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Comment by kylebenzle | Hacker News Reader

XMR and BCH have been working great for a decade and in my mind are the ONLY Cryptocurrency projects that are not outright scams or digital ponzi schemes.

It's odd how clear the picture is but how many people have been fooled by fakes. What other industry is 99% scams and only 1% legitimate?

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Why are you downvoted? XMR is among the greatest cryptocurrencies. It's everything bitcoin was supposed to have been. The fact it's not in the top charts is proof of the irrationality of the market.

Or, perhaps, it's proof that the purpose of crypto in 2023[1] is not utility, it's line-goes-up.

[1] And 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, ...

Utility? It already works. I've gotten paid for services via monero.

I'd be very happy if Monero somehow turned into the stable coin of crypto. It could just hover around $150-$200 forever.

You can feed your dog dinner off a golden plate, but that doesn't mean the price of gold is driven by its utility.

The purpose of a thing is not the driver of its price. It's unfortunate that crypto's turned into speculative stocks but to say it has no purpose or utility is just wrong. It actually works.

The problem with XMR is that it works too well, so people are worried governments will ban it (thus the low price).

Let them ban it. That's the perfect test for the technology.

Not exactly. It is just pricing in the risk of the government making the on/off ramps impossible to access.

There should not be any on-off ramps to begin with. People should just transact in XMR directly. That's what crypto was supposed to have been like.

This does have the network effect disavantage of requiring everything to move to XMR immediately.

Also, except maybe for purely digital there will be "on-off ramps" anyway, except it will be for real goods instead of fiat currency. The government can ban you from paying the gardener or buying milk with XMR.

That won't happen and would actually be much worse for Monero because it means everything becomes a giant target for thieves and scammers, even more than it already is. The reason it's failed is because the idea of cryptocurrency is fundamentally bad. Monero isn't even trying to hide it. The developers openly say that criminals should use it to commit crimes.

What crimes?

For starters, any of the money laundering crimes that CZ just pleaded guilty to. That's what any of these cryptocurrencies mean when they say transactions can't be tracked.

I believe that the ideal end goal would be that a cryptocurrency is a closed system where a person could buy, sell and earn all in one currency. At that point if it grows big enough price will stabilize and more and more day to day commerce will move to the blockchain.

Bitcoin and Monero have always been able to send transactions instantly and for Bitcoin, essentially free for over a decade with zero down time. That beats the pants off Visa and MasterCard.

Why use an inflationary currency that costs 2% to spend and takes 30+ days to settle?

I'm curious as to why BCH is not a ponzi vs BTC given the former is a fork of the latter - so they pretty much work the same way apart from a larger block size.

zcash seems to be going in an interesting direction, though whether they'll actually get anywhere remains to be seen.

Why BCH and not NANO? You like to wait and pay fees?

There are hundreds of coins some copied from bitcoin and slightly changed like litecoin.

The press has tricked you into believing every coin aside from a few popular ones are scams. Dig deeper.

Ah, the classic 'do your own research.'

If I dig deeper, and determine that <some shit coin> is a scam, well, I am just looking at the wrong one.

If I dig deeper, and decide that it's not, and then get burned later, I should have done more due diligence.

'Digging deeper' in a minefield is, generally speaking, not great advice.

Instead of holding forever you could sell earlier. Buying coins with the intent on it going up to make money can be done with 'good' or 'shit' coins. If you have ever purchased penny stocks it's similiar in terms of risk/reward. Buying coins with a larger capitalization reduces risk/rewards.

If you believe everything is a 'shitcoin' and you want to hold them forever then on your death bed you can look at the value and determine if it really was a shitcoin or if the media made me think everything was a shitcoin.

It's nice to see level-headed crypto optimism here. It's disheartening seeing bulls who have long since stopped pretending their favorite coin has any utility beyond being a speculative asset and a get-rich-quick scheme given its poor transaction rate, or that the features they've bolted on will make it valuable, none of which make it viable as a currency.

Why would anyone bother with Bitcoin?

If you want to avoid financial regulations in transmitting value across borders or purchase black market goods and services, you're going to be caught since all/most Bitcoin is KYCd and impossible to keep private, unlike Monero.

If you want to avoid transaction fees, you're SOL since it's at $10 right now versus $0.06 for Monero.

If you want a store of value, it's poor because it's volatile, not backed, and theft is not reversible, unlike virtually any other regulated security.

If you want to make legal purchases with it, any transaction costs $10 and can take hours or days, and is not reversible if you are defrauded, unlike USD.

Bitcoin has no value proposition beyond being a speculative asset and a Ponzi scheme for early buyers.

Be mindful of potential biases. Monero is rightfully highly regarded for its privacy, but you may be overlooking certain aspects:

- Unlike Bitcoin, Monero's monetary issuance is not auditable, which could prove a major problem in case of an attack, potentially leading to inflation.

- Monero faces blockchain bloat issues due to its ring signatures. It cannot scale gracefully.

- Privacy and transaction cost concerns with Bitcoin have largely been addressed by Lightning and potentially other upcoming layer 2 solutions. A lot of work is being done here. If you are technologically inclined, you can also participate: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...

- KYC happens on exchanges. Buy your BTC on decentralized platforms like Bisq or RoboSats and be done with KYC.

- A private-only ledger can pose challenges when transaction notarization is necessary. Bitcoin lets you choose between a private L2 transaction or a public blockchain transaction.

That said, I love Monero and am glad it exists.

Has there been any Bitcoin "L2" that is actually functional. Last I checked the inventor of the most popular L2 said it was a failure.

Lightning has grown beyond its two original creators and now has a healthy community behind it. Worth mentioning are Rusty Russel (iptables, netfilter, some network layers of the Linux kernel) and the fine folks at Acinq (acinq.co).

Yes, it still has some rough edges but it's now mostly usable. https://medium.com/coinmonks/lightning-network-2018-to-2023-...

Besides, about 80% of transactions within exchanges are actually off-chain, so this is nothing new.

"Usable" is a massive stretch. The only way most people will ever be able to use it is through a custodial wallet, so it's right back to bank accounts and centralized exchanges.

But the whole thing is a distraction anyway. The majority of transactions happening off-chain means that Bitcoin is an utter failure at everything it ever set out to accomplish.

Lightning does work if you're using a large provider but it undermines the utility of BTC not requiring a middle-man. Running a lightning node with personal funds is simply not likely or safe for your average hodler.

I'm not sure you've used Bisq or RoboSats if you think they're good replacements for exchanges. Barely anyone is online at a given time.

all i can say that, is you better have everything in stocks, housing and gold, otherwise you're going to have one sad retirement.

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