
Purism Collaborates with Cryptocurrency Monero to Enable Mobile Payments - petethomas
https://puri.sm/posts/purism-collaborates-with-cryptocurrency-monero-to-enable-mobile-payments/
======
Casseres
I'm glad I supported the Librem 5 fundraiser. At first Purism seemed to be
gimmicky (a few hardware switchs, big deal), but then they continued to take
privacy more seriously by supporting coreboot, accepting Monero as payment,
and now this.

That's a great write-up about Monero towards the end. The dev is right about
Monero's usability being a pain point right now, but with more adoption of
services that value privacy, there will be more interest in creating user-
friendly ways to use Monero.

I can't wait to get my Librem 5.

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eximius
Egh, honestly I hope they don't spend much effort on this. They have _more_
than enough work just making a phone that doesn't suck. For their Monero stuff
to be helpful, it would need to include the infrastructure to transparently
exchange with normal fiat currency. If it doesn't do that, it'll be just
another wallet app. That sounds like too tall an order given their funding and
existing project of making a phone.

~~~
Casseres
It would be interesting to know the details of the collaboration as well as
the plans for the end product. It could be that the Monero devs are doing all
of the heavy lifting.

I imagine whatever they are planning just deals with Monero only. And that
people will use LocalMonero, Monero ATMs, or exchanges to go in and out of
fiat. Monero devs just published multisig for review. I imagine that's a
requirement for some exchanges (like Coinbase?) to securely store it before
they can offer it.

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rhn_mk1
I don't know much about Monero, but, remembering the lessons from Bitcoin, is
it actually feasible to use it on a phone?

\- Is running a full node possible on the limited hardware or would the client
need to connected to some external server? \- How frequent transactions can
Monero support? Bitcon blocks are filling up, resulting in high fees.

~~~
Casseres
It's feasible to use a light wallet on your phone (connect to an external
server). There is already an Android app that does this: monerujo

Monero's blocks automatically scale, and transaction fees decrease as more
transactions occur.

~~~
coinme
I’m a fan of monero, but transaction fees do not decrease as more transactions
occur. There are limits to how big the blocks can grow, and also how quickly
they respond to demand, and at the end of the day the transaction price will
go up as demand increases.

~~~
gingeropolous
> but transaction fees do not decrease as more transactions occur.

Yes, it does. The transaction fee is a dynamic fee based on the block size. As
the block size increases, the transaction fee decreases. The theory being that
an increased blocksize means there's increased demand for Monero, which
implies that the value of Monero has increased, so the transaction fee should
decrease.

[https://github.com/monero-
project/monero/blob/4a20a5b5ea4adc...](https://github.com/monero-
project/monero/blob/4a20a5b5ea4adc47e65d9148e39dadf666e48e07/src/cryptonote_core/blockchain.cpp#L2863)

[https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/2531/how-does-
the...](https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/2531/how-does-the-dynamic-
fee-calculation-work)

> There are limits to how big the blocks can grow

Perhaps. But they are not hardcoded. The limits are based on the network
infrastructure (lag, node calculation speeds). Basically, the blocks will grow
until orphaning becomes a serious problem.

> and also how quickly they respond to demand,

This is in, in fact, the only hard coded limit of the things you mentioned.

~~~
coinme
The dynamic fees you mention are a client side default that may be a good
heuristic for client side transaction pricing but has precisely 0 effect on
which transactions a miner will include in a block, which will purely choose
the highest price transactions. Furthermore, the price is in terms of monero,
so sure, you may be paying less monero but it’ll still price out stuff like
microtransactions as the fiat price goes past tens of cents.

When I say there is a limit to block sizes, I am referring to the factors,
lag, etc, you mention. I believe monero has had to change the block times in
the past, as too many orphans were occurring, and block size is another
dimension that this will occur on, as it affects the latency of communicating
the blocks.

Monero is great, but once you factor in the larger transactions I am extremely
doubtful that you could get a higher throughput from it than bitcoin.

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Alghero
Gosh, I love Purism. Todd Weaver is such a wholesome guy and really concerned
about people's privacy.

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crasch4
Excellent news! Purism gets it. Time to start taking back our privacy.

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ecesena
Interesting. Does anybody know why Monero vs ZCash?

~~~
Casseres
Monero is private by default which makes it fungible. You won't stand out by
choosing to make a transaction private on an otherwise public coin.

And there is no company which runs it and takes a 10% cut of all coins that
will ever be mined.

To me, Monero seems more like an open, decentralized, community project than
Zcash.

~~~
codys
edit: I just found a paper [1] which talks about this issue and a potential
solution.

Monero certainly has lots of things that make me excited about it, but it
seems there is a downside:

To recieve a payment, 'A' must tell the sender ('B') A's recieve address. Now,
this recieve address is never encoded in the block chain, but it is known to
everyone who sends 'A' coins.

If 'B' and others who know 'A's recieve address keep track of it and the coins
they send, some privacy is not preserved.

Bitcoin & many other crypto curencies "solve" this to some extent by using
Hierarchical Deterministic wallets ("HD wallets") were a single secret plus a
deterministic "count" is used to generate multiple "accounts", each with it's
own receive address.

The problem is that it isn't clear to me Monero has any HD wallet
implementations, and I'm not familiar enough with monero to say whether
generating lots of different accounts would even be feasible.

Can anyone with more knowledge chime in here?

1: [https://github.com/b-g-goodell/research-
lab/blob/master/publ...](https://github.com/b-g-goodell/research-
lab/blob/master/publications/bulletins/MRL-0006-subaddy/MRL-0006-subaddresses.pdf)

~~~
k_sh
I'm a Monero dilettante, but my understanding is that this is not the case -
your private key (or some derivative of it) is needed in order to unmask
transactions on the blockchain that involve you, so others can't see what
you've been up to. See below:

"When you send funds to someone’s public address, what happens is that you
actually send the funds to a randomly created brand new one-time destination
address. This means that the public record does not contain any mention that
funds were received to the recipient’s public address.

For the same reason, the funds that you are sending were not associated with
your own public address either in the public record. Therefore, when you send
these funds, the public record will not show that the funds originated from
your public address and will not show that the funds were sent to the
recipient’s public address."

Source: [https://www.monero.how/how-does-monero-work-details-in-
plain...](https://www.monero.how/how-does-monero-work-details-in-plain-
english)

~~~
codys
Sure, I'm not contending that the information is exposed in the blockchain,
I'm saying that third parties that keep logs of their sends can collude at a
later time to produce a more complete picture of the transactions sent to an
individual.

Right now avoiding that in monero is difficult. Subaddresses (as linked above)
solve some of that, but as there is still a linear time scan increase, I
wonder how prevalent their use will be. Will people create a new address for
each receive they do? Maybe, maybe not.

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efnx
I’m having a hard time loading any puri.sm articles. Anyone else having a
problem?

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X86BSD
Thank god, finally, someone embraces the most secure, anonymous coin out
there. WHY people throng to bitcoin ill never know.

~~~
wyager
Monero’s mild technological advantages in some areas don’t clearly outweigh
the other advantages of using Bitcoin.

~~~
generalizethis
It isn't really a rating of mild/hot/atomic advantages, it's one offers
fungibility and privacy and the other is a public ledger--they have vastly
different design goals that will separate them more and more over time.

~~~
wyldfire
Monero is super great but would have trouble scaling to bitcoin levels of
transactions. I hope they continue to develop it as people begin to consider
it more.

~~~
hossbeast
To be fair Bitcoin is also having trouble with this

