Why Monero
benkaiser.dev
benkaiser.dev
Monero is a solid improvement because it has low fees (so far) and is very hard to trace. So it’s popular for criminals or intense privacy types. It’s still far too slow and hard to use to ever be accepted in your local grocery store. It’s also hard to buy with fiat because most exchanges are scared of it.
What’s really remarkable is how little any of this has changed since ~2016 which was two crypto boom cycles ago. Every single popular cryptocurrency still has the same massive flaws. They’re all either too traceable, too hard to use, too centralized, too slow, too expensive, or too energy intensive. Most of them are many of those things.
In 2010 I was a crypto believer. But the whole space has made so little forward progress in 10+ years. In fact there’s been a lot of backwards progress. Mostly all that’s happened is a lot of people have become obscenely rich from speculation, scams, or the intersection of those two things.
Those of us who hoped for a new way to pay for things in real life are still waiting.
Regarding the speed, many believe that instant / unconfirmed transactions are safe for day to day activities up to 10000USD. It's very difficult to double spend or inject numerous conflicting malicious transactions in hopes that the victim sees a legitimate transaction but a fraudulent transaction gets mined.
Regarding the ease of use, have you tried featherwallet.org or mymonero.com for mobile?
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with guaranteed-not-to-change monetary policy and supply cap. That's because Bitcoin as a whole is uniquely hard to change.
Monero is great but easy to change and so not a reliable store of value.
Bitcoin and Monero need each other badly.
A cryptocurrency with a fixed emission of 1 coin per second forever is more guaranteed never to change, as it is already as simple, non-arbitrary and fair as possible.
Monero is changing (hard-forking) regularly, so your point is broken on arrival - and I am saying this as Monero proponent. I love Monero but it is easy to change.
BCH didn't win, but it could have. It is not clear to me that BTC will never change monetary policy.
People can hard-fork away with any monetary policy but that simply won't be Bitcoin.
Would Bitcoin remain dominant over altcoin with changed monetary policy - that is another matter - and indeed not 100% certain.
This is the kind of crap Bitcoin maximalists love to push, but there's nothing unique about Bitcoin.
Some community.
No longer true for slow and high transaction fees, after the lightning network. With the lightning network, it is FAST and much LESS transaction fees.
Oh, and the lightning network is no longer a pipe-dream. It is here and actively in use. If you sincerely want to try it, try using the Breez wallet https://breez.technology/
I use it to pay for some things and it's always a pleasant experience. I recommend it. The only downside is that, due to the anonymity, the clients aren't as convenient (because the server can't know your transactions, it's hard to have "light clients").
MyMonero works really well, though: https://mymonero.com/
Another problem is that Monero's PoW is expensive to verify where a good PoW should be instantly verifiable. In fact, it's considered so expensive that by default, the Monero client uses a checkpoint block without verifying all the PoW that led to the block.
Monero's super expensive PoW also makes it very hard to interface with other smart blockchains that may want to verify the amount of work behind a Monero block, or to support useful techniques like flyclient [1].
When evaluating the potential of coins (in terms of price gains), I nowadays pretty much only look at whether they can serve as enablers for whatever is the currently trending thing whose purpose is to extend the leverage factor of fiat money in crypto. At the moment this is "DeFi", especially crypto lending, and NFTs (although the NFT thing is already tapering off again). Because that's what crypto investors ACTUALLY want: vehicles that increase the leverage factor between fiat money invested in crypto and the total crypto market cap.
If I had a dollar that would triple it’s value in a week “just because” I would be suspicious.
This is one of the the reasons why (low) target inflation rates exist. The (slight) devaluation of the currency encourages consumption or investment with the currency and discourages mattress stuffing.
You wouldn't buy goods with stocks.
This is simply a user perspective. My "crypto perspective" isn't too happy about Ripple, but I can't deny that I enjoy using it for quick transfers.
Plus it's fun to mine, you can do it on a CPU instead of needing a massive GPU swarm.
Staking pools also have a "saturation point" to encourage decentralization. That way not all 80 Billion dollars worth of ADA goes to one staking pool.
Very hard to see how oligopolies can arise in this scenario when compared to mining operations that are unprofitable to most users (and of course bad for the environment).
The app crashes randomly, hangs, and worst of all, refuses to send transactions using a hardware wallet when running as a full node.
The hardware wallet is only able to sign transactions when connected to a remote node, which is much worse privacy wise.
Monero needs much more developers & funding to succeed.
Maybe I should look into the CLI. Does it support Ledger?
I can't agree with that sentiment at all. Sure, there a those schemes, but most of the time they are easy to spot. If you have a look at the top 50 coins on CMC [0], you will find mostly solid projects that have large ecosystems with much brainpower locked in.
Now if only they could stabilize the price so you can pay for things instead of gamble on it.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn't they have a Church of Monero a few years back? That was kind of... weird? It was probably started as a joke or something, I can't remember.
https://twitter.com/churchofmonero
Also related reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/a8uyze/the_church_o...
They're get-rich-quick schemes plus money laundering/capital-flight mechanisms. And if you think capital flight is more ethical than a get-rich-quick scheme, I'd like to introduce you to X oligarch on Y continent committing Z poorly publicized genocide.
Edit: that said, the way that they facilitate dubious money transfer is pretty what makes them likely to stick around and so one can say with more certainty their value will be maintained. Hope that makes you feel better.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-north-koreas-role-bit...
Iran's rulers might or might be oligarchs but the use of bitcoin by the Iranian state[1] seems like good evidence that crypto isn't just for the little guy.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/iran-uses-crypto-mining-l...
LOL. Not my experience at all. Monero shills are the worst.
https://www.getmonero.org/2017/12/07/Monero-Compatible-Bulle...
Thank you! There's a lot of difficult-to-google info locked up in comments like this, and I truly appreciate the effort spent replying to randos like me :)
The users themself are anonymous, just like when using cash!
That is a good system because it enables governments to still being able to tax businesses and control illegal activities. Such system will also gain more acceptance among the common folks.
Outside transparency is not a benefit. Most people I've talked to about crypto don't see the opacity as a detriment. They do not trust the government or tax policy. Most of these people are also generally happy to pay their taxes but can see reasons when they would want to hide their behavior.
Lol, the common man isn’t really subjected to other forms of taxation.
Most people pay two kinds of taxes: income tax, and sales/use taxes (with property tax being a distant third).
The most common taxes are difficult to dodge.
People keep walking this back to massive fraud but more likely what anonymity will do is just allow businesses to escape onerous operating issues. E.g. having employees in some states is worse than having them in others because of those state's perceived requirements to operate an LLC in that state, and other related rules. It's not even clear if some of these requirements are enforceable federally.
Edit: I am again talking about capital gains. Yes, the money has to come from somewhere, but you can break the traceability easily by using non-kyc means of getting crypto. E.g. bitcoin ATMs.
BTCs blockchain is rather power inefficient.
Pfff, a single transaction is only 1700kw/h (or 820kg of carbon dioxide) with as little as 90g of electrical waste left behind on average. From an economical standpoint that could be much more ... if you are to sell energy or equipment of course. /s
I think his point is: Bitcoin explicitly takes a libertarian position to taxation by making it hard to tax. While most crypto adopters may be libertarian, the majority of people are not and so the libertarian position will deter adoption.
As noted many times here, anonymous crypto is only as bad as cash.
This makes illegal uses of it much harder.
Nah, will never fly.
And you also have the possibility to avoid taxes if you want. So, it's a superior system because it allows both use cases ;)
I don't think that's a bad use case for tax money.
The narrative that this type of value exchange will protect people is as easily argued that it will put others at risk. We have institutions for a reason, and nobody living in a free country should desire such an absurdly dangerous means of value exchange.
At least when you exchange physical currency, it's actually physically difficult for a kidnapper or bank robber to handle the actually physical volume of $1M.
In light of this - I think it's rational to remove paper currency from circulation and to move to a digital system where every transaction is tracked to a real person. This could be as simple as using existing banking structures, or maybe some sort of cryptographically-secure, immutable ledger of some sort, tying every transaction back to a real person. Almost like a centralized, managed "block chain".
/s
Kidding aside, I have zero clue what the actual adoption rate is for Monero in the seedy underworld of common criminality, so I can't really challenge anyone on this argument.
I can say if I were a criminal, I'd want to keep it as low tech as possible. Given how sophisticated computer forensics is, I don't think I'd be able to keep everything "clean", digitally speaking.
For example, many professional bartenders commit tax fraud every day by not reporting cash tips. This is directly facilitated by paper currencies.
If tips were given in Monero, the tax fraud would be even easier.
EU (or Germany, sorry I forgot) just passed laws that production of all goods should be traceable from beginning to end.
They are working on it. Nobody shall be able to opt out of the system.
There is a certain balance of downsides and upsides of limitations on freedom. If you move the "safety" knob all the way to maximum, you will get a high security prison with creature comforts. Indeed, being watched and tracked at all times, and limited in what you do and where you go, you can definitely be kept out of the harm's way. If you like the motion towards this, welcome to mainland China. (If you want an antidote, re-read the Brave New World.)
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, that is, liberty is a somehow unsafe condition, else vigilance won't be needed. Some people prefer certain upsides of liberty more than certain upsides of safety. Such people founded the U.S., and it still shows here and there. (Not much, of course.)
Yes, I think an effectively anonymized digital value exchange is problematic. I prefer physical currency for anonymized transactions because it provides certain physical barriers that make a non-consensual exchange of goods and services difficult, while perfectly facilitating, though often de-anonymizing large exchanges of value.
Something that's perfectly sensible in a state that values both privacy and rule of law. We don't put cameras in your home, we do put cameras in airports and nuclear energy facilities.
So you're saying 99.9% of the population shouldn't benefit from this because there will be a tiny percentage misusing it?
I take it you're against privacy, encryption and gun ownership too then right?
I think your love letters should be private from the gov't, I don't think your income should be private from the gov't.
I think nearly everyone should be able to own a rifle, but I don't think any private citizen should be able to own a tank.
There are many aspects of life where I think the costs outweigh the benefits for citizen in society. Since there are trivial numbers of alternatives, I see a highly anonymized digital store of value as bad for the public welfare. The limit is typically where public access to the good is necessary to prevent tyranny, but universal access causing a tyranny of the minority is typically the where things should be illegal.
I think the conditions in which Monero would benefit society existed, the legality of Monero would be irrelevant.
>Monero seems much better suited as a weapon against real totalitarian regimes. If it is illegal in both a free and unfree society, then it will only have a practical purpose in the unfree society, whereas the free society will have plentiful alternatives.
From another thread. I think the something like Monero can exist, but also be illegal, and that would facilitate making it's practical use only valuable in truly unfree societies.
Monero is light years easier for law enforcement to find kidnappers (exchanges, honeypots, network access) than cold hard cash.
Was there a plague of kidnappers when the world used 'absurdly dangerous means of value exchange' like paper currency and gold?
edit: my reply was before you edited to discuss physical currency. $1M in $100 bills is 22lbs. Hardly a deterrent.
https://lb-aps-frontend.statista.com/statistics/275545/kidna...
The idea that an email asking for a blockchain currency is somehow more difficult than a dead drop of physical currency is absurd. While there are some merits, this type of value exchange is a dangerous vehicle for facilitating human exploitation. We need to start talking about that fact more, instead of the fever dreams that those of us in the free world somehow live in some faux-totalitarian state, simply because you can't legally purchase MDMA or cocaine.
Evil people use neutral tools for evil purposes. They have been since the beginning of tools.
So stop trying to slow the advance of technology just because some evil people can use it too.
And if you receive that $10k in cash, how do you deposit it without the same risk?
You shouldn't be surprised when Americans value privacy over institutions. Our institutions are more criminal than our criminals.
>stealing from us without due process via civil forfeiture
Yea, this is exactly the type of faux-totalitarian nonsense i was talking about in the other thread. If we live in a free society, we can change the types of laws we don't like, and in the case of civil forfeiture, we should, and are, but pretending like one bad law justifies something with these consequences is ridiculous.
So I'll tell you what. You can work on fixing those institutions if you want. I'll take the privacy while we wait.
I don't understand how people can possibly think that identity obfuscation at scale is a good thing for a financial system. The rule of law and democracy are far from perfect, but it is unquestionably the safest, cushiest time to be alive in human history right now for the average human being.
Let's make our financial system completely opaque and make it impossible to enforce laws. That'll really help us!
This is a blindness that can only come from a lifetime of extreme privilege.
The modern level of financial surveillance – KYC, etc – is only a few decades old, and collects more info for the state than any 'general warrant' could. Even in fairly-free countries, the burdens & murky liabilities created by turning every financial agent into a part-time police informer has the effect of persecuting & impoverishing disfavored individuals & groups – even those who've been convicted of no crime. In unfree states the same surveillance helps quash all kinds of dissent.
A blind faith in authorities' use of financial surveillance ignores history & the current reality of billions living under untrustworthy regimes. Many hardly even pretend to offer "rule of law & democracy".
I do agree that financial surveillance is an issue, but I'm not sure Monero is the best way to curtail it. Why not try passing strong consumer protection laws that ban companies from collecting and selling data on financial transactions as well as tighter restrictions on the access that law enforcement has on this data? If the problem is a government that is abusing its power, it wouldn't be too hard for them to crackdown on any cryptocurrency they consider a threat. Monero feels like a band-aid rather than a long term solution, and one with some pretty significant downsides.
I did not mention Monero at all!
I pointed out that “rule of law & democracy” did OK before the recent modern era of massive, preemptive, general-warrant-like financial surveillance. And that level of surveillance may in fact endanger “rule of law & democracy”.
“Why not try passing strong consumer protection laws that ban companies from collecting and selling data on financial transactions as well as tighter restrictions on the access that law enforcement has on this data?”
You are welcome to try that. Why don’t you start in China, Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Nicaragua? Or even Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Brazil, or India? Protecting financial privacy in those places would help show if your “pass a strong consumer protection law” plan might work.
Even in a country where such a law might have a chance, it’s a fragile protection, & ineffective against most abuses by the state itself. Much better is: built-in, inherent, classic privacy.
I get your point here, but once someone has already lost trust in the government, having the government regulate itself isn't really a viable counter to that person's concerns.
Technology such as atomic swaps mean privacy coins will never be killed by legislation. The best we can do is outlaw their use by the honest, relegating them only to the blackmarket (which is precisely the place you didn't want them in the first place).
You can argue that some gov/regulator should have access, though good luck finding one country everyone trusts. More realistically, and practically, you could require that, as many jurisdictions do with cash, we should have reporting requirements for when a merchant sells something for large amounts of cryptocurrency.
But its pretty hard to argue everyone should be financially naked and exposed to anyone who wants to look. To fix that, even if you're government surveillance friendly, you first need to make the blockchain zero-knowledge (which Monero actually isn't good at, but thats irrelevant here).
The whole "I don't understand how people can possibly think that identity obfuscation at scale is a good thing for a financial system" can be answered by, "Will you share your entire transaction history and account balances with the entire world? Why not?"
Not people who've done any research on the matter. Regulations on money laundering have been almost completely ineffective at reducing crime (the end goal); the drug market is bigger than ever. What they do achieve is imposing a significant burden on individual and small businesses, while large banks like HSBC can get away with money laundering by paying a nominal fine.
Money laundering regulations are like the financial version of the war on drugs: completely ineffective at what they set out to do, succeeding only at giving the government more power and making life harder for the powerless.
And Venmo => https://www.mic.com/p/matt-gaetz-who-is-definitely-not-a-sex...
You know what makes it really easy to ransom a hospital during a pandemic? Monero. You know what makes it easy to ransom a school, leaking personal information of children in the process? Monero.
But to financial economists, cash is a textbook example of a ‘fungible’ thing.
So a statement like – “Monero is fungible, cash is not.” – implies you’re using peculiar definitions.
There is a reason that the scams and ransomware use Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency instead of cash.
Some people say the same things about encryption, but it is a very accurate parallel that it actually makes society safer, and the technology can't be taken from "criminals" so you just have to deal with its existence.
Cryptocurrency isn't a bank. It's a virtual mattress to stuff your money into, and one that lends itself very well to torturing you until you unlock the wallet.
Further, many people live in countries where the people simply cannot trust their institutions or the value of their currencies, to the point where they are better off storing USD under their mattress, so the technology should be there for those people
The government tends to go after lower and middle class people when enforcing laws. I think the benefits of preserving privacy outweigh the IRS collecting the $600 someone who makes $30k owes.
Easily - I value my ability to remain private more than I do your ability to enforce laws.
The beauty of that particular accusation is that you can't really defend against it - as any disagreement can simply be used to infer an even higher degree of privilege.
That is an anomaly in human history. Much of the world still lives under governments that are hostile to many of their people, and we can easily slide back to that condition.
I also have to point out that cash is largely opaque and we have used cash for centuries. Laws were still be enforced. While cash can be exchanged with no knowledge of anyone but the participants, large scale movements and usage of money requires interactions that are very noticeable and traceable. It’s easy to move money anonymously but very hard to use it that way. Monero doesn’t change this very much.
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/still-using-cash/
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/opinion/getting-rid-of-bi...
Monero as a financial system is not as you say "completely opaque" - that's laughable. All the code that runs every Monero client is completely open source.
Now some more savvy people will still complain: "If we can't see any of the balances then how do we know """they""" aren't minting coins out of thin air or defrauding other users?"
The truth is that you can simply read the code and determine that that is impossible. Or more accurately, someone very smart can (I for example can't give that guarantee first hand). But that's why open source software is beautiful - the code is not obfuscated or unclear, if there were any flaws in the system a single white hat could easily sound the alarm.
Long story short, you are confusing transaction privacy with protocol obscurity, the genius of Monero is that its protocol is completely in the open but it retains privacy for its users - that's the genius your ignorance is taking for granted.
Almost all governments throughout history except for now would have abused that privilege.
There's an important side-effect to an anonymous financial system which doesn't get much attention, but is worth noting.
An anonymous financial system is a debt-less financial system, since without identity you can't do credit ratings or other means of enforcement of repayment. Everything is either a commodity or equity/security, not a debt instrument. And there is no debt-financing, only equity-financing (similar to the VC industry).
No debt means no leverage, or in the case of the Global Financial Crisis, no over-leverage [1]. Without debt and leverage you can't have a systemic credit collapse, the most destructive type of financial crisis (GFC, Great Depression).
I've seen one estimate that if central banks and govts hadn't bailed out the financial system in 2007/2008 GFC, there was so much leverage that the collapse would have lost the banking system more money than it had cumulatively made over its entire ~300yr modern history. That would have been Mad Max time for sure, and why the bailouts were the lesser evil.
By eliminating identity from the financial system you've deterministically eliminated the worst possible outcome that system could incur, and materially changed the expectation value for the system (and society) over time.
In the short-term, a highly leveraged, debt-based financial system will likely outperform an equity/commodity-only financial system. But over the medium to long term, when periodic credit collapses are factored in to the former, probably not.
In blockchain financial systems, any activity that requires collateral must be over-collateralized [2], resulting in significantly increased systemic robustness and reliability. If we care about deterministically eliminating the most destructive type of financial crisis from the table of possible outcomes, then we must acknowledge this is a useful side-effect of an anonymous financial system.
Finally, the comparative damage to society of a GFC-style collapse is greater than things that are enabled by untraceable money, like money laundering and sex-trafficking. The latter can be horrible, but the former is potentially a different order of magnitude, if bailouts are not possible (which may be the case next time).
* Notes & Clarifications:
1. High volatility due to price discovery activities is not the same as systemic collapse. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are highly volatile, losing and gaining ~80% of their value multiple times over their first decade of existence. But such volatility is not the same as a systemic collapse.
2. Atomic debt like flash loans are still possible, where the loan is atomically made, invested, liquidated, and repaid all in the same smart contract. If any part of that contract fails, or the loan can't be repaid, then the entire thing is rolled back and the loan never even happened. But that can't result in a collapse in the same way the traditional banking system can.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80...
[2]:https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/overcollateralization.a...
Rich people already have that advantage, why not give the same advantage to the little guy?
The system is already that for everyone rich enough.
I just want to have the same privilege as the Clintons and Trumps when it comes to ~~bribes~~ voluntary contributions.
Use a 2-of-3 multisig for dispute resolution.
Also, Zcash has optional privacy.
On the other hand, the decoy based privacy protocols Monero uses are not really private at all. https://slideslive.com/38911785/satoshi-has-no-clothes-failu...
Its cryptocurrency, everything is tribal.
This is simply not true, otherwise you should present real evidence. It is not perfect, but nothing ever will be, and Monero continues to move forward and use the best technology available. Research continues, and they hope to move away from "decoy based protocols" altogether eventually, but the tradeoffs have so far been too great. Unlike bitcoin, it is able to do large changes, since there is a completely different development culture
Can be read as: a 'relatively' small group of people control the protocol to such a level that arbitrary changes can be enacted with relative ease.
An example that comes to mind is Ethereum, which is essentially controlled by a single developer aided by a few others. When a bug in a contract would have cost many people a significant amount, the lead developer lead the charge (to the applause of almost all) in forking the chain.
I haven't looked at Monero in enough detail to confirm this, but your statement is not exactly a selling point. Having decentralization to the point that it becomes hard for developers to force through changes, should be a feature... not a bug.
>Having decentralization to the point that it becomes hard for developers to force through changes
This is happening to Monero too over time, as the community grows. I expect it will continue to become more difficult to gain consensus over time. There is, at least, many developers and no 'leader' figure like Vitalik
No one else as done the same tech yet themselves. A few things have launched and allegedly plan to add a privacy layer (Mina, Celo). But actually building that kind of tech is a lot harder than reputation management or standard blockchains.
It's still an open playing field.
It's also designed in a way to allow "poison pills" - i.e. those in control can force a single transaction on a block, thus giving a vector to deanonymize someone.
You may ask, "Who would do something like that?" and the answer would be the U.S. government who can compel privately owned organizations via secret court subpoenas. Monero is more private than ZCash, and has a record of not acting on self-interests.
The developers were funded by suspicious government organisations including DARPA and Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology.
It is centralised, with an organisation receiving significant coins directly from the protocol.
Opt-in privacy defeats much of the point and creates traceability issues - privacy needs to be the default for people to use it, for their coins to not be treated suspiciously if they turn on the privacy feature, and it is a requirement to have a large anonymity set.
Among other reasons, there are many...
Halo Arc removes the trusted setup and also sets shielded transactions by default.
ECC also has announced that they intend to work on implementing shielded assests which seem compelling: https://electriccoin.co/blog/zsas-ecc-progress-and-next-step...
One glaring issue is that there seems to be lots of tension between the community and the Zcash foundation (wrt power control).
Another issue with Zcash is that it had a trusted setup, which is not an issue Monero has.
That's not a true statement as far as I understand how Zcash works. Right now there are >742K ZEC in the shielded Sapling pool, so there are quite a few people using it and you can not tell their shielded transactions apart.
https://electriccoin.co/zcash-metrics/
> Another issue with Zcash is that it had a trusted setup, which is not an issue Monero has.
Yes, but they took a number of steps to make sure that the ceremony for creating the trusted setup discarded the keys used and there was no one listening in. (they were geographically distributed and destroyed the hardware)
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/cerem...
Skip to around 36 minutes for that.
What I mean by this is that transactions in Monero are always private, while users of Zcash can choose to send public transactions. What this does is it makes the group of users who send private transactions through Zcash much smaller and far, far more susceptible to being identified through metadata and process of elimination.
This is heavily simplified - and Monero community members would be happy to get into the weeds with you about it if you were to visit their realms on the web, I'm sure.
zcash is shady
Little touches like that keep making me reconsider the project in a favorable light.
If the whole network private, then the privacy faults can only happen at its boundaries--which are places that the protocol designers have less control over. The alternative is having to wonder about what kind of identifying metadata the exchanges are leaking--and they're an easier target for an adversary.
Also, I have to imagine that the everywhere-private nature of XMR is why I don't see it on my exchange's list, while I do see ZEC there.
But I wasn't talking about that. With zero-knowledge proofs protecting the shielded transactions, your anonymity pool is essentially the entire set of people that use shielded transactions. With the Monero approach, your anonymity pool is large, but it's still a subset of the whole network.
> Personal Speculation
> Disclosure: I own a small amount of Monero, Bitcoin and Nano.
How small? $1M might be small to a billionaire. To others $50k is a large amount.
Otherwise it seems like yet another blog post shilling crypto.
Also, you could just as well consider it a positive signal (putting money where their mouth is).
I guess even better would be posting a proof of ownership. Not sure if that would be possible with Monero, but it would be possible with Bitcoin.
If you're buying a coffee the vendor is likely to let you leave the shop after no confirmations (as soon as their node hears about the transaction) but if you're buying a car the same is unlikely to be true.
I don't see why not, it's not like you can buy a car anonymously. If anything there's more security there than with the coffee, and no one is going to attack the Monero network to create a double spend for the price of a car.
In practice people (e.g. exchanges, that know who you are after KYC) still opt to wait a little because if something does go wrong it's a hassle to actually get paid. For the same reason, we are likely to check some of the bills in a large cash payment for authenticity, even though we have effective recourse through the police and the judicial system.
You can buy a car with cash. Monero is digital cash.
XMR.to even used 0-conf back in the days https://twitter.com/xmr_to/status/955364047679049728 (for hundreds of $) easily.
thought, I agree it may be inconvenient.
And although Algorand doesn't include some of the more "controversial" privacy features, it's still RTBF-compliant. [1]
[0]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/role-of-transaction-...
[1]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/right-to-be-forgotte...
I very much want to live in a future where there is a digital payment method that’s as anonymous as cash. As far as I can tell Monero is the front runner
Its almost 6 months and i havent made a singe sale in Monero, but it doesnt matter. Its about widening the purchase power of the coin.
Financial transparency won't prevent crimes. And KYC doesn't prevent crimes either.
Optional privacy also isn't a solution. All transactions must look the same or very similar otherwise you stand out.
Monero solves all of this. It still has a long way to go though.
If that private key is compromised can law enforcement read your past transaction history?
And if law enforcement compromises the private key on the other side of the transaction can they connect the two of you, and all your prior mutual transactions?
Of course you can delete that key if you want, and perhaps run multiple wallets with which you can transact with yourself
When using it for payments is that it is hard to make a case for a regular user (new to crypto) to use it.
The onramp is too painful/expensive/convuluted + payment is without recourse.
Joe Customer needs a really good incentive to use crypto. Currently this means something shady.
So only normal crypto use is for those who already hold some crypto.
PS I've looked for a good solution to this since 2011 and the progress has been glacial.
They pay the Monero to your Monero wallet, and then it's up to you to decide how to use it. Whether or not mining is financially viable (e.g., electricity cost) depends on a few things. You can use a calculator/website like whattomine.com, cryptocompare.com, coinwarz.com, minerstat.com, etc. to get a rough idea of your potential mining profitability.
Provide information about your issues and they would be grateful.
> official desktop gui clients is completely unusable
It has improved significantly over time, perhaps this was a long time ago?
Also you should try out Feather wallet[1], it has a more classic Qt design.
On top of that, node operators can still run pruned node.
Since I missed to dogecoin hype, I am now rooting for Wow.
I wouldn't advise investing in Doge for gains, either.
Also, the founder (who loves telling people to stay poor online) is in jail for fraud. I'm shocked.
I really hope Gensler and co sack up and shut down these wannabe pirate losers.
Why are people still pursuing this cringely inadequate technology