclusive.
Getting people to agree on "low-hanging fruit" is very difficult. Even on here you'll see people that are fine with using energy on crypto. It'll be an even taller order convincing folks that shipping should be outlawed or tightly restricted, especially folks living in rural car-dominated areas of Anglo countries. Then you'll have to mount a new fight to convince people to heavily restrict the bath and restrict shower usage. Oh and keeping your lights on all night. Then start a campaign to restrict running the AC. There will undoubtedly be folks who'll try specifically to find holes in restrictions as well, such as buying a propane stove on areas where gas stoves are banned, then you'll need to amend all of these restrictions and burn ever more political capital.
Much simpler to tax energy based on emissions. If that means PoW crypto will never be profitable, then they can pound sand. That way you also won't have lobby groups grandfather weird exceptions on restrictions to preserve their precious market.
People will do things with money that you're uncomfortable with. If it's criminal, then laws and enforcement and investigation will have to evolve. That doesn't mean "well, I guess we have to give up privacy now. "
Not your money, not your business. Privacy is important, and it's a binary proposition. It's either part of the currency or it's not. You can't have any gray area because people are fallible, malicious, and stupid. You design the system to disempower human foibles as much as you can. Monero does a good job of that.
The privacy argument has more to stand on though. Although I will say "not your money, not our business" is a pretty controversial take.
Doesn't require much thinking to guess what submarines come back filled with.
It's not that they can't move money illegally already.
We wouldn't advocate the usage of horses in modern cities because cars make it easier for criminals to escape law enforcement.
I also don't think it's reasonable to not support Monero just because you worry it might be used for criminal activity.
[1] https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/colombia-narco-submar...
Anonymity, or fungibility, doesn't interfere with that. It simply requires that evidence of harm or crime not depend on an abstract exchange of information.
We don't really use cash anymore, but a digital representation of it. This comes with a lot of electricity consumption on datacenters, among other waste.
For example: financial institutions have to waste a lot of resources just to keep the system "safe", for you, the government, etc. Requires extensive cybersecurity, bureaucratic and legal spending.
It's not just electricity, it's concrete and steel for banks and parking lots, employees driving to and from work, armored cars transporting cash, etc. Traditional cash is many, many orders of magnitude dirtier than even the worst cryptocurrency.
If you could assess the cost in pollution and other harms, you'd also want to assess the value in jobs and infrastructure and other utility. I'd bet cryptocurrency ends up being a far better tool all around, especially if institutional protections can be emulated - some sort of fraud insurance and so on.
Anyway, it's silly to neg on crypto because it uses lots of power. Total red herring.
It's a good ambition to make crypto more efficient, but the fuss is all FUD memeing from the usual suspects.
Isn't it its main use case, with probably purchasing drugs and arms?
I'm not saying that in theory people wouldn't want to privately purchase their baguette (sorry I'm French), it's just that in practice they generally don't care, unless they are doing something illegal.
I'm curious, for those of you who do, what do you actually purchase with monero that's legal? (And why?)
Also I'm not sure she would like my purchasing of cryptocurrency much more ;)
I walk sadly down to the baguette shop, sobbing into my smartphone, where I beg using my tiny remains after the divorce proceeding to buy just one stale baguette. The shopkeep takes pity and pulls last weeks remains out of the trash bin.
As the salt of my tears mix with the mold of the stale baguette, I sit in torment "why didn't I pay in Monero!"
-------- Epilogue -------
3 months later, I join the legion etrangere, the last respite for a soul with no money, no skills, and no baguettes. I have no family to miss me, and any wages I get in the civilian life are garnished. I'm deployed to Mali, a land of no baguettes. 5 more days until I finally get my 200 Euro's pay -- I finally can order a baguette. I hear a loud sound. Several tribesman surround me with pointed sticks. My FAL jams, and I feel the warm fiery sensation of the sticks piercing my organs, as the life force drains out of me. One more baguette was all I wanted. If only I had bought my baguettes with a fungible untraceable currency.
In France we are lucky enough to have another kind of civil union which is much less intrusive with what you can do with your baguette ;) and also have no consequences when you end it.
It never used to be a binary proposition, it used to be somewhat proportionate because (a) there was a cost to surveillance and (b) there was a cost to acting covertly - crime was inherently local and hard to scale.
So you wouldn't have the police surveilling everyone unless that was critical to the stability of the state (Stasi etc), and it was infeasible to track cash transactions so a certain amount of crime and evasion was tolerated. But it was limited because cash is inherently bulky. Even a few million dollars is hard to carry around.
Now the internet has falsified both of those. Both crime and surveillance can be scaled up and globalized. So it has become binarized, with one of two outcomes: anonymous transactions + frictionless crime, including evasion of tax and currency controls; OR omnipresent surveillance of everyone and every transaction.
Cryptocurrency is accelerating towards one of those two outcomes. I just don't think it'll be the first one.
Also in some countries police still don't just scan all your bank transactions 24/7 and there is presumption of innocence in criminal law.
Cash has serial numbers which means it needs to be laundered, since banks work with the FBI to trace where bills with serial numbers show up.
Also just want to remind you that the world doesn't end on US soil and once you moved cash to a different country this kind of tracking becomes more and more complicated.
Let's say you'll make a fake startup funded by VCs from all around the world. There is plenty of people who will love to buy few million dollars with 30% discount.
This isn't about some petty crime though, but again it's much easier to move smaller amount of money anyway.
Then why are you regurgitating this uninformed vomit passing as currency expertise? You clearly don't understand how money laundering works with paper cash, and you think the only thing that matters is "cost".
I really can't speak about US and how FBI works, but again most of online criminals are not operate in the US.
You just can't make a claim and then say later, "But I'm not an expert."
As about money laundering your opinion is one of a person living in western country with working institutions and strong legal frameworks. Unfortunately this isn't the case in many places around the globe. There is tons of countries where everything is just a question of % you want to pay.
The more paper records you generate the more likely you're going to get raided by the FBI, Scotland Yard, etc.
Every anti-crime measure only makes crime more expensive, that's the whole mechanism by which they work.
Converting it back into something digital, anonymously/untraceably requires laundering it where you end up losing 20-70% of the value.
Cash sucks for any meaningful crime.
Cash is designed to be traceable and to move millions of it would be truly a feat. On the other hand you can move billions of crypto for the fuck of it.
Crypto is good for crime.
> Also in some countries police still don't just scan all your bank transactions 24/7 and there is presumption of innocence in criminal law.
The US draws the right balance: your transactions are private until the court authorizes the police obtain them on the basis of probable cause. Now it may not be executed perfectly every time but that's advocating for reforming that system, not throwing it out.
War on drugs has proven that it's impossible to fight this kind of activity no matter how much resources you throw at it. And running scams / botnets / extortion on internet is way less risky criminal activity than selling drugs.
> The US draws the right balance
Unfortunately it doesn't work like this in most of the world and US isn't about to invite remaining 95% of world population to join the party.
It's not that I support criminals, but majority of crime on internet (not counting actually selling drugs) is either scams, botnets or extortion. IMHO they all can only be solved by combination of educating people better and improving systems security overall.
Instead western government promise to solve crime with surveillance, draconian AML policies and censorship. After all it worked so well in authoritarian countries all around the world. /s
I could pressure wash houses for $200 a house everyday and get 100k in less than 2 years. Or bartend, work as a waitress for a few years, whatever. There's plenty of ways people end up with large sums of cash without a SAR or CTR. Some individuals conceivably may pull 2-3k a month out of an ATM for a few years, why would that flag a SAR on you? See this guy, who [1] despite having a bank account had 87k seized by thieves in blue on the side of the road, who meticulously kept ATM statements for most all of it.
> your transactions are private until the court authorizes the police obtain them on the basis of probable cause
What is the court that signs an order, based on probable cause of a crime, for each cash transaction over 10,000? What is the court that orders, based on probable cause, a bank file a SAR when they are suspicious of your transactions. What is the court that signs an order, based on probable cause of a crime, that you declare foreign bank accounts with a combined value above $10k? Can you point me towards the warrants that have been issued for each of these transactions that show the probable cause?
What is the court order, on probable cause, that requires foreign banks to comply with FATCA for Americans abroad?
What is the court order, on probable cause, that requires money transmitters to collect KYC on customers regardless of there being any probable cause whatsoever of a crime?
The idea your transaction are private until ordered by a court is absolute hogwash.
[1] https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/courts/nevada-troopers-t...
It's really not interesting re-hashing how the judicial system works.
It's not really interesting re-hashing an outright lie from someone who knows better.
Plus it's fun to mine, you can do it on a CPU instead of needing a massive GPU swarm.
It is far easier for me to buy some crypto and stake it than it is to buy mining hardware and mine.
How would they do that?
That is also my thinking, that there basically isn't any difference between staking and mining oligopolies.
> So while it’s theoretically possible for a miners cabal to lock out a new entrant it seems pretty opposed to the value of their own holdings so it’s left to something like a country that wants to shut it down through throwing money at the problem then I guess?
In theory, if the stakers are anonymous, this make PoS more resistant to nation state attacks since it would be easier for a nation state to find the mining equipment producers and direct all hardware production to themselves until they acquire 51% of hash rate than it is to find the stakers and take their keys.
Looking forward to lmm explaining how we are wrong.
Mining is anonymous and portable.
This would be true if the only way to get the coins is through exchanges with KYC. You can get coins in other ways so this point of yours is moot.
> In practice, most are going to be using staking providers or delegated proof of stake, and these are corporations that will absolutely be corrupted by states.
We are talking about staking oligopolies not about someone buying 10 dollars worth of coins which makes this point of yours moot.
> Mining is anonymous and portable.
You should read more carefully. I did not mention miners but producers of mining equipment. Also, a nation state can produce mining equipment themselves, they can't create new coins.
Edit: To add, big miners really aren't that portable or anonymous.
What guarantees that this continues to be true? Yes coins that can't be sold are worthless, but coins that can only be sold with KYC aren't.
> We are talking about staking oligopolies not about someone buying 10 dollars worth of coins
The staking providers or delegatees are the (potential) oligopolies
> I did not mention miners but producers of mining equipment.
Those are also anonymous and, if not completely portable, fungible with general electronic manufacturing equipment that's widely possessed.
> Also, a nation state can produce mining equipment themselves, they can't create new coins.
Which supports my point - the capability to exclude a nation state also allows the staking cabals to exclude people they don't like. Given that a staking cabal by its very nature controls the chain, they can stop other people getting or making coins. But a mining cabal can't stop other people getting or making mining equipment.
This applies to PoW coins too. Miners can't be anonymous if they want to sell their coins. Why would anybody mine for nothing?
> The staking providers or delegatees are the (potential) oligopolies
Yes, and miners mine in pools. Why are you not considering pools as (potential) oligopolies? What is the difference?
> Those are also anonymous and, if not completely portable, fungible with general electronic manufacturing equipment that's widely possessed.
They need physical locations with people physically present with physical inputs and outputs. The idea that it is easier for miners and hardware manufacturers to be anonymous than a guy spinning some software on some server is... stupid. To think that it is easier for miners and hardware producers to change location than a guy moving private keys from one server to another is just... retarded.
> Which supports my point - the capability to exclude a nation state also allows the staking cabals to exclude people they don't like.
I've asked you already how would a staking cabal exclude people they don't like and for some reason you are not answering that question. I'm guessing you are avoiding it because your answer, as all you've written so far in this thread, also applies to mining cabals.
> Given that a staking cabal by its very nature controls the chain, they can stop other people getting or making coins. But a mining cabal can't stop other people getting or making mining equipment.
No they can't make them stop making mining equipment, why do you think that that is relevant? The mining cabal can produce their own hardware and prevent anybody using any different hardware from joining the network, could they not?
Can you please try to clearly answer the original question. What makes mining oligopolies better than staking oligopolies? If you are sticking with your answer that it is harder to create mining oligopolies then please explain how? And before you press reply could you please stop for a minute and thing how what you wrote is applicable to mining oligopolies and not to staking oligopolies or vice versa.
Note: I am not the other poster. We just agree that PoS is a sham.
Also it isn't quite friendly to ignore what the person you are arguing with has written or pretending to be two different people in an argument.
Have a nice day.
A mining cabal can't stop other people from mining, because you don't need anything (other than commodity hardware and an internet connection) to mine. But a staking cabal controls both staking and current coins (by the nature of how staking works), and new entrants need to have coins to stake, so such a cabal can stop other people from staking.
This is the first time you are saying that, and you aren't explaining how that is relevant to PoS oligopolies. What was said by me and by rtkwe, on this matter, is that due to this characteristic of PoS coins the only way, we can think of (you've ignored both of our posts on this subject so I'm assuming that you agree?), a staking oligopoly can remain oligopoly is by controlling the majority of coins and not selling those coins which in effect means that a PoS oligopolies don't make any money from being oligopolies. In fact maintaining a staking oligopoly would destroy all the money that was invested in creating it.
In my opinion, and I would love to hear yours if you ever read and parse this, that discourages creation of oligopolies since there is no profit in them.
> A mining cabal can't stop other people from mining
They can't stop them from running their machines but they can stop them from producing any blocks that are accepted in to the chain making it unprofitable for anybody not part of the oligopoly to mine. Unlike with staking this doesn't prevent the mining oligopolies from making a profit since it requires no manipulation of the markets to retain their position as an oligopoly.
Eh, maybe. I think there's a lot of middle ground between selling freely/anonymously to anyone and not selling at all.
> They can't stop them from running their machines but they can stop them from producing any blocks that are accepted in to the chain making it unprofitable for anybody not part of the oligopoly to mine.
I think/hope that would destroy whatever coin that was, and far more quickly, because there's no way to be subtle about that one - everyone can see blocks being broadcast and ignored. Whereas if every time an outsider tries to buy some coins, their name didn't quite match for KYC and they need to resubmit their documents, or someone else bought them first, or the exchange suddenly needs to freeze all transactions to investigate an issue, you can maintain the illusion of an active market for quite some time.
This also applies to staking oligopolies. Either all the coins are owned by the oligopoly rendering them valueless or they need to ignore blocks from others. Again, it seems that staking oligopolies are "better" than mining ones.
> Whereas if every time an outsider tries to buy some coins, their name didn't quite match for KYC and they need to resubmit their documents, or someone else bought them first, or the exchange suddenly needs to freeze all transactions to investigate an issue, you can maintain the illusion of an active market for quite some time.
This assumes that the exchanges are the oligopoly and ignores that the coins that the vast majority of coins that exchanges stake are owned by someone else and can be pulled. And no, if you freeze all transactions for whatever reason you can't maintain the illusion of an active market for quite some time.
Staking pools also have a "saturation point" to encourage decentralization. That way not all 80 Billion dollars worth of ADA goes to one staking pool.
Very hard to see how oligopolies can arise in this scenario when compared to mining operations that are unprofitable to most users (and of course bad for the environment).
"..nodes just vote on a block to state whether or not they think it is valid. Once a block gets enough votes, then it is added to the chain."
Whereas a PoW will "just blaze". Is this correct?
Didn't they have a Church of Monero a few years back? That was kind of... weird? It was probably started as a joke or something, I can't remember.
https://twitter.com/churchofmonero
Also related reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/a8uyze/the_church_o...
They're get-rich-quick schemes plus money laundering/capital-flight mechanisms. And if you think capital flight is more ethical than a get-rich-quick scheme, I'd like to introduce you to X oligarch on Y continent committing Z poorly publicized genocide.
Edit: that said, the way that they facilitate dubious money transfer is pretty what makes them likely to stick around and so one can say with more certainty their value will be maintained. Hope that makes you feel better.
Iran's rulers might or might be oligarchs but the use of bitcoin by the Iranian state[1] seems like good evidence that crypto isn't just for the little guy.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/iran-uses-crypto-mining-l...
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-north-koreas-role-bit...
The app crashes randomly, hangs, and worst of all, refuses to send transactions using a hardware wallet when running as a full node.
The hardware wallet is only able to sign transactions when connected to a remote node, which is much worse privacy wise.
Monero needs much more developers & funding to succeed.
Maybe I should look into the CLI. Does it support Ledger?
Did you export your view key with Ledger? If you refuse it can cause hanging and crashes. With exported view key and the latest version there shouldn't be any of the issues you are describing.
Now if only they could stabilize the price so you can pay for things instead of gamble on it.
LOL. Not my experience at all. Monero shills are the worst.
This is simply a user perspective. My "crypto perspective" isn't too happy about Ripple, but I can't deny that I enjoy using it for quick transfers.
If I had a dollar that would triple it’s value in a week “just because” I would be suspicious.
This is one of the the reasons why (low) target inflation rates exist. The (slight) devaluation of the currency encourages consumption or investment with the currency and discourages mattress stuffing.
You wouldn't buy goods with stocks.
In fact, a currency with a constant rate of issuance is actually highly deflationary in a growing economy.
When evaluating the potential of coins (in terms of price gains), I nowadays pretty much only look at whether they can serve as enablers for whatever is the currently trending thing whose purpose is to extend the leverage factor of fiat money in crypto. At the moment this is "DeFi", especially crypto lending, and NFTs (although the NFT thing is already tapering off again). Because that's what crypto investors ACTUALLY want: vehicles that increase the leverage factor between fiat money invested in crypto and the total crypto market cap.
Another problem is that Monero's PoW is expensive to verify where a good PoW should be instantly verifiable. In fact, it's considered so expensive that by default, the Monero client uses a checkpoint block without verifying all the PoW that led to the block.
Monero's super expensive PoW also makes it very hard to interface with other smart blockchains that may want to verify the amount of work behind a Monero block, or to support useful techniques like flyclient [1].
I can't agree with that sentiment at all. Sure, there a those schemes, but most of the time they are easy to spot. If you have a look at the top 50 coins on CMC [0], you will find mostly solid projects that have large ecosystems with much brainpower locked in.
https://www.getmonero.org/2017/12/07/Monero-Compatible-Bulle...
Thank you! There's a lot of difficult-to-google info locked up in comments like this, and I truly appreciate the effort spent replying to randos like me :)
The users themself are anonymous, just like when using cash!
That is a good system because it enables governments to still being able to tax businesses and control illegal activities. Such system will also gain more acceptance among the common folks.
Outside transparency is not a benefit. Most people I've talked to about crypto don't see the opacity as a detriment. They do not trust the government or tax policy. Most of these people are also generally happy to pay their taxes but can see reasons when they would want to hide their behavior.
BTCs blockchain is rather power inefficient.
Pfff, a single transaction is only 1700kw/h (or 820kg of carbon dioxide) with as little as 90g of electrical waste left behind on average. From an economical standpoint that could be much more ... if you are to sell energy or equipment of course. /s
Lol, the common man isn’t really subjected to other forms of taxation.
Most people pay two kinds of taxes: income tax, and sales/use taxes (with property tax being a distant third).
The most common taxes are difficult to dodge.
Edit: I am again talking about capital gains. Yes, the money has to come from somewhere, but you can break the traceability easily by using non-kyc means of getting crypto. E.g. bitcoin ATMs.
People keep walking this back to massive fraud but more likely what anonymity will do is just allow businesses to escape onerous operating issues. E.g. having employees in some states is worse than having them in others because of those state's perceived requirements to operate an LLC in that state, and other related rules. It's not even clear if some of these requirements are enforceable federally.
As I mentioned, there are more defensible reasons for only having one party lie, like avoiding CA's (future?) claim that paying someone who lives in California implies you hired them in California and need to incorporate in California.
I think his point is: Bitcoin explicitly takes a libertarian position to taxation by making it hard to tax. While most crypto adopters may be libertarian, the majority of people are not and so the libertarian position will deter adoption.
As noted many times here, anonymous crypto is only as bad as cash.
This makes illegal uses of it much harder.
Nah, will never fly.
I don't think that's a bad use case for tax money.
So maybe roads are somewhat easier to grasp. They are paid for by taxes and while you could outsource that to private parties, having to pay a bribe each kilometer seems rather complicated to me.
And you also have the possibility to avoid taxes if you want. So, it's a superior system because it allows both use cases ;)
The narrative that this type of value exchange will protect people is as easily argued that it will put others at risk. We have institutions for a reason, and nobody living in a free country should desire such an absurdly dangerous means of value exchange.
At least when you exchange physical currency, it's actually physically difficult for a kidnapper or bank robber to handle the actually physical volume of $1M.
Monero is light years easier for law enforcement to find kidnappers (exchanges, honeypots, network access) than cold hard cash.
Was there a plague of kidnappers when the world used 'absurdly dangerous means of value exchange' like paper currency and gold?
edit: my reply was before you edited to discuss physical currency. $1M in $100 bills is 22lbs. Hardly a deterrent.
https://lb-aps-frontend.statista.com/statistics/275545/kidna...
The idea that an email asking for a blockchain currency is somehow more difficult than a dead drop of physical currency is absurd. While there are some merits, this type of value exchange is a dangerous vehicle for facilitating human exploitation. We need to start talking about that fact more, instead of the fever dreams that those of us in the free world somehow live in some faux-totalitarian state, simply because you can't legally purchase MDMA or cocaine.
Evil people use neutral tools for evil purposes. They have been since the beginning of tools.
So stop trying to slow the advance of technology just because some evil people can use it too.
Monero seems much better suited as a weapon against real totalitarian regimes. If it is illegal in both a free and unfree society, then it will only have a practical purpose in the unfree society, whereas the free society will have plentiful alternatives.
And if you receive that $10k in cash, how do you deposit it without the same risk?
You shouldn't be surprised when Americans value privacy over institutions. Our institutions are more criminal than our criminals.
>stealing from us without due process via civil forfeiture
Yea, this is exactly the type of faux-totalitarian nonsense i was talking about in the other thread. If we live in a free society, we can change the types of laws we don't like, and in the case of civil forfeiture, we should, and are, but pretending like one bad law justifies something with these consequences is ridiculous.
So I'll tell you what. You can work on fixing those institutions if you want. I'll take the privacy while we wait.
There is a certain balance of downsides and upsides of limitations on freedom. If you move the "safety" knob all the way to maximum, you will get a high security prison with creature comforts. Indeed, being watched and tracked at all times, and limited in what you do and where you go, you can definitely be kept out of the harm's way. If you like the motion towards this, welcome to mainland China. (If you want an antidote, re-read the Brave New World.)
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, that is, liberty is a somehow unsafe condition, else vigilance won't be needed. Some people prefer certain upsides of liberty more than certain upsides of safety. Such people founded the U.S., and it still shows here and there. (Not much, of course.)
Yes, I think an effectively anonymized digital value exchange is problematic. I prefer physical currency for anonymized transactions because it provides certain physical barriers that make a non-consensual exchange of goods and services difficult, while perfectly facilitating, though often de-anonymizing large exchanges of value.
Something that's perfectly sensible in a state that values both privacy and rule of law. We don't put cameras in your home, we do put cameras in airports and nuclear energy facilities.
>Monero seems much better suited as a weapon against real totalitarian regimes. If it is illegal in both a free and unfree society, then it will only have a practical purpose in the unfree society, whereas the free society will have plentiful alternatives.
From another thread. I think the something like Monero can exist, but also be illegal, and that would facilitate making it's practical use only valuable in truly unfree societies.
In light of this - I think it's rational to remove paper currency from circulation and to move to a digital system where every transaction is tracked to a real person. This could be as simple as using existing banking structures, or maybe some sort of cryptographically-secure, immutable ledger of some sort, tying every transaction back to a real person. Almost like a centralized, managed "block chain".
/s
Kidding aside, I have zero clue what the actual adoption rate is for Monero in the seedy underworld of common criminality, so I can't really challenge anyone on this argument.
I can say if I were a criminal, I'd want to keep it as low tech as possible. Given how sophisticated computer forensics is, I don't think I'd be able to keep everything "clean", digitally speaking.
For example, many professional bartenders commit tax fraud every day by not reporting cash tips. This is directly facilitated by paper currencies.
If tips were given in Monero, the tax fraud would be even easier.
EU (or Germany, sorry I forgot) just passed laws that production of all goods should be traceable from beginning to end.
They are working on it. Nobody shall be able to opt out of the system.
So you're saying 99.9% of the population shouldn't benefit from this because there will be a tiny percentage misusing it?
I take it you're against privacy, encryption and gun ownership too then right?
I think your love letters should be private from the gov't, I don't think your income should be private from the gov't.
I think nearly everyone should be able to own a rifle, but I don't think any private citizen should be able to own a tank.
There are many aspects of life where I think the costs outweigh the benefits for citizen in society. Since there are trivial numbers of alternatives, I see a highly anonymized digital store of value as bad for the public welfare. The limit is typically where public access to the good is necessary to prevent tyranny, but universal access causing a tyranny of the minority is typically the where things should be illegal.
I think the conditions in which Monero would benefit society existed, the legality of Monero would be irrelevant.
I'm not saying Monero shouldn't exist, I'm saying those of us in a free society should want it to be illegal in our free society. Again, it's legality in an unfree society is essentially irrelevant to it's practicality.
I don't understand how people can possibly think that identity obfuscation at scale is a good thing for a financial system. The rule of law and democracy are far from perfect, but it is unquestionably the safest, cushiest time to be alive in human history right now for the average human being.
Let's make our financial system completely opaque and make it impossible to enforce laws. That'll really help us!
This is a blindness that can only come from a lifetime of extreme privilege.
That is an anomaly in human history. Much of the world still lives under governments that are hostile to many of their people, and we can easily slide back to that condition.
I also have to point out that cash is largely opaque and we have used cash for centuries. Laws were still be enforced. While cash can be exchanged with no knowledge of anyone but the participants, large scale movements and usage of money requires interactions that are very noticeable and traceable. It’s easy to move money anonymously but very hard to use it that way. Monero doesn’t change this very much.
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/still-using-cash/
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/opinion/getting-rid-of-bi...
But to financial economists, cash is a textbook example of a ‘fungible’ thing.
So a statement like – “Monero is fungible, cash is not.” – implies you’re using peculiar definitions.
I cannot take cash into a bank that came from a heist or a covert drug buy from the authorities for example, I'd go to jail. The term 'marked bills' exist because cash is not fungible, not all bills are equal.
This is the binary quality of fungibility. There are no shades of fungibility, there is no "well this is X's definition of it".
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fungibility.asp
(It is interesting to think of the ways traditional cash might not meet a physicist’s definition, or assumptions under which Monero might somehow be more fungible or less fungible than physical cash, on a spectrum richer than a pure binary. But if you remain oblivious to what the word commonly means to others, you’re failing a bit at communication.)
There is a reason that the scams and ransomware use Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency instead of cash.
You know what makes it really easy to ransom a hospital during a pandemic? Monero. You know what makes it easy to ransom a school, leaking personal information of children in the process? Monero.
The government tends to go after lower and middle class people when enforcing laws. I think the benefits of preserving privacy outweigh the IRS collecting the $600 someone who makes $30k owes.
You can argue that some gov/regulator should have access, though good luck finding one country everyone trusts. More realistically, and practically, you could require that, as many jurisdictions do with cash, we should have reporting requirements for when a merchant sells something for large amounts of cryptocurrency.
But its pretty hard to argue everyone should be financially naked and exposed to anyone who wants to look. To fix that, even if you're government surveillance friendly, you first need to make the blockchain zero-knowledge (which Monero actually isn't good at, but thats irrelevant here).
The whole "I don't understand how people can possibly think that identity obfuscation at scale is a good thing for a financial system" can be answered by, "Will you share your entire transaction history and account balances with the entire world? Why not?"
Not people who've done any research on the matter. Regulations on money laundering have been almost completely ineffective at reducing crime (the end goal); the drug market is bigger than ever. What they do achieve is imposing a significant burden on individual and small businesses, while large banks like HSBC can get away with money laundering by paying a nominal fine.
Money laundering regulations are like the financial version of the war on drugs: completely ineffective at what they set out to do, succeeding only at giving the government more power and making life harder for the powerless.
And Venmo => https://www.mic.com/p/matt-gaetz-who-is-definitely-not-a-sex...
The modern level of financial surveillance – KYC, etc – is only a few decades old, and collects more info for the state than any 'general warrant' could. Even in fairly-free countries, the burdens & murky liabilities created by turning every financial agent into a part-time police informer has the effect of persecuting & impoverishing disfavored individuals & groups – even those who've been convicted of no crime. In unfree states the same surveillance helps quash all kinds of dissent.
A blind faith in authorities' use of financial surveillance ignores history & the current reality of billions living under untrustworthy regimes. Many hardly even pretend to offer "rule of law & democracy".
I do agree that financial surveillance is an issue, but I'm not sure Monero is the best way to curtail it. Why not try passing strong consumer protection laws that ban companies from collecting and selling data on financial transactions as well as tighter restrictions on the access that law enforcement has on this data? If the problem is a government that is abusing its power, it wouldn't be too hard for them to crackdown on any cryptocurrency they consider a threat. Monero feels like a band-aid rather than a long term solution, and one with some pretty significant downsides.
I get your point here, but once someone has already lost trust in the government, having the government regulate itself isn't really a viable counter to that person's concerns.
I did not mention Monero at all!
I pointed out that “rule of law & democracy” did OK before the recent modern era of massive, preemptive, general-warrant-like financial surveillance. And that level of surveillance may in fact endanger “rule of law & democracy”.
“Why not try passing strong consumer protection laws that ban companies from collecting and selling data on financial transactions as well as tighter restrictions on the access that law enforcement has on this data?”
You are welcome to try that. Why don’t you start in China, Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Nicaragua? Or even Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Brazil, or India? Protecting financial privacy in those places would help show if your “pass a strong consumer protection law” plan might work.
Even in a country where such a law might have a chance, it’s a fragile protection, & ineffective against most abuses by the state itself. Much better is: built-in, inherent, classic privacy.
Technology such as atomic swaps mean privacy coins will never be killed by legislation. The best we can do is outlaw their use by the honest, relegating them only to the blackmarket (which is precisely the place you didn't want them in the first place).
Some people say the same things about encryption, but it is a very accurate parallel that it actually makes society safer, and the technology can't be taken from "criminals" so you just have to deal with its existence.
Cryptocurrency isn't a bank. It's a virtual mattress to stuff your money into, and one that lends itself very well to torturing you until you unlock the wallet.
Further, many people live in countries where the people simply cannot trust their institutions or the value of their currencies, to the point where they are better off storing USD under their mattress, so the technology should be there for those people
There's an important side-effect to an anonymous financial system which doesn't get much attention, but is worth noting.
An anonymous financial system is a debt-less financial system, since without identity you can't do credit ratings or other means of enforcement of repayment. Everything is either a commodity or equity/security, not a debt instrument. And there is no debt-financing, only equity-financing (similar to the VC industry).
No debt means no leverage, or in the case of the Global Financial Crisis, no over-leverage [1]. Without debt and leverage you can't have a systemic credit collapse, the most destructive type of financial crisis (GFC, Great Depression).
I've seen one estimate that if central banks and govts hadn't bailed out the financial system in 2007/2008 GFC, there was so much leverage that the collapse would have lost the banking system more money than it had cumulatively made over its entire ~300yr modern history. That would have been Mad Max time for sure, and why the bailouts were the lesser evil.
By eliminating identity from the financial system you've deterministically eliminated the worst possible outcome that system could incur, and materially changed the expectation value for the system (and society) over time.
In the short-term, a highly leveraged, debt-based financial system will likely outperform an equity/commodity-only financial system. But over the medium to long term, when periodic credit collapses are factored in to the former, probably not.
In blockchain financial systems, any activity that requires collateral must be over-collateralized [2], resulting in significantly increased systemic robustness and reliability. If we care about deterministically eliminating the most destructive type of financial crisis from the table of possible outcomes, then we must acknowledge this is a useful side-effect of an anonymous financial system.
Finally, the comparative damage to society of a GFC-style collapse is greater than things that are enabled by untraceable money, like money laundering and sex-trafficking. The latter can be horrible, but the former is potentially a different order of magnitude, if bailouts are not possible (which may be the case next time).
* Notes & Clarifications:
1. High volatility due to price discovery activities is not the same as systemic collapse. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are highly volatile, losing and gaining ~80% of their value multiple times over their first decade of existence. But such volatility is not the same as a systemic collapse.
2. Atomic debt like flash loans are still possible, where the loan is atomically made, invested, liquidated, and repaid all in the same smart contract. If any part of that contract fails, or the loan can't be repaid, then the entire thing is rolled back and the loan never even happened. But that can't result in a collapse in the same way the traditional banking system can.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80...
[2]:https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/overcollateralization.a...
The system is already that for everyone rich enough.
I just want to have the same privilege as the Clintons and Trumps when it comes to ~~bribes~~ voluntary contributions.
Almost all governments throughout history except for now would have abused that privilege.
Easily - I value my ability to remain private more than I do your ability to enforce laws.
The beauty of that particular accusation is that you can't really defend against it - as any disagreement can simply be used to infer an even higher degree of privilege.
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.
Rich people already have that advantage, why not give the same advantage to the little guy?
Use a 2-of-3 multisig for dispute resolution.
Another issue with Zcash is that it had a trusted setup, which is not an issue Monero has.
That's not a true statement as far as I understand how Zcash works. Right now there are >742K ZEC in the shielded Sapling pool, so there are quite a few people using it and you can not tell their shielded transactions apart.
https://electriccoin.co/zcash-metrics/
> Another issue with Zcash is that it had a trusted setup, which is not an issue Monero has.
Yes, but they took a number of steps to make sure that the ceremony for creating the trusted setup discarded the keys used and there was no one listening in. (they were geographically distributed and destroyed the hardware)
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/cerem...
Skip to around 36 minutes for that.
Halo Arc removes the trusted setup and also sets shielded transactions by default.
ECC also has announced that they intend to work on implementing shielded assests which seem compelling: https://electriccoin.co/blog/zsas-ecc-progress-and-next-step...
One glaring issue is that there seems to be lots of tension between the community and the Zcash foundation (wrt power control).
zcash is shady
Also, Zcash has optional privacy.
On the other hand, the decoy based privacy protocols Monero uses are not really private at all. https://slideslive.com/38911785/satoshi-has-no-clothes-failu...
Its cryptocurrency, everything is tribal.
No one else as done the same tech yet themselves. A few things have launched and allegedly plan to add a privacy layer (Mina, Celo). But actually building that kind of tech is a lot harder than reputation management or standard blockchains.
It's still an open playing field.
This is simply not true, otherwise you should present real evidence. It is not perfect, but nothing ever will be, and Monero continues to move forward and use the best technology available. Research continues, and they hope to move away from "decoy based protocols" altogether eventually, but the tradeoffs have so far been too great. Unlike bitcoin, it is able to do large changes, since there is a completely different development culture
Can be read as: a 'relatively' small group of people control the protocol to such a level that arbitrary changes can be enacted with relative ease.
An example that comes to mind is Ethereum, which is essentially controlled by a single developer aided by a few others. When a bug in a contract would have cost many people a significant amount, the lead developer lead the charge (to the applause of almost all) in forking the chain.
I haven't looked at Monero in enough detail to confirm this, but your statement is not exactly a selling point. Having decentralization to the point that it becomes hard for developers to force through changes, should be a feature... not a bug.
>Having decentralization to the point that it becomes hard for developers to force through changes
This is happening to Monero too over time, as the community grows. I expect it will continue to become more difficult to gain consensus over time. There is, at least, many developers and no 'leader' figure like Vitalik
The developers were funded by suspicious government organisations including DARPA and Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology.
It is centralised, with an organisation receiving significant coins directly from the protocol.
Opt-in privacy defeats much of the point and creates traceability issues - privacy needs to be the default for people to use it, for their coins to not be treated suspiciously if they turn on the privacy feature, and it is a requirement to have a large anonymity set.
Among other reasons, there are many...
It's also designed in a way to allow "poison pills" - i.e. those in control can force a single transaction on a block, thus giving a vector to deanonymize someone.
You may ask, "Who would do something like that?" and the answer would be the U.S. government who can compel privately owned organizations via secret court subpoenas. Monero is more private than ZCash, and has a record of not acting on self-interests.
What I mean by this is that transactions in Monero are always private, while users of Zcash can choose to send public transactions. What this does is it makes the group of users who send private transactions through Zcash much smaller and far, far more susceptible to being identified through metadata and process of elimination.
This is heavily simplified - and Monero community members would be happy to get into the weeds with you about it if you were to visit their realms on the web, I'm sure.
Little touches like that keep making me reconsider the project in a favorable light.
If the whole network private, then the privacy faults can only happen at its boundaries--which are places that the protocol designers have less control over. The alternative is having to wonder about what kind of identifying metadata the exchanges are leaking--and they're an easier target for an adversary.
Also, I have to imagine that the everywhere-private nature of XMR is why I don't see it on my exchange's list, while I do see ZEC there.
But I wasn't talking about that. With zero-knowledge proofs protecting the shielded transactions, your anonymity pool is essentially the entire set of people that use shielded transactions. With the Monero approach, your anonymity pool is large, but it's still a subset of the whole network.
> Personal Speculation
> Disclosure: I own a small amount of Monero, Bitcoin and Nano.
How small? $1M might be small to a billionaire. To others $50k is a large amount.
Otherwise it seems like yet another blog post shilling crypto.
Also, you could just as well consider it a positive signal (putting money where their mouth is).
I guess even better would be posting a proof of ownership. Not sure if that would be possible with Monero, but it would be possible with Bitcoin.
XMR.to even used 0-conf back in the days https://twitter.com/xmr_to/status/955364047679049728 (for hundreds of $) easily.
thought, I agree it may be inconvenient.
And although Algorand doesn't include some of the more "controversial" privacy features, it's still RTBF-compliant. [1]
[0]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/role-of-transaction-...
[1]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/right-to-be-forgotte...
If you're buying a coffee the vendor is likely to let you leave the shop after no confirmations (as soon as their node hears about the transaction) but if you're buying a car the same is unlikely to be true.
I don't see why not, it's not like you can buy a car anonymously. If anything there's more security there than with the coffee, and no one is going to attack the Monero network to create a double spend for the price of a car.
You can buy a car with cash. Monero is digital cash.
In practice people (e.g. exchanges, that know who you are after KYC) still opt to wait a little because if something does go wrong it's a hassle to actually get paid. For the same reason, we are likely to check some of the bills in a large cash payment for authenticity, even though we have effective recourse through the police and the judicial system.
I very much want to live in a future where there is a digital payment method that’s as anonymous as cash. As far as I can tell Monero is the front runner
Its almost 6 months and i havent made a singe sale in Monero, but it doesnt matter. Its about widening the purchase power of the coin.
Financial transparency won't prevent crimes. And KYC doesn't prevent crimes either.
Optional privacy also isn't a solution. All transactions must look the same or very similar otherwise you stand out.
Monero solves all of this. It still has a long way to go though.
If that private key is compromised can law enforcement read your past transaction history?
And if law enforcement compromises the private key on the other side of the transaction can they connect the two of you, and all your prior mutual transactions?
Of course you can delete that key if you want, and perhaps run multiple wallets with which you can transact with yourself
When using it for payments is that it is hard to make a case for a regular user (new to crypto) to use it.
The onramp is too painful/expensive/convuluted + payment is without recourse.
Joe Customer needs a really good incentive to use crypto. Currently this means something shady.
So only normal crypto use is for those who already hold some crypto.
PS I've looked for a good solution to this since 2011 and the progress has been glacial.
They pay the Monero to your Monero wallet, and then it's up to you to decide how to use it. Whether or not mining is financially viable (e.g., electricity cost) depends on a few things. You can use a calculator/website like whattomine.com, cryptocompare.com, coinwarz.com, minerstat.com, etc. to get a rough idea of your potential mining profitability.
Provide information about your issues and they would be grateful.
> official desktop gui clients is completely unusable
It has improved significantly over time, perhaps this was a long time ago?
Also you should try out Feather wallet[1], it has a more classic Qt design.
On top of that, node operators can still run pruned node.
Since I missed to dogecoin hype, I am now rooting for Wow.
I wouldn't advise investing in Doge for gains, either.
Also, the founder (who loves telling people to stay poor online) is in jail for fraud. I'm shocked.
I really hope Gensler and co sack up and shut down these wannabe pirate losers.
Why are people still pursuing this cringely inadequate technology