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Comment by GhettoComputers | Hacker News Reader

Where is the scam part? I don't need to use their crypto, its just built in, and its not dishonest in any way. There is no monopoly, and suggesting they should run encryption and servers all day with no compensation and free isn't sustainable, in fact that makes me even more suspicious that it is a govenment run system.

I prefer that I can at least see it being sustainable, and if its a P2P protocol it could be free, but if they paid the developers well I would feel even better for various reasons.

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You could flip that argument too and say that the thousands of dollars one must pay to run an Oxen node is a threshold that intelligence agencies and governments can easily afford. While the idealists who just want to support the onion routing with bandwidth for a few bucks a month are shut out.

That's why tor is so massive, because anyone can support it. But that's also what makes tor vulnerable to sybil attacks. It's a catch 22.

Either way, my warnings bells go off when someone asks for thousands of dollars for crypto coins that have no real advantage like Monero.

Another question that comes up with Oxen is what happens if it's adopted. Because afaik each onion routing node is also calculating the blockchain. So the more transactions happen, the heavier these calculations get, right? So each onion routing node will require a lot of resources eventually, if this ever takes off.

Your statement on the intelligence agencies is incorrect. You need oxen to run the nodes not dollars, and obtaining oxen has an exponential cost due to market forces.

If you want to run 1 node you can obtain the oxen pretty easily. If you want to obtain enough oxen to control 50% of the network you will need to buy more oxen than is in existence.

That's a really good point that I had overlooked. Thanks.

Also the oxen blockchains state growth is pretty mild. Its currently 20gb after 4 years. Even moneros blockchain is pretty mild which gets heavy use (sub 100gb i believe).

State growth is an issue all blockchains face, but there are ways of addressing it. If oxens blockchain gets to 200gb in 40 years though i dont think that is an unreasonable expectation to put on the people running nodes.

It's been slow because the coin hasn't been adopted by anyone yet. I'd imagine that if it was actually adopted by some real market, giving it real value, it would grow a lot faster.

So it is an issue to combine those two features, onion routing and blockchain. Because onion routing only requires bandwidth donation.

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