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Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

Can't help but feel like this is a puff piece for Monero. It's just how quickly it jumped into beating the drum for Monero.

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Agreed, a simple disclosure "I own Monero" is needed. The lack of this* hurt the credibility. On the about page the author says they run two Monero nodes.

That said, the article is pretty much a list of links so not as much credibility is needed.

*this: edit - this being a disclosure that they do or don't own Monero

Disclosure: I own crypto but not Monero

> On the about page the author says they run two Monero nodes.

Running a node is not the same as mining. You are not rewarded financially, and you don‘t need to hold Monero to run a node. Nodes just maintain the ledger and transaction pool.

Running a node supports the network through decentralization and participation in consensus.

It seems a reasonable enough leap to think that someone who runs a Monero node owns Monero. And even if they don't, that possibility is enough reason for a disclosure statement, either that they do or don't own Monero. Like the parent poster said, mentioning Monero in the intro of the article stands out.

They list a Monero donation address on the About page ("I’ll happily take any Monero you’d like to throw my way"). It's a reasonable presumption that they do hold Monero, at least intermittently when they receive donations.

This isn't how disclosure legally works re the About page. It needs to be on the same page, displayed prominently.

To be fair, Monero is a fungible privacy coin and a valid answer to all of those concerns.

I’m constantly surprised Monero’s market cap isn’t higher. It works better for all the use cases of crypto that genuinely add value, yet has a small fraction of the value of many coins that are used for nothing at all.

Because it actually works, Coinbase never added it. Regulatory pressure.

Good question. Monero is essentially everything bitcoin was supposed to be. Private, anonymous, more decentralized, you can actually mine it using general purpose computers, it's actually usable as a currency due to low fees and fast transactions. I've actually gotten paid for code in XMR, it's awesome.

It's not even a good investment since it doesn't increase in value as fast as bitcoin but gets slaughtered whenever the market goes down. Would be nice if it stabilized in the $200 range.

Why should it be? Dollar genuinely adds value for most of human population and yet a single dollar "token" costs 1 dollar. If anything, the flat price of a token I would consider a very small but anyway a sign of maturity and usefulness, as opposed to speculation tokens. (stabletokens excluded of course)

The fed can only manage to get the value of the dollar down by massively increasing the money supply. Monero money supply can only increase by 1% a year. So you’d think the value would go up quickly if crypto has expanding utility

I bought into monero hoping it would be the next big thing. Fungibility/no public ledger made it seem like it had way more utility, but it turned out 1) virtually nobody buys crypto in order to spend it, and 2) its only real world use was on the dark web.

So you bought it as a speculative investment?

Yes. The same as almost everyone buying crypto. But hoping that it would become a usable currency.

That's two incompatible things though...

Only incompatible at the same time, but that's not what OP is saying. OP is saying that he hopes it turns from something that is speculative and not a widely-accepted currency, into something that is a widely-accepted currency and not speculative.

The old having one's cake and eating it too.

I get the optimism there, but I just can't see how the incentives possibly give way to each other there. Just have to ask kindly that those manipulating the platforms for profit stop?

I agree, but it just confirms what we already know: fundamentals have no importance in the cryptocurrency world, it's all about hype and speculation.

Now if they had a cute dog mascot maybe you could get Elon Musk to tweet about it...

Cryptocurrency has this nasty conflict of interest built in: the early adopters and their investors are rich on paper but ALL of that value goes away if people switch to something else. You can still find Bitcoin holders lying about it being private or uncensorable because they stand to lose a fortune if everyone switches to Monero.

I think this combination of looking like tech but being a financial instrument makes it hard to talk about on tech forums because we don’t have anything with close to that level of conflict built-in. If you were a PHP developer who switched to Python, the value of your past experience wouldn’t drop to zero (often it goes up); if your Rails app was bought by a Node shop it wouldn’t be seen as worthless and they’d probably keep it running for many years. The closest comparison I can think of for weak fiat currency like Bitcoin would be Flash after Adobe threw in the towel and everyone knew they’d need to migrate, and even there the value had a higher floor because you had working code and a path to HTML5.

Monero isn't designed to be deflationary. This makes it better for real world use but worse for speculation.

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