Monero is perhaps the only cryptocurrency that both works as advertised, and has gathered a self-sustaining userbase.
No $20 transaction fees. No influencer pump and dumps. No VCs who need to extract value. No fork drama. No unrealistic roadmap. No charismatic leader boiling the frog with scope creep. It's not trying to be an investment. It's actually private. It's actually anonymous. This is all a lot of us ever wanted from a cryptocurrency.
Thanks! That seems to be a pretty good list (I haven't tried but I did check a bunch of the listed websites and they did say they accept Monero).
I'd still be a bit worried to use it to pay on a website that's not well known, as I assume you don't get disputes if the website doesn't deliver the service after you paid ^^
There's a real hobby around replica (ok, fake) designer watches. It's not always about ego and trying to present something you're not - though a lot of people use it for that. The real interest a lot of people have around it is the ~art~ of replicating something to the extreme detail that a lot of these manufacturers do. There are countless extensive posts of people reviewing the same watch from different manufacturers under microscopes and critiquing the build, quality, and accuracy to real watches.
And to be honest, I like them a lot too because they're very fashionable and look great and are iconic. But I also don't want to spend $12k+ on a watch. And also in honesty, I always present it as a replica when asked about it and usually provide the above context where appropriate.
I have no issue supporting replica manufacturers because they always represent their merchandise as replicas, and I also have no respect for intellectual property and the ridiculous practices of legitimate manufacturers.
All this to say (admittedly defensively) that Monero is used often in buying replica watches.
A friend of mine has also used it to buy drugs online (which was sent to labs for testing before using).
I pay for a VPN and hosting with it, and a few people I know IRL use it for settling small debts (like Venmo, except nobody is selling your transaction history). I think it's unlikely Monero will ever crack the chicken and egg problem of broad merchant acceptance, but all the same I'm glad something exists for the niche of privacy-oriented services.
Anything someone wants to sell for it, just like any other currency.
I know youre getting frustrated with the vague responses, but that's really how it is, with all money, and Monero people are very hell bent on reminding anyone that asks about this.
You can check out https://monerica.com/ for a resource that lists services and goods and websites that accept it, not including the darknet ones, if youre into illegal drugs you'll have to find those yourself. Obligatory reminder that most illegal drugs are purchased with US dollars.
If you look for purchasable things there isn't much. But the current US president is effectively identifying some of his political opponents as traitors [0]. it isn't that clear which exact opponents he is referring to (does it include Trump, who was a slim margin from being the US president?). We've seen bank account freezes deployed against that truck protest in Canada too and it isn't obvious why any of us have a more fundamental claim to safety from the government than a trucker. Trucking always seemed pretty respectable to me.
In such an environment, being able to donate money with anonymity quickly starts to look like a political necessity. And being able to support people directly if the financial system is further activated as a political weapon (I suspect not much has actually changed, just the records are more easily available - but for the sake of argument lets say this is a new phenomenon that we happen to have also just developed a method for resisting).
Separately from the rest of your comment, I think you should look into how crypto was used in the trucker situation - it did not work at all, iirc a lot of money just vanished
You should be aware that Coingeek is a propaganda site for a known charlatan. Any claim that Wright invented bitcoin should give it away immediately. His claims have been repeatedly, cryptographically proven false, for close to 10 years now:
He is trying to use courts around the world to bully bitcoin developers into writing code that gives him 1.1 million bitcoin for free. So of course he'd like to spread the idea that governments have control over it.
Jesse Powell's point was not that governments can control bitcoin - it was that governments can control exchanges under their jurisdiction. Kraken cannot seize your coins if you keep them in self-custody. Kraken is not responsible for you - you are responsible for yourself.
For a long time I renewed my domain name with crypto because my bank's anti-fraud system got hung up on it for some reason (it does that with crypto too but buying more crypto is less time sensitive.)
I used it when originally trying jmp.chat out so I wouldn't have to worry about recurring charges/fraud etc.
I've bought some electronic components with it just to see it work.
>Why would it be any different for Monero
This response does not make much sense: how do you pay for cars, groceries, condoms with Monero?
With fiat, you use some centralized banking instrument like cash, credit, debit, or whatever. Reconciling how that purchase experience is identical with Monero (but is somehow an anonymous, decentralized transaction) might require slightly more explanation to distinguish it from your garden variety anarchocapitalist crypto daydreaming.
Or, more likely, you mean that _in theory_ you could use it to buy anything, with the small hurdle of instantly overturning all of modern commerce infrastructure and the leviathan hard currency sovereigns that deliberately engineered traceable, centralized transactions as political and cultural contagion. Just gotta overcome that, teach grandma about cold wallets and the paramount value of anonymity, and we'll be off fiat.
Wake me up when Monero is broadly known for something other than the de facto payment vehicle for ransomware.
It's a stretch to call FIAT "money", let alone "hard money". The US dollar has lost >97% of it's value just since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913... and that's widely viewed as one of the strongest FIAT currencies in the world. The only stronger FIAT currency that immediately comes to mind for me is the Swiss Franc (CHF).
In places like Venezuela, doctors and lawyers spend their days playing Runescape and World of Warcraft, because thlse fictional, virtual currencies are more stable than their real state-backed FIAT currency, and because they can earn more real-world currency by exchanging ingame currency for it than they can as doctors and lawyers in their "equitable" economic system of socialism.
> The US dollar has lost >97% of it's value just since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913
That's over a 100 years ago. I can easily see bitcoin lose much of its value in about 4 decades when the block subsidy is negligible and it relies almost exclusively on transaction fees for security.
>I can easily see bitcoin lose much of its value in about 4 decades when the block subsidy is negligible and it relies almost exclusively on transaction fees for security.
I actually agree with this, and that's one reason I, too, prefer Monero - the tail emissions + tx fees are more economically sustainable than tx fees alone.
> The US dollar has lost >97% of it’s value just since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913…
Yeah, that’s the result of placing function as medium of exchange nd unit of account over function as a store of value, as a deliberate measure to both facilitate exchange and encourage investment outside of the money in productive assets.
Also why, while Bitcoin might arguably be a decent investment if you can take the volatility (note that I am not saying that it is, either), its crappy money compared to major world currencies.
It's one of the first technologies in history that enables completely private exchanges of currency. Whether you're a cryptocurrency hater or not, that's pretty cool.
I hate to burst the bubble but strategies to break Monero's anonymity have been known since 2019. It turns out that the general strategy of mixing a subset of outputs together is insufficient to provide robust privacy, even if the mix set is large (like in Lelantus).
The only strategies that can provide strong anonymity for on-chain crypto are full anonymity set currencies like Zcash.
ZCash is insecure by default. It is a honeypot for people who wish to use the default privacy settings of Monero.
> On June 8, 2020, Chainalysis added support for Zcash to their Chainalysis Reactor and "Know Your Transaction" (KYT) technologies.[22] This permits Chainalysis to trace and provide transaction values and at least the sender or receiver address for over 99% of Zcash activity.[22] Chainalysis explains that it is able to accomplish this since most Zcash users do not use privacy-enhancing features.
There have been some claims that Chainalysis has been able to make progress in de-anonymizing Monero. It’s hard to know what’s true. We’ve certainly seen where false information is used to steer people in certain directions. E.g. “Monero isn’t anonymous, so don’t use it.” When it reality it is anonymous, which is the real reason they don’t want you to use it.
Bitcoin was never anonymous. It just took an incredible amount of effort to follow the transactions, along with subpoenas to exchanges, that even the shady exchanges gave into. Chainalysis are credited with bringing down the biggest criminals that tried to hide behind Bitcoin. Who knows if they have also cracked Monero, because there was a short while where people thought Bitcoin was safe before it was known that Chainalysis was already at their door.
And Monero’s relative lack of popularity shows how limited the market is for a cryptocurrency that actually works.
People don’t want private transactions. All they want is those pumps and unrealistic roadmaps and charismatic leaders and investment promises. They want to dream of massive financial success, not to pay for coffee anonymously through a clunky UI.
Monero is not private. I remember reading about this in 2018. Extremely dishonest to ignore this. There's even comments here spelling it out. Besides that it's marketingspeak through and through in that post.
If anything, people have more to gain by being anti-monero than advertising for it. It's a stable asset, never goes up in price, hardly will make you a profit, so it is made for pure usage and protecting your freedoms
> No charismatic leader boiling the frog with scope creep.
LOL
> It's actually private. It's actually anonymous. This is all a lot of us ever wanted from a cryptocurrency.
Yes indeed. I sometimes daydream Satoshi knew about ZKP's early enough to integrate it into Bitcoin ... we would have had the perfect storm.
> No $20 transaction fees.
This one isn't a structural guarantee of Monero, but rather a side-effects of being a late-comer to the game. In other words, it might come to pass that tx fees get in the $20 range.
EDIT:
> This is all a lot of us ever wanted from a cryptocurrency.
Agreed, except maybe for this: I've come to value the finite supply of Bitcoin more than it's value/usefulness as an actual currency.
I initially loved the idea of cryptocurrencies as a currency that would be used in everyday life.
I've changed my stance on this completely: I think that Bitcoin (or something like Monero, with indeed a neat advantage over BTC) is way more valuable as a financial instrument with is own unique characteristics and super-sharp edges than it would ever be as a currency
>Yes indeed. I sometimes daydream Satoshi knew about ZKP's early enough to integrate it into Bitcoin ... we would have had the perfect storm.
Can't read SN's mind but I don't know if transactional privacy was a priority for him when developing bitcoin. One of the downsides of Monero's anonymity was that it quickly became a target of censorship so large exchanges like coinbase don't offer it anymore.
Before transaction fees increased, Bitcoin had a capability of enjoying a pretty good mixing feature that is now only practical with similar but lower fee proof of work cryptos.
Might also consider https://www.getmonero.org/library/ which has links for both both Mastering Monero and the more technical "Zero to Monero" [0] where they go through the maths in detail.
Monero really is quite something. It is eye opening to realise there has never been a situation where one person could simply transfer wealth to someone else without anyone in the middle being able to say No. A powerful tool for liberty.
> It is eye opening to realize there has never been a situation where one person could simply transfer wealth to someone else without anyone in the middle being able to say No.
Well, this is what the promise of Bitcoin was, but the lack of anonymity in BTC missed the mark by a few inches.
Monero (and it's competitors: ZCash, Grin, Beam, MWC, ...), which IIRC uses the Mimblewimble [1] principle to preserve anonymity) bridged that gap a few years after BTC was launched, but by that time, Bitcoin had already grown to a huge size.
What I would really like to see in terms of innovation in the crypto world is Mimblewimble being actually added to BTC or ETH. Things would get truly interesting.
OTHO, if BTC and ETH had Mimblewimble, they might become a much bigger targets for folks that stand to benefit from controlling free economic transactions between people (governments, etc ...), so who knows, the lack of ZKP in BTC/ ETH might be a blessing in disguise.
Grin and Beam use Mimblewimble, but Monero uses ring signatures to obscure the transaction graph (with every real input hiding among 16 decoys), and Zcash uses ZK-SNARK zero knowledge proofs [1].
This makes the latter two chains grow at a much faster rate [2] and leaves nodes unable to identify the UTXO set of unspent outputs, making them more resource intensive.
I personally Love Mimblewimble. I'm a Monero user mostly, but I love Grin.
John Tromp has a proposal for an interactive coin shuffling protocol for Grin [0] that would negate a lot of the privacy concerns, I personally haven't fully tried to understand it and it seems pretty cumbersome to me compared to Monero. I hope to see it in action so I can get an idea of how it compares.
The protocol you linked is noninteractive. The user simply creates an onion-based transaction and sends it to the service. The service collects these and creates a single joint transaction which includes your output.
> It is eye opening to realise there has never been a situation where one person could simply transfer wealth to someone else without anyone in the middle being able to say No.
I believe the traditional tool for this is a suitcase full of either cash or jewelry.
Going to mention this as a top level comment because a lot of people here seem to believe that Monero is an anonymous cryptocurrency.
Unfortunately, techniques to break Monero's anonymity have been known since 2018, and these techniques are effective at breaking essentially any partial-mixing based cryptocurrency. (Monero, Lelantus, CoinJoin, Wasabi, etc).
Initial attacks (famously The Flashlight Attack) were capable of breaking the anonymity of targeted individuals, but this attack was later generalized (by me) to break everyone.
These attacks never got a lot of coverage but they are highly effective. The only way to get strong on-chain privacy is to use a full-anonymity cryptocurrency like Zcash.
The general idea behind each of these is that you can identify people by doing math that essentially asks "what is the likelihood that these N outputs are this close together in the transaction history graph" - and the answer ends up being "cryptographically unlikely" after just a handful of transactions from the same party. The privacy decays unexpectedly quickly. I never formalized the math but iirc you can get enough evidence to be convinced that two different transactions were by the same person after they spend something like 3 outputs total. The math is really nasty.
The only fix we know of is to switch to full anonymity systems. The privacy break is exponential in strength, and therefore even systems like Lelantus that use mixin sizes of >50,000 outputs fail to provide meaningful anonymity.
This problems have already been solved.
Zcash is far away from being full privat its just opt-in privacy and not privat by default. And the structure that Zcash is a company is not good
I think Monero is awesome because it's actually designed to be an anonymous payment system. Unlike Bitcoin, anonymity is built into each transaction. No need for washing your coins via sketchy "tumbler" services.
I think Bitcoin is awesome because unlike cash, digital transfers are built into the system.
Now, just like cash wasn't built with digital transfers in mind, neither was Bitcoin built with anonymity in mind, so not sure why Monero would be better/worse than Bitcoin for a thing Bitcoin was never made for in the first place.
The purpose of Bitcoin was never that all transactions were anonymous. Monero is great for this (or zCash), but it's a bit misleading to say Monero is "better" at something when what you are comparing it to, was never built for that "something" in the first place.
Really not sure what you're trying to say here. People use Bitcoin for anonymous transactions and jump through various hoops to try and achieve this goal (for example using tumbling services). It seems perfectly valid to say Monero is better for anonymous transactions than Bitcoin. I'm not sure why it matters what it was "made for". All that matters is what it is used for in practice. This does not seem like a misleading statement.
If something is better than some other thing at achieving the same goals, then it is just better, period. If it turns out that, what people really wanted was an efficient way to launder money, then Monero is not really 'better' than bitcoin perse, but it rather solves a different, more popular problem instead.
Presumably it matters because the person you are replying to cares more about the less popular problem.
The bitcoin whitepaper is titled 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System'. Cash is private and peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer is impossible if chain analysis companies are required in the middle, as it is now to make sure you don't get 'bad coins'.
Other issues are opened up like the possiblity that a coalition of mining pools will censor transactions in the future.
Bitcoin has clearly failed at its originally intended purpose and monero is now what it wanted to be
It's missing several of Bitcoin's features, such as an identifiable UTXO set, relative time locks, a fully auditable supply, instantly verifiable PoW...
That's not the only difference. As tromp said, if someone figured out the discrete log of H, they could inflate Monero and nobody would be able to tell. If someone inflated Bitcoin, everyone would notice immediately.
Monero is cool - the ring signature mechanism is something i’d never heard of before. Its a way to be possibly, but not provably, be involved in a transaction. Ie plausible deniability.
At real-world crypto recently the zcash people (MIT and Tel Aviv cryptographers) found a way to massively speed up the process of finding your balance (privacy chains are often very slow because they have to sum up all the transactions you were potentially involved in).
I also want to do a deep dive into light protocol - which is a privacy mechanism on top of solana, so transactions go at reasonable speed and you can use mainstream dapps (solana has the most amount of developers outside eth and is a lot faster and cheaper).
You probably should add the year (2019) to the title. It's still a great book that made me understand ring signatures. Everything is well explained but some bits may be outdated (eg. monero now uses randomx for ultimate asic resistance.)
“The first two chapters of this book are friendly non-technical intro- ductions to key topics and skills. For readers curious to learn more about behind-the-scenes details, chapters 3 and 4 contain conceptual non-mathematical explanations of Monero's privacy features and blockchain. Later chapters dive into complex technical details for understanding, developing, and integrating Monero.”
Yup. It's always felt like there's a disproportionate amount of hate for crypto -- not that people should like it or love it, but that I'm surprised that tech people here don't appear to understand its inevitability.
So it seems like they treat it as something to be killed (impossible) as opposed to something to buckle up and get ready to manage (more or less like they correctly do with AI.)
Inevitable for law avoidance? Sure. We know quite well that humans like very much systems which allow them to avoid laws of any kind, so of course such a system will survive for a long time.
Inevitable for lawful daily usage? Nope. Fundamental problems and lack of benefits will prevent blockchain based ledgers to be deployed in any useful scalable way. Actually not "will" but rather "did". Token proposals had a decade of time already and all failed (except for law avoidance of course). Any legitimate proposal has failed spectacularly:
1) Legal currency - failed due to no privacy, bad performance, atrocious UX, unstable exchange rate, shady providers;
2) Distributed storage - fail
3) Distributed calculator - fail
4) Distributed network (Helium) - fail
5) Smart contracts - neither smart nor contracts, very pricey, limited functions (on chain only), oracle problem unsolved
6) NFT - one big lie, impossible to implement any promise made about them because they don't facilitate transfer of the ownership
7) Supply chain ideas - fail, the problem is not securing the DB but securing the humans doing data input in the DB
Anything else I've forgot? Basically most of the good ideas on paper turned out to be either impossible or impractical with blockchains.
1) International transfers: crypto is the best here. No stupid regulations, fast and cheap unlike SWIFT or something like it.
I've used to work as international freelance programmer since 2003 or about and payments were the pain all time before 2015 or about when I have moved to crypto. Lost transfers, compliance investigations without any real reason with blocking funds for many months, failed transfers because of some stupid errors like missed letter in the receiver name, etc. And even in the best case you should wait for day or two without any info about the transfer progress. Instant card payments are illusion only, it works only in some cases until it fails (for example, my country currency exchange rate is very volatile sometimes, and some people used to buy with card payments smth nominated in US dollars during this periods, hosting for example, and they thought they have saved their money with this buys, but they were really surprised when their accounts were decreased in several days after that, because real transfer takes several days, and it is executed with the exchange rate actual at that time). There is nothing comparable with crypto in international transfers.
2) Distributed storage. I can't believe you don't know about IPFS. When I've tried to download the book I've failed to buy last time I've found that pirate sites use IPFS links more often than torrents now.)
3) Smart contracts allows amazing things sometimes. Do you know about the flashloans for example? You can loan a millions without any credentials, use it for exchange arbitrage for example and if you fail to get your profit and can't return loan plus interest it suddenly becomes like you didn't loan it at all.) Looks like some kind of magic for me.)
4) NFT is misused tech. It really guarantees the ownership, but not for associated media.) Best cases for NFT are tickets or license keys. But this cases can't give you millions in a minute that's why nobody knows about them.
1) You didn't read my comment carefully. I did say that crypto is great for law avoidance. So yes, international money transfers avoiding any taxes, fees and regulation is indeed better with crypto. The thing is, I'm not an oligarch plundering my country and funneling stolen money to offshores and UAE. I do value AML laws and all the "stupid" regulations which come with it. Even if I'm personally affected by them and have to procure papers for money origin, is limited by in amounts and time to transfer - it is better that a so called "free market" a wild west libertarian dystopia.
2) I have heard about IPFS and other file storage projects like Filecoin or Siacoin. All of them are noncompetitive with any centralized service. And as for illegal filesharing - sure, it may be useful, bittorents are better though and have no shitty monetization attached to them.
3) Yes, I have heard about flashloans, a lot. It's an amazing source of lulz and comedy godl, finding out how another bridge had been abused, often by the flash loan. It's a completely bullshit and useless idea for a normal human, unless you are a technically inclined hacker, who looks for vulnerabilities in the shitty code running on a virtual machine actively discouraging writing longer code with test coverage and better programming practices, because the longer the code the pricier it is to run. To such hackers flash loans are invaluable to properly abuse broken contracts.
4) NFT doesn't guarantee ownership of nothing but the token itself (and token is useless, because of the tech limitations). Tickets have no benefits on the blockchain because they are always issued by the centralized source. Any property you wish can and MUST be set by that same centralized corporation. NFTs add zero, nothing to it. Same with license keys, again issued by a central authority. NFTs is a cargo cult by tokenbros who don't know how business works.
Not daily and I think that's the thing. I suppose when one says "cryptocurrency," there are a lot of possible ways one might use it. I agree that for a daily driver, very unlikely.
But "store of value" is still very much in play.
Crypto as a competitor to the 401k or "money in the mattress" strikes me as damn near inevitable.
There's no way in hell you could convince me to invest in anything as volatile as a pile of crypto coin for my retirement. My retirement account is for slow, gentle, growth, not for a rollercoaster that could end up at zero (within the realm of reasonability - yes, the entire stock market could disappear, but at that point we're not retiring, we're firing up the pursuit special and heading into the desert). This is why ETFs are so popular - they remove a lot of the volatility.
Why would I put my money under the mattress if I could pull it out tomorrow and it'd be worth half of what I thought it was? Yes, inflation is a thing for fiat, but that's nowhere near as volatile as crypto has and continues to be.
Not to mention that in that same decade crypto coins have failed at everything but item 1 the instant payment systems solved the problem of digital money transfer beautifully (and legally)
Yours is a great way to explain it. I'd say - bitcoin and siblings are 'inevitable' like drug trafficking, not like breathing air
I really like this analogy, especially if you go deep on "drug trafficking," -- a corrupted, but not "wholly corrupt" activity that has potential to be legitimized and thus there may be a need to consider something other than "legal annihilation."
(as in bootlegging was also once drug-trafficking)
My point exactly; Yes, "crypto" is useful for many presently illegal activities, but on its face, it is arguably "morally neutral," so you can reasonably throw it in with "encryption," "anonymity" etc -- potentially dangerous techs that the bad guys CAN use, but also important for freedom in the face of authortarianism.
I don't see cryptocurrencies as something to be killed. I think the vast majority of them are illogical, based on wishful thinking and severe ignorance or outright scams. People will point out one among twenty thousand without realizing that the exception proves the rule.
Yeah sure keep speculating on your "digital gold" I don't care. Unlike holding dollars as demand deposits or cash, you can't hijack the economy. You are accountable for the risks you take but that doesn't mean anyone is going to use Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay their groceries, especially since so many of the crypto credit card companies love operating in jurisdictions where they are completely unaware about the tax implications of their product. What a well thought out business model...
Even though Europe/EU is embracing a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and making it easier to do business, crypto exchanges operate in regulatory safe havens, engage in shady practices or get hacked and lose your money.
> People will point out one among twenty thousand without realizing that the exception proves the rule.
This argument doesn't hold well. Creating huge amounts of value is expected to be the exception rather than the rule - one of the powerful mechanisms at play here is this is an unusually free market where failure is cheap and all the money clusters to success.
It is reasonable to ignore the thousands of failures. They failed because they were easy to ignore.
>> this is an unusually free market where failure is cheap [public quick]
The speed and amount of effort to innovate, by basically every demographic of persons, is breathtaking and exciting. Due to low startup costs (lack of gatekeepers), most will fail. That is okay, because the builders are not playing with super powder.
> I'm surprised that tech people here don't appear to understand its inevitability.
All progress depends on the "unreasonable man". I don't think it's inevitable at all, nor have I seen any evidence that it will be. Thus far non-government blockchains have proven to be ill suited for applications other than speculation (and crime). Central bank "programmable money" is definitely a threat - but it's hardly inevitable if popular opposition is vigorous enough.
If you were to ask a tech enthusiast in 2010, they'd might you that 3D TVs were inevitable. Instead they fizzled out. Then there's "the Metaverse", which seems to be on bumpy terrain as well. SPACs seem to be doing not so hot[1]. Not every tech/financial trend sticks around if the value proposition isn't there. And the value proposition for cryptocurrency is very poor in my view.
You should look harder for the evidence. 1% is all you need. There is a not-insignificant number of people using crypto to move and store money today. I agree A LOT of garbage is going to get shaken out, but this says to me "okay, what part/idea in crypto survives this bloodbath and gets bigger," not "throw the whole thing out."
I think of it as a bunch of bad early implementations that are being used for dubious financial purposes and outright fraud, fueling a bubble. The same could be said for joint stock corporations in the 1600s. Something can be inevitable (maybe it is maybe it isn’t) and the current situation can still be bad.
Someone in the 1600s saying that joint stock companies are terrible, solve a problem that doesn’t really need solving, and are being used to rip off investors and fund unethical colonialism would have been right. It took a while before people used them in good ways. And even today they are questionable.
I think it's the crypto bros who misunderstand it's "inevitability." Crypto has far, far fewer practical applications than the people pushing for it it claim. There are two useful situations for crypto:
1) Where you need a trustless distributed consensus method or database (and where the Oracle Problem doesn't get in your way). Trustless is the key word here, 99% of the time that someone proposes a potential use for crypto it would be better served by traditional databases like Postgres, or traditional consensus algorithms like Raft, because being able to handle such things in a trustless manner isn't actually as desirable as crypto bros suggest.
2) Where you need to bypass financial regulations, sanctions, laws, etc. Crypto has shown some real utility for buying illegal drugs and guns online, for example. Whether or not you see this as a good or bad thing depends largely on your political leanings.
Bypassing financial regulations is indeed a great thing. It’s none of your business whether someone wants to trade derivatives or earn interest on their own money. Love it when supposed investor protections aren’t opt out, and then the surveillance infrastructure they put in place get used for tax enforcement or state sponsored looting of political enemies.
Maybe if you lived in some 3rd world countries - you could find more utility for it. Hyperinflation is the default for some countries, being able to keep some evil dictators from your money might be a good thing.
F.x. instead of your money funding illegal wars in Libya you could save some of that wealth and try to build a better future.
I think tech people are in the best position to judge that in most cases the technology doesn't bring any benefits that a current / non-ledger like technology doesn't bring already. Use-cases are few and far between. I doubt it's actually inevitable. (again some use cases are, especially in the utility realm)
We are so familiar with the technology we have actual informed opinions in either direction. The only dispassionate people are those who don’t know yet.
Not what I've seen here. This is one of the few topics here where I think emotion STRONGLY gets in the way of reason. Too few people are "first princpl-ing" this to understand that the crypto-train, to some extent, is happening whether any of us like it or not.
The problem with the cryptocurrency advocates is that they have zero clue about money. Neoclassical economics declares money irrelevant and not something to study, so there is hardly any research how money influences a society beyond central bank policy about how much money there should be.
Here is a tip. Money is a transaction cost reducing device. That is it's primary function. By transaction costs I don't mean just fees that a bank or payment service provider charges you, no I mean every economic cost that is involved in negotiating payments. You could think of transaction costs as friction and money as a lubricant. If you have to exchange currencies this causes friction, if you have to physically transport goods or meet in person to barter with them this causes friction. If the value of the goods you are trading is unknown this causes friction. The purpose of money is to be better than some alternative world without money and most cryptocurrencies are hardly better, they are worse or outright useless. The legitimate niches that cryptocurrencies occupy will barely even influence the real world.
I 99% agree and and also argue that the 1% is significant.
Money is sometimes that, but it's also merely a store of value. And I think this what people are missing. I agree that we're almost certainly not going to say paying for coffee in bitcoin.
But where it has legs is as the 401k/money in the mattress replacement; a space that's still very "competitive," i.e. a lot of the options here still really suck, thanks to inflation and/or third parties.
Honestly I hear this a lot from crypto advocates, but it just seems like wishful thinking on their part. There are a ton of legitimate complaints about cryptocurrency that come up, and the fact that after a decade the field still hasn't made any real progress is telling to me. At this point the "shitcoins" have mostly collapses, NFT has been devalued, and use cases seem to be disappearing. While I do think things like migrating away from proof of work have been helpful, I still don't believe that we're going to see larger adoption.
I do think you are right that this is a topic where emotion strongly gets in the way of reason, but I think the people lacking reason are the advocates and not the critics.
The most obvious first step is to stop all initial coin offerings against money. If the cryptocurrency is a security, then that is ok, but there are some regulations that need to be followed. In the EU there are plenty of companies willing to manage a security token offering for your company. A security token is basically a cryptocurrency that acts as an informal stock.
Parallel to barter, desire-to-use is all that is required for use-case.
Governments are going to remain challenged by the need to now assert that possession or use of a legal instrument, with no inherent illegal characteristic, is now evidence of intent to crime.
Not that I don't expect them to rise to the occasion. As they have been by implementing crude sanction power in place of legislation.
After all these years, all scam stories apart, what crypto allow its users to do that they would not be able to do otherwise with less resources? Really I don’t know, and I admit I never wanted to dig the topic as there are many other topic I will never have the time to learn and yet doesn’t seem to have such an issue of what is at best a tremendous noise/signal ratio.
You hear about "scam stories" because they're usually interesting and they get clicks so media will naturally put them on the spotlight. You don't hear about thoudands of people in third world countries who are able to get capital for their projects, start up their business by avoid sanctions put on their countries banking systems, NGOs who are able to collect donations while in autocratic regimes, sick people who can order their medication on the darknet which for whatever reason is not available to them in their country, and so on and so on. The fact that you can just wire $100 to your buddy across the world for a 50 cent fee without caring about banks or IBANs or SWIFT codes or whatever else just blows my mind to this day, it creates so many opportunities one cannot just brush the whole crypto concept off as some nft scam shit.
Being able to wire $100 to your buddy across the world isn't so useful when you can't be sure if it'll be worth $90 or $100 or $110 by the time your buddy goes to use it.
> what crypto allow its users to do that they would not be able to do otherwise with less resources
International money transfers, for instance. The traditional banking system was always slow and expensive, and, on top of that, countries cut each other out due to geopolitical reasons. Many third-world countries have a decent crypto adoption, you can send someone money in a matter of minutes (I do).
I can send money in minutes too from bank to bank, internationally and domestically. I could do it for years now.
Some very big sums require approval and are delayed. But guess what - it's not a technical limitation but a legal one. It not like some TCP packet can transmit wire transfer of 1000 dollars and unable to do so for 50000 dollars. And we as society do want to control large sum transfers, unless we want to end up like my home country, with funds funneled with close to no control to offshores.
Sure, if a person want to skirt the law and transfer millions without control then current token systems are perfect for him.
The other day I tried to wire money to somebody in a different country, but my bank didn’t support that country. So I used USDC and sent the funds in seconds without any issue.
> and, on top of that, countries cut each other out due to geopolitical reasons
For a sovereign state this is a feature, not a bug. If you think that countries will take sending of funds to embargoed countries lying down you are sorely mistaken.
Sure, and that's exactly why sovereign states don't like monero and mixers - but that is their problem, not mine. Also, in many cases transferring crypto is not illegal - for instance, it is legal to transfer money to non-sanction banks in Russia, but in many countries, the banking system doesn't allow that. If you had a 90y.o. starving grandma there, you'd be grateful for the crypto.
Via sanctions, it is illegal for you to use specific mixers assuming you are a US citizen. Which does make it your problem.
And if you have a mixer or private coin that isn't under sanction, it is only a matter of time as determined by the US gov's assessment of the risk of it being widely adopted.
I am not a US citizen, but, regardless, I'm not sure you're right: as long as I don't consider something to be immoral, I don't particularly care if it's legal or not. Given how easy it is to obtain untraceable crypto, I still think it's mostly their problem.
That's a minuscule use case whose benefits are arguably exaggerated next to the UX inconvenience and other downside factors for the common abuela looking to receive grocery money.
Until crypto becomes at least as easy to get set up with and use as dealing with a bank, Western Union, or online banking, it'll remain niche.
I’m kind of surprised it made it to the top of the page. HN is certainly divided about crypto, not recently it has felt to me it’s slipped the wayside in favor of AI stories.
Monero is supposedly untraceable, or at least far harder to trace than Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other "traditional" cryptocoins. It's untraceability has made it receive even greater scrutiny and attempts to regulate it/ban it than other coins.
- Private by default. With most other cryptos you can see all transactions on the blockchain (although you'll only see address hashes instead of names).
- ASIC resistant POW. Meaning you don't need specialized hardware to mine it but can do it with your PC (assuming it's fairly powerful).
- Transactions are cheap and fairly fast.
- Development is focused on the primary use-case of making transactions for payments, instead of making a "decentralized computing network" or similar.
to me it's because I see how it's properties are valued by the markets it is transacted in, giving me enough safety that I can find a p2p seller to acquire some Monero without being identified (no-KYC), which then I do not risk being part of data leaks and becoming a target of attacks, and I am able to move some funds to a cold storage, which means funds I don't need to touch or connect its keys the internet, as I know in months or years from now I'll still be able to transact those as I need them, as it retains its properties and all coins are always interchangeable no matter where they come from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility)
Opt-in privacy is poor because most people don't bother, and this drastically reduces the privacy for those that do. Even if something has perfect privacy features, this alone is a deal-breaker.
With Zcash you get opt-in privacy, with Monero it's enforced with every transaction, for everyone.
The researchers involved in zcash are a combo of DJB acolytes (in a good way) and Tel Aviv infosec researchers. Plus Ed Snowden was one of the people that participated in their keygen ceremony. *
* Slightly off topic, wikipedia for zcash is terrible, it's written by people that don't understand that a 'ceremony' is part of any asymmetric cryptosystem from your Linux package manager to the CA that signed the cert for the website you're looking at.
there's way more to those crypto than just privacy, Zcash for example is moving to proof-of-stake, they also want tokens and smart contracts on their chain, while Monero is focused on also being more broadly distributed/decentralized, and harder to take down, with a CPU based proof-of-work to enforce that
Zcash has directly admitted that it already had a catastrophic inflation bug [1]. Nobody can prove if it has been hyperinflated by an attacker. Developers linked to DARPA and the Israeli government had the knowledge, capability and opportunity to do so - do you trust them?
I feel like Monero is in a tough spot. Not enough network effect to compete with Bitcoin, and new scaling layers like Arc and Lightning actively building out to provide privacy.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, it's an entirely valid observation. And as I type, it's the only comment mentioning lightning as competition.
Moreover, my greater sense is that the nuts and bolts of crypto is not an HN strong suit. It usually brings out religious-type arguments with little sense of balance. <sigh>
Actually I think that thanks to Bitcoin coming first and being bigger, Monero is able to rise in its shadow, because bitcoin as a crypto people use is like giving governments a safe environment of still being in control, with its traceability and ASIC mining by corporations that can sanction addresses and etc, if Monero was the first ever cryptocurrency it would be way more regulated and attacked as a tool for criminals and would never reach mass adoption, so it's way easier to move from Bitcoin - the coin for social media and legal tender - to Monero - the anonymous alternative -, than from your regulated and enforced fiat currency to a "criminal coin" everyone is afraid to have, making it impossible to spend and use. If Bitcoin continues to grow, so will Monero
The network effect will come when the FED and ECB "save" everybody from their manufactured hyper inflation (give or take 2 years from now) through CBDC.
- To be user friendly, you need to reintroduce trust into the system, defeating the point.
- It's still more expensive to lock up Bitcoin in Lightning than to use Monero.
- The privacy of Lightning is poor compared to Monero.
The only thing Monero lacks compared to Bitcoin is the amount of speculative network effect it has, which is indeed what's holding back Monero's popularity.
Investing in a coin for the purpose of privacy is not a good investment. This is because the government has to criminalize every private currency and privatizing method with any significant use. If it hasn't been criminalized yet, it is just because they haven't yet gotten around to it.
I'm not saying that one can't hope for privacy. Only that the investment risk is extremely lopsided in this moment. Expect that the government can ramp up their criminalization efforts faster than a coin can reach escape velocity should its use become more common.
Private coins may be inevitable, but it is going to be a bumpy road to get there.
Bitcoin has absolutely capitalized on giving the impression of privacy, to those (most) not paying full attention, while offering the opposite. Without privacy, DCs are worse than cash unless you feel that you are under threat of seizure or you have a plan to abscond across borders sometime soon.
I was using "investment" as a catch-all for both speculation and use. As in one "invests" dollars into BC with either the intent of selling it for cash later, or the intent of eventually using it. See "with any significant use" in my second sentence.
When someone try to hardfork bitcoin, bitcoin remain the same and the new fork is just a fork of bitcoin. Network effect and convergence over the open standard in action; the edge that protects bitcoin.
When someone forks monero, the new fork is called "monero" and all the small userbase moves over it. The old chain simply dies. No network-effect to resist changes because theres no network at all compared to bitcoin.
Same for all the crypto.
Its absurd to save money in monero or in all the crypto where someone can easily move the inexistent userbase and do hardforks.
But if you cant save because the expected value of the cryptos over time is zero, what is the meaning of exchange these assets?
All crytpos that are not bitcoin (even monero) can only work on the informative asimmetry where some people ignore these facts and, scammed by promoters, holds these non-sense assets expecting returns that will never come. The promoters, instead, will make money dumping on them.
This betrays a complete lack of understanding of hardforks in Monero.
Whenever Monero upgrades to new consensus rules they indeed do so via a hardfork, but that only works because there's social consensus (both economic and mining wise). If the consensus would be to stay with the original rules, people would (and it has happened before).
Even in Bitcoin this works, and Bitcoin has even hardforked before! The difference is that in Bitcoin people want to stay on the original chain.
Keeping money in Monero is safe because you'll still keep the money after the hardfork, that's just how they work.
No $20 transaction fees. No influencer pump and dumps. No VCs who need to extract value. No fork drama. No unrealistic roadmap. No charismatic leader boiling the frog with scope creep. It's not trying to be an investment. It's actually private. It's actually anonymous. This is all a lot of us ever wanted from a cryptocurrency.