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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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