Hi. Here is a use case you can carry on to future discussions. There is a flourishing scene of dark net markets where people can purchase drugs using cryptocurrency. Merchants have reviews, products have reviews, and the whole process is much safer, secure, and convenient than meeting a drug dealer in real life with cash.
Clearly crypto is valuable to break the law. After all, look at the number of crypto scams. Or ransomware attacks.
Bitcoin is not yet perfect. Hopefully someday. Monero however is pretty great privacy wise.
Two things:
1. Bitcoin Lightning is not Bitcoin and is in fact a centralized by design layer 2 system which the transactions are off-chain [0][1], a direct contradiction to what Bitcoin was designed for. A peer-to-peer on-chain electronic cash system.
2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations. [2][3][4]
You can still use Monero, but the on-ramps, exchanges will have banned the privacy coins under these regulations, cutting a way to easily exchange it for fiat.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.07746.pdf
[2] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/monero-k...
[3] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021...
[4] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/31/eu-parliament-vot...
Yes, but I personally have node equipment sitting in my closet waiting to be setup. (time constraints) It's not so centralized that it's obviously destined to be controlled by Governments and Corporations. I would put proof of stake down as being much more controllable by monied interest.
> 2. Monero and the other privacy coins are getting delisted and banned from exchanges due to increasing regulations.
That's sad, but it leads me to two thoughts. One, I'm glad I don't live in the UK or EU, and I think it's gross that something like that happens without the input of the people. Not that I'd put it entirely past the US to do this either (sigh). Two, hopefully Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges will allow for people to swap into privacy coins without a regulated exchange, but I agree there are probably numerous ways to penalize or track the entrance and exit thereof.
I think really this comes down to getting off exchanges asap and trying to actually use the currency. My local community has a group that actively uses the currencies for exchange, but who knows how strongly that would survive if the currencies couldn't off ramp to fiat.