How Monero Fulfilled Satoshi's Promise
zola.ink
zola.ink
No crypto is large enough to be useful as cash and yet still censorship resistant. Governments can and have censored developers, miners, and exchanges. Monero is no exception, as highlighted at the beginning of the article. Further censorship is just a matter of time, not capability.
But the INSTANT that a regular person becomes a regular small business, the tax authority can and likely will ask to see their records. The INSTANT someone buys a car, the government will be interested in knowing how they paid for it.
Even in the most extreme situation, the government can and will demand taxes to be paid in its preferred currency. How are you gonna get hold of a substantial amount of dollars or remnibi or whatever without getting caught?
This stuff is enforced and no amount of math can beat thousands of years of the state figuring out how to collect taxes.
So much for the "hacker" in hacker news, and all the ethos behind that word. Instead what we get is pedantic social control freaks flinging smugness as if it were feces at anyone who dares think about the usefulness of things that work around surveillance.
> public ledger cryptocurrencies have most of the characteristics of cash except one thing: Untraceability
The author argues Monero fills a missing case:
> untraceable cryptocurrency while keeping all of cash’s characteristics
As the saying goes, if it quacks/walks/acts like a duck, you can decorate it with all the lies you want; it is a duck.
> cryptocurrencies have most of the characteristics of cash
I've been very aware of it since many many moons ago.
Even then, I guess I don't know what's obviously bad faith.
The other user's comment doesn't appear bad faith to me.
In fact, I thought it was clever, as it advanced my understanding of matters as they are.
Am I wrong?
Am I doing bad faith?
Are we sure they are?
What if the author had just written "while keeping the cash-like characteristics" instead of "while keeping all of cash’s characteristics"? Does that meaningfully change the author’s point? I don’t think so and I would expect someone reading the article in good faith isn’t going to say, "But you said all!"
No, you’re not wrong.
No, your comment does not seem to be in bad faith.
The comment I initially responded to absolutely was.
Their comment was absolutely not in bad faith.
With grace, I would say not everyone has as considered views as you do. That can make it challenging and frustrating to deal with because you know better.
It's worth showing them, or at least telling them, instead of discussing your opinion of their motivations for saying things, which we can agree is, at best, mind-reading among strangers in a textual format.
I’m assuming it isn’t cause having privacy so great a whole industry can be revolved around it is indeed something to be proud of.
crypto got heavily bombarded with bad press at some point during COVID era - I remember seeing 2-3 articles per day on the front page here, for weeks, about how le bad it is for the environment, etc. and that was enough to change the public sentiment here from indifference to knee-jerk, Pavlovian reaction to anything related to it.
- stability
- throughput
- power consumption
- taxation
- monetary policy capabilities
are all made-up objections from people watching too much cable news.
Yes, the consequence of crypto's failure to support a large subset of these is best distilled as "this is useful for criminals, grifters and not many others."
Bitcoin Lightning also has privacy, although it's not as strong as MWEB and obviously nowhere near Monero.