My fear with strongly anonymous DeFi is indirectly harming the environment and supporting crime. Sadly doesn't look like Monero resolve these concerns.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.