Drop a Monero address here and I'll send you a tiny amount for your first transaction.
I recommend CakeWallet, which is cross-platform, user friendly, and does a lot of good for the community, but any of the wallets recommended on the official[1] website are fine.
p.s. you or anyone can reach out via my contacts in bio if you have any questions about Monero.
I would actually recommend to just use a hardware wallet. The monero-cli or the Monero GUI-Wallet are sufficient. Just drop your wallet onto an USB stick with LUKS encryption. Get your recovery seed + wallet height written by hand and bury them somewhere in your garden, or your parents garden in safe box.
Drop me your address, and I will also send a little bit your way, to get you hooked!
KYC[1] methods are the easiest and what I recommend for everyone. I will only go into detail with KYC methods in this post.
A. Determine where you are. Are you in a jurisdiction that has CEXs[2] that allow you to purchase Monero with Fiat? If so, Continue to B; otheriwse, continue to C.
B. If you are in the USA/Country where you can buy Monero directly:
1. Open a Kraken[3] account. You will need to prove your identity through a service like Persona.
2. Send money into Kraken from your bank or credit card.
3. Purchase Monero on Kraken with your deposited funds.
4. 7-day hold and then you will be able to withdraw to your self-custody wallet.
Conclusion: You now own Monero. You have payed minimal fees. The government and entire financial system knows you have purchased Monero.
This may or may not be a concern depending on your threat model[4]. Many people overstate this threat—Monero is the 14th largest Cryptocurrency by market cap, it is not particularly suspicious to purchase it. It does not compromise your future Monero transactions—it is just like withdrawing cash from an ATM, the financial system and government know that you now hold cash, but what it is used for is opaque.
C. If you are not in the USA/are in a jurisdiction where you can't buy Monero directly:
1. Open an account on any KYC CEX, I recommend Kraken. You will need to prove your identity through a service like Persona.
2. Purchase any coin. I recommend Litecoin[5], but Bitcoin or anything works.
3. Create a self-custody wallet for Litecoin, I recommend CakeWallet.
4. Withdraw your Litecoin to CakeWallet.
5. Go to Trocador[6].
6. Create a swap from Litecoin to Monero.
7. Give Trocador one of your Monero addresses to send the converted Monero to.
8. Choose the exchange with the best fees/privacy to your liking (these change throughout the day).
9. Send your Litecoin from CakeWallet to the Litecoin address provided.
10. You will shortly receive Monero to the address you gave Trocador.
Conclusion: You now own Monero. You have payed a small amount of fees. Depending on the pervasiveness and intelligence of blockchain surveillance, the financial system and the government knows that you have purchased Monero, or has the ability to figure out that you have purchased Monero.
All your future transactions are anonymous. Remember, Monero is just patching one hole in making an anonymous transaction. It does not magically make you anonymous if any of these other things are not anonymous: OS, browser, IP address, identities, etc.
[1] Know-your-customer — they say it's to stop crime.
[2] Centralized Exchange
[3] As respected of a CEX as you will get. They support Monero while most other CEXs have removed it.
[6] [https://trocador.app Highly reputable instant exchange aggregator. They do not touch your funds, they just aggregate other instant exchanges and provide a guarantee for no-KYC. Excellent customer support. You will pay about a 1% fee converting your crypto through an instant exchange. Instant exchanges are CEXs, but since they deal only in Crypto and not Fiat, they can afford to easily be no-KYC.
A key feature of cash is its ability to pass through and into the KYC/AML panopticon where (edit: to make it clear what the "KYC/AML panopticon" meant -- after being deposited in a bank) you can buy things like real estate and heavy capital equipment. If you can't prove chain of custody of source of funds and source of wealth, you're effectively shut off from a wide amount of transactions.
At least in the West. If you go to someplace like Dubai it is no problem.
No my argument is Monero fails in practice relatively worse than similar 'weight class' crypto currency assets at actually spending 'digital cash' (presumably a desirable quality of 'cash') to make legal purchases from crypto accepting sellers. This is quite evident if you survey available offerings -- vendors are far more likely to accept even the lower cap litecoin than monero (even the 'cryptwerk' website advertised by getmonero shows 2x as many vedors accepting LTC).
I do postulate that the fact it is easier to show chain of custody to the point it satisfies banks and regulated entities as part of this (even if through chain-analysis mumbo jumbo), thus other crypto currencies have lent more towards accessing more purchases in a way cash idealizes to do.
At no point was my argument simply monero fails at the same thing a pile of cash dropped through the sky might fail at and that's the end of it. I think that's a pretty silly portrayal of what I've said, made in bad faith. Although in reality I've had my cex account frozen almost every single time I've tried depositing very low, 3 digit amounts of XMR (including frozen for years) whereas you can somewhat reliably put $200-$1000 in a bank in place like USA and then use that as part of purchase that goes through KYC/AML channels.
Now if you do want to compare, say, a pile of cash falling out of the sky, vs a pile of bitcoin, vs a pile of monero and you wanted to spend it on something big that went through KYC/AML compliance. In order of what would be easiest to spend, assuming the money actually came from a legal source. Bitcoin would be the easiest to spend because you have some chance at showing it came straight from a KYC'd source because of the plaintext blockchain, next would be cash (largely for historical reasons), the hardest to actually spend would be the monero. Now if we presume matheusmoreira point about banks was just a red herring, then your follow on is just one too, since the bit regarding KYC/AML compliance purchases/transactions was a response to that.
Right but isn't the point of Monero that once you have it, you don't have a public, immutable ledger of all subsequent transactions, just waiting there for when you become persona non grata to some entity with significant time or computational resources to fuck you?
The relevant similarity to (unbanked) cash is the post-facto privacy.
And yes, this feature does dramatically increase the KYC posture of institutions that need to be afraid of those same computation-rich entities, but obviously the point of the currency is you don't functionally need them the way you functionally need a bank to do anything similar with cash.
Most basic economics academic reviews show a few main qualities of cash[0][1].
(1)durability
(2)portability
(3)divisibility
(4) uniformity
(5) acceptability
(6) limited supply
Monero beats plaintext chain coins at uniformity, as BTC for example is non-fungible because there are tainted and non-tainted coins. Monero is truly fungible. It loses to even similar weight class coin at acceptability.
I suppose you can argue the gains in uniformity overcome the losses in acceptability. I'm not sure reality has bore that out if you actually want to use your cash. In practice BTC/LTC can shed their taint and public trail by being mixed and this seems to make up for this weakness enough for acceptance while still allowing a public chain for the last few transactions before it enters/leaves the KYC/AML panopticon, which is highly desirable for 'acceptability' (this is probably also why ZCash is far more easier to access than XMR, as it has a feature to disable anonymity so it can go to/from central exchanges and KYC/AML'd vendors).
Note: if you go to some cryptocurrency shilling website, you can find 'anonymity' as a trait, but this deviates from the more common definition.
> A key feature of cash is its ability to pass through and into the KYC/AML panopticon where you can buy things like real estate and heavy capital equipment.
My country is in the process of criminalizing the purchase of real estate with cash. Laws have been proposed to that end. Politicians have also proposed restricting the amount of "unexplained" physical cash the population is "allowed" to hold.
This is your future if you don't resist.
> If you can't prove chain of custody of source of funds and source of wealth
You shouldn't have to "prove" anything. What a bunch of nonsense.
Cash would "fail horribly at meeting the regulatory and political challenges challenges today". And some countries are trying to make it harder to use.
Yes but fortunately we have other points of comparison and I was making a relative analysis. Legal vendors who take crypto are more likely to accept even the lower market cap LTC in most cases than XMR. XMR is one of the weakest performers as spending cash on legal goods and service amongst crypto assets of similar financial "weight class."
The technical superiority and features on many points seem to be unable to overcome this.
That's because anonymity is the entire point of Monero. Of course legal vendors don't like anonymity, every government wants to be able to track every transaction anywhere.
Saying Monero hasn't been able "to overcome this" is like saying boats have been unable to overcome driving on roads. Technically true, but very much not the point.
For business acceptance, I see how it would be hard if it is impossible to use on a CEX. I think that Haveno/RetoSwap will eventually become the preferred and more convenient Fiat-->Monero method instead of CEXs for the avg user.
Overall though I would even prefer to use a stable than a bank or fiat p2p app to send money.
>They've failed horribly at meeting the regulatory and political challenges of being tradeable on central exchanges and as a result has met weak acceptance from crypto-friendly legal vendors making it harder to use as actual digital cash.
Despite this, everywhere it is accepted, it becomes the largest marketshare crypto payment method, excluding whales.
In this case, I mean a narrowed focus (in this case, on technical qualities) to the point it is maladaptive for the underlying stated goal ("digital cash").
A survey of cryptocurrencies showed monero has failed to achieve this goal of being a superior form of digital cash, relative to most other crypto currencies in similar 'weight class' of market cap and years available. This failure isn't technical, it's due to relative weaknesses in the realms of politics and soft social influence. Even the lower market cap LTC is more accepted as 'cash' by most legal vendors.
-----------
re: below muh sources
getmonero.org, OPs referenced website, advertises cryptwerk as a good directory.
There are ~twice as many for LTC for example, and that's being charitable with something with a lower market cap rather than BTC which is like 3+ times as many.
(4) Note there are 2x vendor for lower market cap LTC, 3x as many for higher market cap BTC. Note this directory was chosen by monero people themselves, so I'm not cherry picking something gaming the merchant list against monero.
There is a pretty consistent survey of XMR performing weaker than similar class assets in spending at crypto accepting vendors. (Note I had to reply above earlier because my account was throttled)
I had not paid any attention to Monero amid the storm of cryptocurrencies and related scams, but thanks to your recommendation here, I will be checking it outmn
That's a good signal that the privacy guarantees are real, no? It's no secret that the main use-case for crypto is skirting the legal system; I'm not sure I understand this desire to make it anything bigger than that. For example, it's extremely hard to Be Your Own Bank because one mistake means you've just lost all your funds whether it's from a scam, malware, or losing your wallet seed phrase. Large amounts of people "being their own bank" by putting their life savings into crypto would be a disaster.
That's the wrong question. Nobody cares how the elites in the government feel. They exist to serve us. That is the only reason they have any power at all.
The right question is: how can we make it mathematically impossible for the government to oppress us in any way, regardless of how much they seethe and rage about it? Their happiness does not matter. In fact their anger is probably a good sign that the technology is working as intended. The angrier they get, the freer you are.
The angrier they get, the higher is the chance that they make your technical solution illegal. What, you're using technology that might endanger children? All the concerned parents are suddenly your enemoies, democratically speaking. What? Your technology can be used to do money laundering? And you're using it still? You can now anonymously pay only darknet vendors and other shady bussinesses. Have your anonymity, but cut off from the rest of "good" society.
Given the original motivation to actually invent crypto, I am surprised it wasn't outlawed a long time ago. No goverment likes to be overthrown...
It's just the usual politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, people make technology that works around the laws in such a way that the government can do nothing about it.
Governments must continuously increase their tyranny in order to maintain the exact same level of control they used to have before. There are two possible outcomes: a free and uncontrollable population emancipated by ubiquitous subversive technology, or a totalitarian government so oppressive that even your concerned parents feel the weight of its boot on their faces.
It's my sincere hope that we'll discover the true limits of the government's tyranny in the process. The harsh truth is people need to accept the existence of some amount of crime if they want to live with basic human dignity. It's just like how the banking industry accepts some degree of fraud as a business expense. They could stamp it out, but the security requirements would add so much friction to everyday transactions nobody would buy anything.
It seems that many high-quality things (or otherwise aspirational things) take on Esperanto names (disclosure, I am an Esperantist). While Monero is no doubt a cool crypto-currency, it is even cooler that it has inspired some crypto-curious people to learn Esperanto[1] instead!
While I am here, I might as well give you a brief Esperanto lesson. Mono = money, ero = piece/quantum. So, "pano" = bread, "panero" = bread-crumb. Thus, "monero" = coin.
Many previous international currencies (all of them created with Swiss involvement), were also given Esperanto names: Spesmilo (thousand speso's (speso is analogous to "penny")), Stelo (star).
There is even a luxury watch-brand (from Switzerland) called "Movado", which is Esperanto for "Movement" (made back when watches were made with mechanical movements).
And I also learned, from the linked thread (disclosure, I am a participant), that there is a soft-drink called "Mirinda". This is an adjective that means "awe-worthy".
> interestingly, it's one of the least-used least-hyped options. It's as though we didn't actually want privacy in our money system.
There is lots of interest from
individuals. But governments all around the world have done their best to suppress it. They indeed do not like privacy and independence. They are the ones who sued and pressured exchanges into delisting Monero.
wouldn't that defeat the privacy purpose? wouldn't someone be able to see that it was your card in the ATM, when they traced back the monero as exchanged for a coin that was exchanged for your fiat?
ETA: just to be clear - that's a genuine question. I don't know much about monero, so if it really is possible to have untraceable money, that seems like a prudent investment for precaution. I've just always assumed that digital money is inherently traceable, so I always assumed genuine privacy is a mirage. I assume I'm wrong about that, somehow, so I'm curious about the mechanisms of that anonymity.
so would that be a feature of monero-to-monero transactions? I'm still confused as to how it would actually be anonymous? like if I used another coin to exchange for monero, that's obviously traceable. so then I use monero to purchase something else which I then sell for other monero (or I just trade monero directly? if that's possible?). and I'm to believe that there's no way to trace that back and say "okay, monero from wallet X was traded to wallet Y" or whatever other intermediate steps (like"monero was spent on X from wallet A, and then X was resold using monero from wallet B")? like, assuming they don't get in to my wallet, no one would be able to track down a transaction on the chain to a wallet? Or they would be able to track it to a wallet, but they couldn't tie that wallet to me for... some reason?
sorry to ask, but the website seems very light on any actual technical detail about how they are achieving their privacy claims - at least in terms I can parse to make them understandable to me.
very cool, thanks! And since I can't respond to that poster, I'll say it here: thanks for that detailed answer! That definitely seems like a pretty anonymous system. I'm convinced that monero is a pretty private coin!
Monero is far more bloated than Bitcoin, paying a high price
for its privacy features, most of which (no visible amount or address) can be had while making even Bitcoin look bloated [1].
And Monero's fees decrease with larger block sizes (Monero has dynamic block sizes) whereas Bitcoin has a fixed block size and fees must increase to compete to be included in the block.
Because of government pressure. It was delisted by lots of exchanges purely based on government fear of privacy and independence, not any technical or demand reasons.
The CEX that do list it, it is essentially a trap. As soon as you do something with XMR they start freezing your account and demanding all sorts of KYC/AML. That is my experience after playing with it by pulling out a couple hundred $ and doing nothing with it other than putting it back on an exchange.
Coinbase doesnt sell it which annoys me, but probably due to legal regulation I am sure. Its a shame too, I think its probably one of the most interesting cryptocurrencies.
Privacy is available in bitcoin as a layer-2 solution such as Lightning. When Trump made the popular and media-broadcast bitcoin transaction during his campaign, he did so over lightning. Privacy alone is thus not a big reason to abandon bitcoin and move over to another chain.
Monero needs to step up for quantum safety, not by replacing the existing encryption, but by adding a quantum safety encryption layer on top. Google's recent paper on quantum risks to cryptocurrencies had identified Monero as being at risk. This is not tomorrow's problem; it requires initiating action today, so these efforts can bear fruit by the time the quantum hardware is ready, perhaps by 2029.
All coins are aware of quantum safety requirements, yet quantum computers are still far enough in the future that it makes sense to wait, and first see what those post-quantum mitigations should look like.
Burying the head in the sand doesn't work. Quantum-safe algorithm candidates exist. Post-quantum cryptography is a bonafide field with families of algorithms that exist, e.g. lattice/hash/code/multivariate based. If a user has to choose between two cryptocurrencies, one of which is quantum safe and the other isn't, the user will choose the one that is. The ultimate choice of algorithm doesn't have to be finalized right now; that will remain a work in progress for decades, but getting there is not a one-hop journey.
Because XRP is not decentralized, it will be easy to upgrade. With bitcoin, you have to convinve the node runners to upgrade - which means the taken patchset must be sound and verified in depth beforehand.
I wouldn't worry since AI can do research, identify approaches, and implement them. The human of course needs to review every line with a critical eye, and compare the implementations against their academic specifications.
Now THAT is FUD. Current annual inflation rate is 0.84191433% [0]. That is massive and not "approaches zero". The value of Monero over n-years thus approaches zero over time, for big enough n.
While that is a little under 1%, it is still inflation. The ECB targets on average 2% inflation (while before COVID the ECB targeted maximum of 2% - so actually close to the Monero inflation).
It looks like we have different definitions of "massive".
You also say it does not approach zero, but in the following sentence you do say it approaches zero.
I guess people need to decide if inflationary money is better or worse than deflationary money, and what amount of inflation is appropriate.
Personally, without too much thought: I think a monetary inflation rate should correlate with the population inflation rate, so that it's value remains somewhat constant (I'm open to changing this opinion with more information).
Even if that was true. Are you saying that EVERYONE that gets funded was there from the start of Monero, 12 years ago, and is part of this secret club? Since that is obviously not true, if "they only fund friends", then I guess people must be able to make new friends.
The US Federal Government specifically calls out Monero as one of the coins that it hates, which means that it must be quite effective at achieving its goals. So the pro is that you know it works. The cons are nothing specific to Monero, just general criticism of cryptocurrencies. Not being a deep crypto user myself, at least, I haven't heard anyone speak of any flaw specific to Monero that isn't shared by a significant portion of the remainder of all of these coins
One admittedly minor issue is that since monero is ASIC resistant, its very attractive to run on compromised computers. Other coins suffer this as well I'm sure, but I don't have any data on this. I guess this is mainly a hunch.
> The US Federal Government specifically calls out Monero as one of the coins that it hates, which means that it must be quite effective at achieving its goals. So the pro is that you know it works.
Official condemnation doesn't work like that. Facebook's cryptocurrency, Libra, was also condemned, and we know it didn't work because it never actually existed.
Which is its biggest weakness. Lightning over Bitcoin is decently anonymous, too. Given that is just a layer-2 technology and can be developed further and evolutes outside of Bitcoin protocol changes, makes it more flexible and has shorter innovation cycles.
And outlawing bitcoin has become basically impossible after the large amount of ETF inflows. Monero is nice technology, but I think the ship has already sailed for Bitcoin (and L2 solutions like lightning).
Anonymity is not binary 0 or 1. There is a difference in there is a one-in-a-million chance that you made a payment, is not the same as there is a one-in-three chance you did the payment. You can define anonymity to be a one-in-a-billion chance, and all lower odds as "not anonymous". But that is not applicable in the real world.
Isn´t the experiment in El Salvador proof that Bitcoin does not work as a currency? If you think it isn't, then do you have any measurable pass/fail test for it?
El Salvador is the worst example, as they have been bribed by the IMF to get rid of bitcoin. I would also wan't to learn how the situation in El Salvador would be any different if they adopted Monero instead - I think it would be the same outcode.
I am not a bitcoin-as-currency evangelist. I see it more as digital gold, and gold is not a currency today. It will have its role as a store of value and fallback unit of trade that keeps government currencies in check - another pillar in financial checks-and-balances.
That was not my argument at all. First I said, I don't see bitcoin as currency at all. Second, major nation states have always tryed to use their power to force other nations to use their currency (petrodollar, cough). This is nothing specific to crypto, but something also specific to traditional fiat currencies.
Any high-volatile asset such as bitcoin is IMHO not suited as currency. The good news is, with the bitcoin taproot upgrade and latest lightning standards, you can actually issue stablecoins over bitcoin's taproot asset protocol, and send it over the existing lightning network. My bet is on stablecoins-over-lightning as currency, and bitcoin as store of value. One blockchain to rule them all, other chains not need (for financial transactions at least).
No, Layer-2 systems only transfer cryptographically signed IOUs between nodes.
Settlement only happens when these IOUs are cashed out, and to cash out you need a transaction in the blockchain layer, so the point about latency still stands.
It is as much an IOU as the US Dollar was pre-1971. That is a pretty good image for Lightning/Bitcoins relationship. Lightning is the dollar with a guarantee that you can convert it to gold anytime you like by presenting it at the central bank. Very few people ever converted their USD to the underlying gold as a settlement transaction. The difference with lightning is, the government can't just rug-pull you and stop exchanging those paper bill IOUs - it is cryptograhpically secured that you can always convert to bitcoin. Since no one would consider exchaging dollars as settling in gold, lightning settlement is not tied to on-chain transactions.
Payment channels are possible on other networks as well. Once again, there is no inherent advantage to Bitcoin here. I know because I worked on one (https://raiden.network/). I also dealt with many of its failure modes:
- insufficient liquidity on intemediate nodes
- network partitions
- uncooperative nodes
- nodes that were liquidity sinks and forced other participants to bear the costs of deposits
- insufficient market makers
But more than anything: people do not want to use crypto for payments. It gives them no significant advantage over traditional credit/debit cards, it has no built-in solution for appeals or reversals and it forces them to learn a bunch of stuff to be minimally safe...
> Payment channels are possible on other networks as well
you are moving the goalpost in the discussion of this thread. User KaierPro said bitcoin would not be suitable because transactions takes to long, to which is responded lightning solves that. Now claiming that other cryptos can have layers-2 is correct, but adds nothing to the discussion or my initial point. Yes other chains have faster settlement times, and can have their respective payment channels - no one argued against that.
In practice, it has shown that it is only viable if adoption by number of nodes and TVL grew by orders of magnitude, and both are very unlikely to happen because - like I said - spenders have nothing to gain from it and no matter how much of the UX friction is solved, it will never be as easy as paying with credit card.
The only people who want to use Lightning are the ones who are invested in Bitcoin. Everyone else just want simple/safe access to a payment network.
You are just moving the goalpost again, without adding to the discussion. If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same. Nothing to do with my initial point which was comparing lightning/bitcoin to monero.
> If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same.
Most spenders will prefer credit cards, but there is a non-zero group where absolute privacy is important and monero is the better choice, therefore more valuable to them.
You are the one trying to make some false equivalency by saying that "bitcoin/lightning is good enough for most cases, therefore there is no need for monero".
The problem is that you are starting with the conclusion that you want (i.e, "Bitcoin is the best") and you are working backwards from this conclusion to make all sorts of rationalizations. Try going from the use case first and then let's see where the reasoning takes you. You will see that for pretty much ANY use-case, Bitcoin is not the answer.
It is splitting words. There is a settlement layer in lightning, which is presenting the preimage and unpeeling the onion HLTCs in reverse order. This happens at the latency of the network path, so usually less than a second. Bitcoin settling is usually tied to confirmation in the block, which lasts ~10minutes. Lightning might be IOUs, but ones that are fungible themselves and not tied to a specific debtor. Actual lightning-to-bitcoin cashout would probably not happen for everyday use, or at least not more often than you change bankaccounts in todays terms.
That's intellectually dishonest. It's like saying wire transfers or card payments are only valid after interbank settlements are finalized.
Bitcoin Lightning is cryptographically designed to be valid even if it's not yet settled on the main layer. It provides cryptographically sound mechanisms to overrule anyone that tries to "cheat". There is no mathematical way to cancel or double spend it, just like your dollars are valid when the transaction is committed in your bank's database although the money still technically hasn't left the other bank.
There are plenty of failure modes where you can lose your funds even if your wallet keys are not compromised. Try running a lightning node, make transactions worth more than a few hundred dollars and then leave your node offline for a few days. Or even more simply: ask yourself what happens to your funds if the disk on your lightning node goes bust and you don't have a recent backup.
THis is the issue, until its settled in the chain, then you are down to trusting the 2nd layer.
Anything offchain has a whole bunch of issues that are either naively or deliberately obscured by the fact that it _eventually_ writes to the blockchain. The exchanges that offer instant settlement are circumventing trust by doing the settlement for you. You get speed, but not security that they have done what they have said they have.
Well, to be fair to OP: small business and retailers are also not getting "real" money when they accept payment via credit cards from Visa/MasterCard.
To be honest I think the issue here is not due to speed of settlement, but layer-2 is not an acceptable substitute because it does not allow reversability. For the merchants it's good that they are getting the money right away, but most consumers will not dare to pay anything via layer-2 networks simply because they won't have any recourse in case they want to undo the transaction.
You can implement reverseability with a credit system, such as Visa/Mastercard. It should not be implemented in base layer or layer-2. It is basically an escrow system.
So now you are proposing to build yet-another piece to an already complex system just so we can justify the existence of your beloved blockchain in the first place.
How long it's going to take you to realize that even if we built everything you are asking for, we are STILL going to end up with a system that is not as capital-efficient as the status quo?
This is just untrue.
If someone cheats in lightning, and you demonstrate they cheated as you describe, then you get all of the locked BTC as a reward. This is on layer 1. Essentially you can easily prove your nonce was signed more recently.
Because lightning uses Bitcoin's blockchain, which is the most secured (as in energy) and the most common (as in market cap) and probably the most accepted as in regulation. Plus, you can use bitcoins taproot asset protocol to issue stablecoins and send them over lightning. No other blockchain needed - which in my opinion, renders monero obsolete or at least a very niche product.
- Lightning is not fully anonymous. It can still be traced by the participating nodes.
- Ethereum's blockchain consumes less energy, is more decentralized, it's a lot more resistent to any form of attack and it can also host fixed-supply coins.
- Market cap is a meaningless metric, it's at best circular logic and at worst it's just a "one billion flies can't be wrong" argumentum ad populum.
- It baffles me how the Bitcoin enthusiasts talk so much about ideology and freedom, but get completely silent about the fact that most mining operations are done in countries with oppressive regimes, financed or subsidized by dictators with access to cheap fossil fuels.
> Lightning is not fully anonymous. It can still be traced by the participating nodes.
"Fully anonymous" is a strong term. Even cash is not fully anonymous. I would give monero that it is more anonymous than lightning because it is a core design principal. There is a spectrum to anonymity, however. As public enemy number one, such as Snowden or BinLaden, your anonymity requirements are different than a citizen buying illegal erectile dysfunction medication online.
If you consider the new features added in lightning over the past 24 months such as trampoline payments, blinded paths etc. - you will find that lightning is anonymous enough. Plus, you can increase anonymity in the client implementation at the expense of higher transaction fees (longer paths, more trampolines). Lightning's BOLT12 standard, which is currently finalized, will increase anonymity even further.
> Ethereum's blockchain consumes less energy, is more decentralized, it's a lot more resistent to any form of attack and it can also host fixed-supply coins.
Thats is factually untrue. First, ethereum famously had a human-coordinated rollback with a controlled restart organized between devs and node runners over Discord. Second, Ethereum is not decentralzied at all, because that is a core property of proof-of-stake: There is no way at any given time that you can be sure that the majority stake is not already in a single entities (or colluding group) possesion - and would thus have absolute control. It is therefore never guaranteed at any given time, that the network is decentralized.
> Market cap is a meaningless metric, it's at best circular logic and at worst it's just a "one billion flies can't be wrong" argumentum ad populum.
Price is ultimately what determines the value of anything. It is absolutely far from meaningless, as the market cap is also a big factor if a crypto asset can be outlawed or banned. Given how many investors in the west already own bitcoin, there would be a massive outcry if it is suddenly outlawed. I say you could outlaw Monero tomorrow and the mainstream media wouldn't even cover it.
> It baffles me how the Bitcoin enthusiasts talk so much about ideology and freedom, but get completely silent about the fact that most mining operations are done in countries with oppressive regimes, financed or subsidized by dictators with access to cheap fossil fuels.
You mean, such as the United States? Because the US (especially Texas) is one of the biggest miners of bitcoin currently.
But you can only make any claims about the properties of a system when looking at the extremes. If Bitcoin's blockchain does not make strong anonymity guarantees as Monero, then Bitcoin by definition can not be the "blockchain to rule them all" that you so desperately want.
>ethereum famously had a human-coordinated rollback with a controlled restart organized between devs and node runners over Discord.
That was achieved through social coordination. No backdoor was exploited, no one had their coins stolen on the original chain. The system worked as intended.
Can you say the same about Bitcoin? Do you think that all these banks and exchanges trading ETFs have secured access to the bitcoins they claim to have? When one of these institutions goes bust, who is going to bail them out?
You keep trying to argue that Bitcoin is more valuable because it is more likely to be supported by the powers-that-be, and that is the strongest indicator that all your evangelism is driven by "Greater Fool" dynamic. Satoshi's idea for crytocurrencies was to have an alternative system that worked despite adversarial governments, yet we keep getting time-and-again evidence that it can only work if it becomes of an instrument for the powerful institutions that caused the problems in the first place.
Bitcoin and its blockchain has no intrinsic value. Unlike Monero, it is not fully anonymous. Unlike Ethereum, it has no utility for decentralized applications. It can not be used as a currency. All Bitcoin has is first-mover advantage and a huge number of people with cognitive dissonance trying to keep the bubble inflated.
> Because the US (especially Texas) is one of the biggest miners of bitcoin currently.
Access to cheap fossil fuels? Check.
Facilitated by the government? Check!
Serving the interests of the elites and the aspirational 14% instead of the general populace? Check!
Really up to you personally what is a pro and a con. For me this is a starting list. A lot of these are a result of the technical differences as well as I listed the technical differences.
Pros:
1% inflation
no fixed supply (makes it more of a currency than an asset)
privacy by default,
fungibility—every coin is the exact same, no coin history
prevents financial surveillance by corporations,
protects against government abuses,
useful tool for activists, journalists, minorities, useful for domestic abuse survivors,
useful for businesses sending money across borders,
protects against stalkers,
protects against advertisers profiling you,
reduces identity theft,
prevents databreaches of personal info,
pushes forward cryptography,
allows people to purchase drugs (you decide if this is good or bad),
prevents financial censorship,
allows anonymous donations,
low fees,
more decentralized than bitcoin due to RandomX CPU mining,
prevents crypto robbery,
allows you to buy your adult content without anyone knowing.
large developer community iirc 3rd after bitcoin, eth
less volatile than other cryptos
usually most used crypto for payments when accepted at merchants
All of the pros - minus the inflation - also exist for Bitcoin-over-Lightning. Non of the cons exist for Lightning. Especially no waiting time. In lightning you can spend your received bitcoin after a split-second - no waiting whatsoever.
I had a terrible experience trying out Lightning. Could you tell me where I went wrong? I hit high fees converting to Lightning, and I hit high fees sending Lightning transactions.
The problem with Lightning or Zcash is that it is not private by default. A private currency has to be private by default, with the option to share info on the transaction—that's Monero.
Lightning is centralized, Chainalysis supports Lighning tracing—it does not support Monero tracing.
You could get the same advantages of Lightning on Bitcoin by making a layer-2 solution on Monero. Monero beats lightning at layer one.
Fees are not part of the technological stack, but the economics behind the providers you chose. Just as with the Internet, you can host your own webserver or datacenter at home and run your own AS in your bedroom. But most people chose to pay someone to do that. Right now regulation kills all sorts of crypto (Monero included) and drives up prices because it is mostly startups that provide services around that, and they are crushed by the paperwork.
pro: if the world devolves into an authoritarean hellscape, people will still have a form of undetectable currency until they find a way to get rid of this
con: this improves the chances if the world to devolving into an authoritarean hellscape
Please look into the benefits. Consider the upsides. I have considered the downsides. Try to understand the importance of Cash and private money and its role in a free society.
I get that you were swept up in that period when crypto got bashed left and right. I agree, there are a lot of problems with crypto and 99% of cryptos are scams, but Monero has a huge use case for internet money. Monero is creating whole new parallel economies[1] and protecting activists and everyday people that value privacy.
Visiting those linked websites, they feel sketchy. It seems they are offering gift cards and different pirated digital goods in exchange for Monero. Red flags all around.
Monero is a community project. There are no official websites, only community contributions and consensus. Sure, some sketchy sites are inevitably going to be listed on Monerica, but it lists which have been verified as working by the site owner, and they show reports of scams. Here[1] you can see a list of projects that accept Monero donations.
xmrbazaar allows only legal listings, it is by no means a DNM, but it is a free market. There are multi-sig wallets with mediators to prevent scamming by either party, and there is a reputation system.
Yeah, some of the boosted listings are for financial services; I see plenty of sketchy listings on FB marketplace.
Examples of normal listings: See these eggs[2], real estate[3], italian meat[4].
Privacy tools will be used in ethical and non-ethical ways. I get that it is annoying that crypto facilitates cybercrime, but that is the cost of privacy for everyone. Everyone gets those rights, because there is no other way. I will say that Monero is vastly used for ethical purposes[1].
I guess encryption shouldn't exist because cybercriminals use it to communicate privately. Privacy is a human right, and payments are essential to modern life.
Also, good luck on "crash and burn", Monero has been going steady, being the most freedom protecting crypto, for 12 years, celebrating its 12th birthday two days ago.
> Privacy tools will be used in ethical and non-ethical ways.
Monero is not a privacy tool. It's a criminal money laundering tool.
So far, the *coin ecosystem has given us nothing _but_ negatives. It's kinda unique in that regard.
> I guess encryption shouldn't exist because cybercriminals use it to communicate privately. Privacy is a human right, and payments are essential to modern life.
A tool should not be regulated based on what it can do. Regulating tools rather than the action or intention of a person or group is inherently backwards and wrong imo.
> A tool should not be regulated based on what it can do.
They should be regulated on their primary purpose in practice and the damage that they cause. And Monero is unwilling or unable to police itself, even as it does damage that dwarfs pretty much any other computing technology.
And not just nebulous "missed sale" damage, but very real damage that often results in dead people and ruined lives.
> Regulating tools rather than the action or intention of a person or group is inherently backwards and wrong imo.
We absolutely regulate tools that can inflict a disproportionate amount of damage. For example, I can't just buy high explosives even if I just want to do a cool video of me launching a manhole cover into the air. Or nuclear materials. Or surface-to-air missiles. Or....
> I get that it is annoying that crypto facilitates cybercrime, but that is the cost of privacy for everyone.
Who decided this, was 'everyone' consulted on what they'd rather have? Because it seems to me like cyber-criminals and a handful of idealists got what they wanted, and everyone else can suck it...
Who decided you can post this? Was 'everyone' consulted on what they'd rather you post? Because it seems like you and a handful of politicians posted ideas you wanted and everyone else can suck it...
I hope you see the absurdity of your 'everyone' claim.
I see the absurdity of claiming that something (in this case absolute financial privacy) is for the benefit of everyone and worth the costs without taking into account whether the tradeoff does actually benefit everyone, or if the price is something that most people, let alone everyone, would be willing to pay.
Because claiming cybercrime is a price that is worth it for everyone to have this privacy comes across a lot like Trump saying "Don't expect the US to fight your wars for you any more, you're welcome, ingrates" while waging an unnecessary war nobody else wanted.
Crypto makes cybercrime pay, without it collection would be almost impossible. The post I'm responding to argues that it is worth it. I disagree and think it's presumptuous to claim it has anything of a net benefit for society.
The idea that it doesn't make whole categories of crime profitable and therefore attractive, or that the impact is negligible, is not really supportable in a world with rampant cryptolockers and other crypto-currency enabled extortion.
Further, the appeal of this sort of financial privacy for non-criminal use is pretty limited. But you know all this, the alleged privacy benefits have been a talking point for many years now but in the end there's no real legit crypto use cases and still no real interest in crypto beyond crime and gambling.
I'll add some numbers to back up crypto—it is built on trustless numbers, unlike your fiat, after all.
Chainalysis's most recent report puts "illegal" activity at under 1% of total crypto transaction volume[1]. UNODC[2] estimates "The estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 - 5% of global GDP, or $800 billion - $2 trillion in current US dollars. Due to the clandestine nature of money-laundering, it is however difficult to estimate the total amount of money that goes through the laundering cycle."
HSBC[3], TD[4], Cred Suisse[5], and others have each been moving cartel, sanctioned, or Iranian money in sums that dwarf every ransomware payment ever made combined. If enabling "crime" disqualifies a payment method, then fiat loses in that comparison by more than an order of magnitude.
>Crypto makes cybercrime pay, without it collection would be almost impossible.
Ransomware predates Bitcoin by two decades. The AIDS Trojan in 1989 demanded a cashier's check to Panama. Pre-Bitcoin lockers like Reveton and Winlock collected via MoneyPak, Ukash, Paysafecard, and wire transfers.
>Further, the appeal of this sort of financial privacy for non-criminal use is pretty limited.
Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, which accepted crypto after Russia froze its banking. The Ukrainian government, which received over $100M in crypto donations in the first weeks of the 2022 invasion. WikiLeaks, after Visa/MC/PayPal blockaded it in 2010 with no court order. Nigerian #EndSARS protesters, whose bank accounts were frozen. Iranian, Argentine, Lebanese, and Venezuelan savers watching double-digit monthly inflation destroy their hard earned wages. Migrant workers send remittances home for ~1% instead of Western Union's 7–10%. Here[6] is a list of hundreds of Non-profits that accept Monero—because people want to be able to donate, privately. The FSF received[ a total of 900,000 USD in Monero donations in two large contributions just in this past year. GrapheneOS, which has employees across many continents, pays all but one of it's 10+ developers in cryptocurrency.
>no real interest in crypto beyond crime and gambling.
Besides pushing back on the idea that, "crime", without a specific definition of what is happening, is bad, XMRBazaar hosts over 8000 legal, trustless craigslist-style listings[7]. Eggs, real estate, italian meats. I'm shivering in my boots at all this Crime[1].
Some of your response is disingenous. Ransomware has been around a long time, certainly, but adding cryptocurrency payrails has made it far more prevalent, those other methods are much harder and riskier to execute well.
Other parts of your response are irrelevant and nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Because bad laws exist with regards to abortion and sexuality, we should disregard all laws, is that your argument?
And searching for people's experiences on XMR Bazaar is hilarious - "When looking at the platform's homepage statistics and browsing other listings, it seems like the vast majority of offers never see a single trade, even the interesting ones with Escrow enabled. There appear to be significantly more listings than actual completed orders."
So I'm not sure that's an argument for there being general interest in day to day use of cryptocurrency.
Lots of your other claims are easily dismissed - migrant workers are still not really using crypto for remittances, it's estimated at under 3% of the market, and is also rife with predictable problems - https://www.austrac.gov.au/news-and-media/media-release/aust...
There are some interesting edge cases in there, when it comes to Ukraine, certainly. But in general we appear to have the same handful of enthusiasts doing niche things, no general interest, and a lot of dodgy shit.
Fundamentally, I wonder what the rest of the on-chain transaction volume can be, because cryptocurrency has failed to go mainstream as a payment service over the course of 17 years now. Investment/speculation springs to mind as an obvious candidate, so we're effectively back to gambling by proxy at that point.
Monero has consistently exceeded the rest of crypto in community, integrity to mission, and use-case. True digital cash.
FCMP++ upgrade will be huge for sender privacy bringing Monero's technical strength in line with ZCash.
The new site[1] looks great as well; it was funded by the CCS.
[1] https://getmonero-redesign-impl.vercel.app/
Very awesome set of replies you’ve left in this thread. So nice to see.
I will be buying some Monero for the first time because of this thread.
I'm glad you gained something! Welcome to Monero!
Drop a Monero address here and I'll send you a tiny amount for your first transaction.
I recommend CakeWallet, which is cross-platform, user friendly, and does a lot of good for the community, but any of the wallets recommended on the official[1] website are fine.
p.s. you or anyone can reach out via my contacts in bio if you have any questions about Monero.
[1] https://cakewallet.com/
[2] https://www.getmonero.org/downloads/
I would actually recommend to just use a hardware wallet. The monero-cli or the Monero GUI-Wallet are sufficient. Just drop your wallet onto an USB stick with LUKS encryption. Get your recovery seed + wallet height written by hand and bury them somewhere in your garden, or your parents garden in safe box.
Drop me your address, and I will also send a little bit your way, to get you hooked!
Cypherpunks write code.
45nQZrXEDSL8UPj7DeJRrcdFkAteCajG4bGGsQP7cmWwiZU63dpfWe9RPpas38BAU4Kwv5NSKBsnacXewQszMhrx7fgTQLe
Your username does not match with the person the offer was made to. Please do not beg for money here.
Thank you for that offer, that's very kind of you.
My new address is
49jUau1t16ZPtBNFaJ2o5eW79x6Fui14AbqwQyovBe2V6LdwgWrHkniWTV9dj7tAY8SRxsshkmQEwLCBYUvPFEkZBJGZt6n
Where do you recommend trading dollars -> Monero?
KYC[1] methods are the easiest and what I recommend for everyone. I will only go into detail with KYC methods in this post.
A. Determine where you are. Are you in a jurisdiction that has CEXs[2] that allow you to purchase Monero with Fiat? If so, Continue to B; otheriwse, continue to C.
B. If you are in the USA/Country where you can buy Monero directly:
1. Open a Kraken[3] account. You will need to prove your identity through a service like Persona.
2. Send money into Kraken from your bank or credit card.
3. Purchase Monero on Kraken with your deposited funds.
4. 7-day hold and then you will be able to withdraw to your self-custody wallet.
Conclusion: You now own Monero. You have payed minimal fees. The government and entire financial system knows you have purchased Monero.
This may or may not be a concern depending on your threat model[4]. Many people overstate this threat—Monero is the 14th largest Cryptocurrency by market cap, it is not particularly suspicious to purchase it. It does not compromise your future Monero transactions—it is just like withdrawing cash from an ATM, the financial system and government know that you now hold cash, but what it is used for is opaque.
C. If you are not in the USA/are in a jurisdiction where you can't buy Monero directly:
1. Open an account on any KYC CEX, I recommend Kraken. You will need to prove your identity through a service like Persona.
2. Purchase any coin. I recommend Litecoin[5], but Bitcoin or anything works.
3. Create a self-custody wallet for Litecoin, I recommend CakeWallet.
4. Withdraw your Litecoin to CakeWallet.
5. Go to Trocador[6].
6. Create a swap from Litecoin to Monero.
7. Give Trocador one of your Monero addresses to send the converted Monero to.
8. Choose the exchange with the best fees/privacy to your liking (these change throughout the day).
9. Send your Litecoin from CakeWallet to the Litecoin address provided.
10. You will shortly receive Monero to the address you gave Trocador.
Conclusion: You now own Monero. You have payed a small amount of fees. Depending on the pervasiveness and intelligence of blockchain surveillance, the financial system and the government knows that you have purchased Monero, or has the ability to figure out that you have purchased Monero.
All your future transactions are anonymous. Remember, Monero is just patching one hole in making an anonymous transaction. It does not magically make you anonymous if any of these other things are not anonymous: OS, browser, IP address, identities, etc.
[1] Know-your-customer — they say it's to stop crime.
[2] Centralized Exchange
[3] As respected of a CEX as you will get. They support Monero while most other CEXs have removed it.
[4] https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/threat-modeling/
[5] Low fee POW (proof of work) crypto. The second crypto to be created after Bitcoin. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HDyfsemWoAAOLVM.jpg
[6] [https://trocador.app Highly reputable instant exchange aggregator. They do not touch your funds, they just aggregate other instant exchanges and provide a guarantee for no-KYC. Excellent customer support. You will pay about a 1% fee converting your crypto through an instant exchange. Instant exchanges are CEXs, but since they deal only in Crypto and not Fiat, they can afford to easily be no-KYC.
I used the Monero GUI wallet, but it has always historically got flagged as malware by Windows, which I'm sure puts a lot of people off.
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> regulatory and political challenges
Not bending down to the financial arm of warrantless global mass surveillance is a feature, not a bug.
> being tradeable on central exchanges
Central exchanges are banks in disguise. They should not exist.
A key feature of cash is its ability to pass through and into the KYC/AML panopticon where (edit: to make it clear what the "KYC/AML panopticon" meant -- after being deposited in a bank) you can buy things like real estate and heavy capital equipment. If you can't prove chain of custody of source of funds and source of wealth, you're effectively shut off from a wide amount of transactions.
At least in the West. If you go to someplace like Dubai it is no problem.
I'm confused
your argument is that Monero fails at doing a thing that cash also fails at, which is making large purchases without chain of custody/source of funds?
No my argument is Monero fails in practice relatively worse than similar 'weight class' crypto currency assets at actually spending 'digital cash' (presumably a desirable quality of 'cash') to make legal purchases from crypto accepting sellers. This is quite evident if you survey available offerings -- vendors are far more likely to accept even the lower cap litecoin than monero (even the 'cryptwerk' website advertised by getmonero shows 2x as many vedors accepting LTC).
I do postulate that the fact it is easier to show chain of custody to the point it satisfies banks and regulated entities as part of this (even if through chain-analysis mumbo jumbo), thus other crypto currencies have lent more towards accessing more purchases in a way cash idealizes to do.
At no point was my argument simply monero fails at the same thing a pile of cash dropped through the sky might fail at and that's the end of it. I think that's a pretty silly portrayal of what I've said, made in bad faith. Although in reality I've had my cex account frozen almost every single time I've tried depositing very low, 3 digit amounts of XMR (including frozen for years) whereas you can somewhat reliably put $200-$1000 in a bank in place like USA and then use that as part of purchase that goes through KYC/AML channels.
Now if you do want to compare, say, a pile of cash falling out of the sky, vs a pile of bitcoin, vs a pile of monero and you wanted to spend it on something big that went through KYC/AML compliance. In order of what would be easiest to spend, assuming the money actually came from a legal source. Bitcoin would be the easiest to spend because you have some chance at showing it came straight from a KYC'd source because of the plaintext blockchain, next would be cash (largely for historical reasons), the hardest to actually spend would be the monero. Now if we presume matheusmoreira point about banks was just a red herring, then your follow on is just one too, since the bit regarding KYC/AML compliance purchases/transactions was a response to that.
Right but isn't the point of Monero that once you have it, you don't have a public, immutable ledger of all subsequent transactions, just waiting there for when you become persona non grata to some entity with significant time or computational resources to fuck you?
The relevant similarity to (unbanked) cash is the post-facto privacy.
And yes, this feature does dramatically increase the KYC posture of institutions that need to be afraid of those same computation-rich entities, but obviously the point of the currency is you don't functionally need them the way you functionally need a bank to do anything similar with cash.
Most basic economics academic reviews show a few main qualities of cash[0][1].
(1)durability
(2)portability
(3)divisibility
(4) uniformity
(5) acceptability
(6) limited supply
Monero beats plaintext chain coins at uniformity, as BTC for example is non-fungible because there are tainted and non-tainted coins. Monero is truly fungible. It loses to even similar weight class coin at acceptability.
I suppose you can argue the gains in uniformity overcome the losses in acceptability. I'm not sure reality has bore that out if you actually want to use your cash. In practice BTC/LTC can shed their taint and public trail by being mixed and this seems to make up for this weakness enough for acceptance while still allowing a public chain for the last few transactions before it enters/leaves the KYC/AML panopticon, which is highly desirable for 'acceptability' (this is probably also why ZCash is far more easier to access than XMR, as it has a feature to disable anonymity so it can go to/from central exchanges and KYC/AML'd vendors).
Note: if you go to some cryptocurrency shilling website, you can find 'anonymity' as a trait, but this deviates from the more common definition.
[0] https://inomics.com/terms/characteristics-of-money-1545438 [1] https://illinoistreasurergovprod.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net...
You: "everybody is autistic but me!"
Also you: proceeds to rant about "heavy equipment," a beloved pastime of everyone, including the neurodivergent
I don't think what you are saying is that complicated honestly, but surely you see that, there can be many successful niches.
> A key feature of cash is its ability to pass through and into the KYC/AML panopticon where you can buy things like real estate and heavy capital equipment.
My country is in the process of criminalizing the purchase of real estate with cash. Laws have been proposed to that end. Politicians have also proposed restricting the amount of "unexplained" physical cash the population is "allowed" to hold.
This is your future if you don't resist.
> If you can't prove chain of custody of source of funds and source of wealth
You shouldn't have to "prove" anything. What a bunch of nonsense.
Cash would "fail horribly at meeting the regulatory and political challenges challenges today". And some countries are trying to make it harder to use.
Yes but fortunately we have other points of comparison and I was making a relative analysis. Legal vendors who take crypto are more likely to accept even the lower market cap LTC in most cases than XMR. XMR is one of the weakest performers as spending cash on legal goods and service amongst crypto assets of similar financial "weight class."
The technical superiority and features on many points seem to be unable to overcome this.
That's because anonymity is the entire point of Monero. Of course legal vendors don't like anonymity, every government wants to be able to track every transaction anywhere.
Saying Monero hasn't been able "to overcome this" is like saying boats have been unable to overcome driving on roads. Technically true, but very much not the point.
For business acceptance, I see how it would be hard if it is impossible to use on a CEX. I think that Haveno/RetoSwap will eventually become the preferred and more convenient Fiat-->Monero method instead of CEXs for the avg user.
Overall though I would even prefer to use a stable than a bank or fiat p2p app to send money.
>They've failed horribly at meeting the regulatory and political challenges of being tradeable on central exchanges and as a result has met weak acceptance from crypto-friendly legal vendors making it harder to use as actual digital cash.
Despite this, everywhere it is accepted, it becomes the largest marketshare crypto payment method, excluding whales.
Pardon, the “autistic” point of view?
In this case, I mean a narrowed focus (in this case, on technical qualities) to the point it is maladaptive for the underlying stated goal ("digital cash").
A survey of cryptocurrencies showed monero has failed to achieve this goal of being a superior form of digital cash, relative to most other crypto currencies in similar 'weight class' of market cap and years available. This failure isn't technical, it's due to relative weaknesses in the realms of politics and soft social influence. Even the lower market cap LTC is more accepted as 'cash' by most legal vendors.
-----------
re: below muh sources
getmonero.org, OPs referenced website, advertises cryptwerk as a good directory.
Go to https://cryptwerk.com/pay-with/xmr/ and compare it to https://cryptwerk.com/pay-with/ltc/.
There are ~twice as many for LTC for example, and that's being charitable with something with a lower market cap rather than BTC which is like 3+ times as many.
Do you have a source to back up this claim? There are thousands[1] of legal businesses that accept Monero.
[1] https://monerica.com, https://kycnot.me
(1) Go to the monero website you cited.[0]
(2) The top merchant directory recommended was 'cryptwerk'. Follow that through
(3) Compare https://cryptwerk.com/pay-with/xmr/ to https://cryptwerk.com/pay-with/ltc/.
(4) Note there are 2x vendor for lower market cap LTC, 3x as many for higher market cap BTC. Note this directory was chosen by monero people themselves, so I'm not cherry picking something gaming the merchant list against monero.
There is a pretty consistent survey of XMR performing weaker than similar class assets in spending at crypto accepting vendors. (Note I had to reply above earlier because my account was throttled)
[0] https://getmonero-redesign-impl.vercel.app/get-started/merch...
I had not paid any attention to Monero amid the storm of cryptocurrencies and related scams, but thanks to your recommendation here, I will be checking it outmn
Drop an address and I will send you a small amount for your first transaction.
> of being tradeable on central exchanges
That's a good signal that the privacy guarantees are real, no? It's no secret that the main use-case for crypto is skirting the legal system; I'm not sure I understand this desire to make it anything bigger than that. For example, it's extremely hard to Be Your Own Bank because one mistake means you've just lost all your funds whether it's from a scam, malware, or losing your wallet seed phrase. Large amounts of people "being their own bank" by putting their life savings into crypto would be a disaster.
What are they supposed to do? How can they make governments happy without sacrificing privacy?
Regulatory capture would be the traditional way
> How can they make governments happy
That's the wrong question. Nobody cares how the elites in the government feel. They exist to serve us. That is the only reason they have any power at all.
The right question is: how can we make it mathematically impossible for the government to oppress us in any way, regardless of how much they seethe and rage about it? Their happiness does not matter. In fact their anger is probably a good sign that the technology is working as intended. The angrier they get, the freer you are.
> The angrier they get, the freer you are.
The angrier they get, the higher is the chance that they make your technical solution illegal. What, you're using technology that might endanger children? All the concerned parents are suddenly your enemoies, democratically speaking. What? Your technology can be used to do money laundering? And you're using it still? You can now anonymously pay only darknet vendors and other shady bussinesses. Have your anonymity, but cut off from the rest of "good" society.
Given the original motivation to actually invent crypto, I am surprised it wasn't outlawed a long time ago. No goverment likes to be overthrown...
It's just the usual politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, people make technology that works around the laws in such a way that the government can do nothing about it.
Governments must continuously increase their tyranny in order to maintain the exact same level of control they used to have before. There are two possible outcomes: a free and uncontrollable population emancipated by ubiquitous subversive technology, or a totalitarian government so oppressive that even your concerned parents feel the weight of its boot on their faces.
It's my sincere hope that we'll discover the true limits of the government's tyranny in the process. The harsh truth is people need to accept the existence of some amount of crime if they want to live with basic human dignity. It's just like how the banking industry accepts some degree of fraud as a business expense. They could stamp it out, but the security requirements would add so much friction to everyday transactions nobody would buy anything.
[dead]
I'll echo the sentiment that Monero seems like the "best" cryptocurrency in that it has all of the benefits of Bitcoin + actual privacy.
And interestingly, it's one of the least-used least-hyped options. It's as though we didn't actually want privacy in our money system.
I think a hint into this is actually in one of these posted features: https://repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/me...
One of the reasons for building a proper payments system is "Casino games"...
It seems that many high-quality things (or otherwise aspirational things) take on Esperanto names (disclosure, I am an Esperantist). While Monero is no doubt a cool crypto-currency, it is even cooler that it has inspired some crypto-curious people to learn Esperanto[1] instead!
While I am here, I might as well give you a brief Esperanto lesson. Mono = money, ero = piece/quantum. So, "pano" = bread, "panero" = bread-crumb. Thus, "monero" = coin.
Many previous international currencies (all of them created with Swiss involvement), were also given Esperanto names: Spesmilo (thousand speso's (speso is analogous to "penny")), Stelo (star).
There is even a luxury watch-brand (from Switzerland) called "Movado", which is Esperanto for "Movement" (made back when watches were made with mechanical movements).
And I also learned, from the linked thread (disclosure, I am a participant), that there is a soft-drink called "Mirinda". This is an adjective that means "awe-worthy".
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Esperanto/comments/1sobiko/comment/...
> interestingly, it's one of the least-used least-hyped options. It's as though we didn't actually want privacy in our money system.
There is lots of interest from individuals. But governments all around the world have done their best to suppress it. They indeed do not like privacy and independence. They are the ones who sued and pressured exchanges into delisting Monero.
Its been made very difficult to actually buy it
You can go to an ATM and purchase a coin and use a DEX to convert almost instantly.
wouldn't that defeat the privacy purpose? wouldn't someone be able to see that it was your card in the ATM, when they traced back the monero as exchanged for a coin that was exchanged for your fiat?
ETA: just to be clear - that's a genuine question. I don't know much about monero, so if it really is possible to have untraceable money, that seems like a prudent investment for precaution. I've just always assumed that digital money is inherently traceable, so I always assumed genuine privacy is a mirage. I assume I'm wrong about that, somehow, so I'm curious about the mechanisms of that anonymity.
The DEX will likely leak the fact that you received the monero, but after that there is no more paper trail. So you can spend it as you like.
so would that be a feature of monero-to-monero transactions? I'm still confused as to how it would actually be anonymous? like if I used another coin to exchange for monero, that's obviously traceable. so then I use monero to purchase something else which I then sell for other monero (or I just trade monero directly? if that's possible?). and I'm to believe that there's no way to trace that back and say "okay, monero from wallet X was traded to wallet Y" or whatever other intermediate steps (like"monero was spent on X from wallet A, and then X was resold using monero from wallet B")? like, assuming they don't get in to my wallet, no one would be able to track down a transaction on the chain to a wallet? Or they would be able to track it to a wallet, but they couldn't tie that wallet to me for... some reason?
sorry to ask, but the website seems very light on any actual technical detail about how they are achieving their privacy claims - at least in terms I can parse to make them understandable to me.
The flagged post in reply to you is correct. Each transaction is buried in one time addresses and decoy addresses.
very cool, thanks! And since I can't respond to that poster, I'll say it here: thanks for that detailed answer! That definitely seems like a pretty anonymous system. I'm convinced that monero is a pretty private coin!
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There are many crypto ATMs that accept cash up to a transaction limit.
Monero is far more bloated than Bitcoin, paying a high price for its privacy features, most of which (no visible amount or address) can be had while making even Bitcoin look bloated [1].
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/grincoin/comments/mu88ow/comment/gv6...
> paying a high price
Monero's transaction fees are less than Bitcoin's:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-xmr...
And Monero's fees decrease with larger block sizes (Monero has dynamic block sizes) whereas Bitcoin has a fixed block size and fees must increase to compete to be included in the block.
I wasn't talking about fees, but about chain size, utxo set size, and code complexity. Fees are always low when blocks are far from full.
> when blocks are far from full.
And when they're not?
But Monero transactions confirm more quickly, the first confirmation usually takes just two or three minutes.
Part of the reason is that you can’t buy it on Coinbase.
Because of government pressure. It was delisted by lots of exchanges purely based on government fear of privacy and independence, not any technical or demand reasons.
The CEX that do list it, it is essentially a trap. As soon as you do something with XMR they start freezing your account and demanding all sorts of KYC/AML. That is my experience after playing with it by pulling out a couple hundred $ and doing nothing with it other than putting it back on an exchange.
Coinbase doesnt sell it which annoys me, but probably due to legal regulation I am sure. Its a shame too, I think its probably one of the most interesting cryptocurrencies.
Privacy is available in bitcoin as a layer-2 solution such as Lightning. When Trump made the popular and media-broadcast bitcoin transaction during his campaign, he did so over lightning. Privacy alone is thus not a big reason to abandon bitcoin and move over to another chain.
Monero needs to step up for quantum safety, not by replacing the existing encryption, but by adding a quantum safety encryption layer on top. Google's recent paper on quantum risks to cryptocurrencies had identified Monero as being at risk. This is not tomorrow's problem; it requires initiating action today, so these efforts can bear fruit by the time the quantum hardware is ready, perhaps by 2029.
All coins are aware of quantum safety requirements, yet quantum computers are still far enough in the future that it makes sense to wait, and first see what those post-quantum mitigations should look like.
Burying the head in the sand doesn't work. Quantum-safe algorithm candidates exist. Post-quantum cryptography is a bonafide field with families of algorithms that exist, e.g. lattice/hash/code/multivariate based. If a user has to choose between two cryptocurrencies, one of which is quantum safe and the other isn't, the user will choose the one that is. The ultimate choice of algorithm doesn't have to be finalized right now; that will remain a work in progress for decades, but getting there is not a one-hop journey.
For comparison, XRP already has a roadmap: https://cryptonews.com/news/ripple-post-quantum-readiness-xr...
Because XRP is not decentralized, it will be easy to upgrade. With bitcoin, you have to convinve the node runners to upgrade - which means the taken patchset must be sound and verified in depth beforehand.
We are on a Monero thread. It has scheduled forks.
None if the crypto currencies will survive the quantum apocalypse because all the people who can pull off the migration have long left.
I wouldn't worry since AI can do research, identify approaches, and implement them. The human of course needs to review every line with a critical eye, and compare the implementations against their academic specifications.
Yeah but then who does the audit if the humans are not capable? Should they all get mythos to review stuff?
Monero is what Bitcoin wanted to be
Monero has fixed inflation baked in, so no.
> fixed inflation
It looks like you're referring to the tail emission which solves the problem that Bitcoin has.
Also, it is a small fixed amount of "coins", so the actual inflation rate approaches zero.
I think your comment is what they call "F.U.D."
> which solves the problem that Bitcoin has
Which problem are you talking about? It being deflationary? You might not think it's a good idea, but it's not a problem if it's by design.
Once there are no more block rewards, Bitcoin will only rely on fees to incentivize miners.
So either fees will be expensive, or there won't be miners securing the blockchain.
Gotcha. Well it's by design, as Satoshi believed it not to be a problem. Only time will tell.
> so the actual inflation rate approaches zero.
Now THAT is FUD. Current annual inflation rate is 0.84191433% [0]. That is massive and not "approaches zero". The value of Monero over n-years thus approaches zero over time, for big enough n.
While that is a little under 1%, it is still inflation. The ECB targets on average 2% inflation (while before COVID the ECB targeted maximum of 2% - so actually close to the Monero inflation).
[0]: https://p2pool.io/tail.html
Thank you?
It looks like we have different definitions of "massive".
You also say it does not approach zero, but in the following sentence you do say it approaches zero.
I guess people need to decide if inflationary money is better or worse than deflationary money, and what amount of inflation is appropriate.
Personally, without too much thought: I think a monetary inflation rate should correlate with the population inflation rate, so that it's value remains somewhat constant (I'm open to changing this opinion with more information).
https://archive.is/Vhzng
They only fund friends and are quite sketchy so the CCS is not the best thing ever
Even if that was true. Are you saying that EVERYONE that gets funded was there from the start of Monero, 12 years ago, and is part of this secret club? Since that is obviously not true, if "they only fund friends", then I guess people must be able to make new friends.
Yeah, they make new friends too but yes its a secret and exclusive club.
Just look into cypherstack and the "paid" ccs employees.
All the people who get huge grants are insiders.
Would someone please explain to me the pros and cons of this existing?
The US Federal Government specifically calls out Monero as one of the coins that it hates, which means that it must be quite effective at achieving its goals. So the pro is that you know it works. The cons are nothing specific to Monero, just general criticism of cryptocurrencies. Not being a deep crypto user myself, at least, I haven't heard anyone speak of any flaw specific to Monero that isn't shared by a significant portion of the remainder of all of these coins
One admittedly minor issue is that since monero is ASIC resistant, its very attractive to run on compromised computers. Other coins suffer this as well I'm sure, but I don't have any data on this. I guess this is mainly a hunch.
> The US Federal Government specifically calls out Monero as one of the coins that it hates, which means that it must be quite effective at achieving its goals. So the pro is that you know it works.
Official condemnation doesn't work like that. Facebook's cryptocurrency, Libra, was also condemned, and we know it didn't work because it never actually existed.
Do you already know how a regular Cryptocurrency works and want to know about Monero specifically? Or do you not know anything about Crypto?
I am very aware of cryptocurrency, some of the intricacies, and possibly most of the use cases.
I asked an honest question about the pros and cons. Every technology has pros and cons, right?
Monero is the most anonymous of the mainstream cryptocurrencies. That's also the reason why it is increasingly outlawed (at least in the EU).
Which is its biggest weakness. Lightning over Bitcoin is decently anonymous, too. Given that is just a layer-2 technology and can be developed further and evolutes outside of Bitcoin protocol changes, makes it more flexible and has shorter innovation cycles.
And outlawing bitcoin has become basically impossible after the large amount of ETF inflows. Monero is nice technology, but I think the ship has already sailed for Bitcoin (and L2 solutions like lightning).
> decently anonymous
"decently"?
It's either anonymous or not.
And the lightning node operator can see the transactions, so no, it's not anonymous.
Anonymity is not binary 0 or 1. There is a difference in there is a one-in-a-million chance that you made a payment, is not the same as there is a one-in-three chance you did the payment. You can define anonymity to be a one-in-a-billion chance, and all lower odds as "not anonymous". But that is not applicable in the real world.
> Anonymity is not binary 0 or 1
I disagree. Either someone is known or they are not known.
Isn´t the experiment in El Salvador proof that Bitcoin does not work as a currency? If you think it isn't, then do you have any measurable pass/fail test for it?
El Salvador is the worst example, as they have been bribed by the IMF to get rid of bitcoin. I would also wan't to learn how the situation in El Salvador would be any different if they adopted Monero instead - I think it would be the same outcode.
I am not a bitcoin-as-currency evangelist. I see it more as digital gold, and gold is not a currency today. It will have its role as a store of value and fallback unit of trade that keeps government currencies in check - another pillar in financial checks-and-balances.
> El Salvador is the worst example, as they have been bribed by the IMF to get rid of bitcoin.
So the 'true cryptocurrency' hasn't been tried yet, eh? ;)
That was not my argument at all. First I said, I don't see bitcoin as currency at all. Second, major nation states have always tryed to use their power to force other nations to use their currency (petrodollar, cough). This is nothing specific to crypto, but something also specific to traditional fiat currencies.
Any high-volatile asset such as bitcoin is IMHO not suited as currency. The good news is, with the bitcoin taproot upgrade and latest lightning standards, you can actually issue stablecoins over bitcoin's taproot asset protocol, and send it over the existing lightning network. My bet is on stablecoins-over-lightning as currency, and bitcoin as store of value. One blockchain to rule them all, other chains not need (for financial transactions at least).
Bitcoin takes to long to settle, and whilst its settling will need some sort of escrow service to take the risk out for small retailers and consumers.
Plus the global transaction rate would also stop it really being useful for day to day spending for a country.
You replied to me but did not address lightninng. Lightning settles instantly. And you DO transfer bitcoin.
> And you DO transfer bitcoin.
No, Layer-2 systems only transfer cryptographically signed IOUs between nodes.
Settlement only happens when these IOUs are cashed out, and to cash out you need a transaction in the blockchain layer, so the point about latency still stands.
It is as much an IOU as the US Dollar was pre-1971. That is a pretty good image for Lightning/Bitcoins relationship. Lightning is the dollar with a guarantee that you can convert it to gold anytime you like by presenting it at the central bank. Very few people ever converted their USD to the underlying gold as a settlement transaction. The difference with lightning is, the government can't just rug-pull you and stop exchanging those paper bill IOUs - it is cryptograhpically secured that you can always convert to bitcoin. Since no one would consider exchaging dollars as settling in gold, lightning settlement is not tied to on-chain transactions.
Payment channels are possible on other networks as well. Once again, there is no inherent advantage to Bitcoin here. I know because I worked on one (https://raiden.network/). I also dealt with many of its failure modes:
But more than anything: people do not want to use crypto for payments. It gives them no significant advantage over traditional credit/debit cards, it has no built-in solution for appeals or reversals and it forces them to learn a bunch of stuff to be minimally safe...> Payment channels are possible on other networks as well
you are moving the goalpost in the discussion of this thread. User KaierPro said bitcoin would not be suitable because transactions takes to long, to which is responded lightning solves that. Now claiming that other cryptos can have layers-2 is correct, but adds nothing to the discussion or my initial point. Yes other chains have faster settlement times, and can have their respective payment channels - no one argued against that.
> which is responded lightning solves that
Theoretically.
In practice, it has shown that it is only viable if adoption by number of nodes and TVL grew by orders of magnitude, and both are very unlikely to happen because - like I said - spenders have nothing to gain from it and no matter how much of the UX friction is solved, it will never be as easy as paying with credit card.
The only people who want to use Lightning are the ones who are invested in Bitcoin. Everyone else just want simple/safe access to a payment network.
You are just moving the goalpost again, without adding to the discussion. If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same. Nothing to do with my initial point which was comparing lightning/bitcoin to monero.
> If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same.
Most spenders will prefer credit cards, but there is a non-zero group where absolute privacy is important and monero is the better choice, therefore more valuable to them.
You are the one trying to make some false equivalency by saying that "bitcoin/lightning is good enough for most cases, therefore there is no need for monero".
The problem is that you are starting with the conclusion that you want (i.e, "Bitcoin is the best") and you are working backwards from this conclusion to make all sorts of rationalizations. Try going from the use case first and then let's see where the reasoning takes you. You will see that for pretty much ANY use-case, Bitcoin is not the answer.
It is splitting words. There is a settlement layer in lightning, which is presenting the preimage and unpeeling the onion HLTCs in reverse order. This happens at the latency of the network path, so usually less than a second. Bitcoin settling is usually tied to confirmation in the block, which lasts ~10minutes. Lightning might be IOUs, but ones that are fungible themselves and not tied to a specific debtor. Actual lightning-to-bitcoin cashout would probably not happen for everyday use, or at least not more often than you change bankaccounts in todays terms.
That's intellectually dishonest. It's like saying wire transfers or card payments are only valid after interbank settlements are finalized.
Bitcoin Lightning is cryptographically designed to be valid even if it's not yet settled on the main layer. It provides cryptographically sound mechanisms to overrule anyone that tries to "cheat". There is no mathematical way to cancel or double spend it, just like your dollars are valid when the transaction is committed in your bank's database although the money still technically hasn't left the other bank.
There are plenty of failure modes where you can lose your funds even if your wallet keys are not compromised. Try running a lightning node, make transactions worth more than a few hundred dollars and then leave your node offline for a few days. Or even more simply: ask yourself what happens to your funds if the disk on your lightning node goes bust and you don't have a recent backup.
THis is the issue, until its settled in the chain, then you are down to trusting the 2nd layer.
Anything offchain has a whole bunch of issues that are either naively or deliberately obscured by the fact that it _eventually_ writes to the blockchain. The exchanges that offer instant settlement are circumventing trust by doing the settlement for you. You get speed, but not security that they have done what they have said they have.
Well, to be fair to OP: small business and retailers are also not getting "real" money when they accept payment via credit cards from Visa/MasterCard.
To be honest I think the issue here is not due to speed of settlement, but layer-2 is not an acceptable substitute because it does not allow reversability. For the merchants it's good that they are getting the money right away, but most consumers will not dare to pay anything via layer-2 networks simply because they won't have any recourse in case they want to undo the transaction.
You can implement reverseability with a credit system, such as Visa/Mastercard. It should not be implemented in base layer or layer-2. It is basically an escrow system.
So now you are proposing to build yet-another piece to an already complex system just so we can justify the existence of your beloved blockchain in the first place.
How long it's going to take you to realize that even if we built everything you are asking for, we are STILL going to end up with a system that is not as capital-efficient as the status quo?
This is just untrue. If someone cheats in lightning, and you demonstrate they cheated as you describe, then you get all of the locked BTC as a reward. This is on layer 1. Essentially you can easily prove your nonce was signed more recently.
> they have been bribed by the IMF to get rid of bitcoin
And the US government is being bribed by Silicon Valley to adopt crypto...
> I am not a bitcoin-as-currency evangelist
Then why all the talk about Lighning and the dismissal of Monero?
Because lightning uses Bitcoin's blockchain, which is the most secured (as in energy) and the most common (as in market cap) and probably the most accepted as in regulation. Plus, you can use bitcoins taproot asset protocol to issue stablecoins and send them over lightning. No other blockchain needed - which in my opinion, renders monero obsolete or at least a very niche product.
- Lightning is not fully anonymous. It can still be traced by the participating nodes.
- Ethereum's blockchain consumes less energy, is more decentralized, it's a lot more resistent to any form of attack and it can also host fixed-supply coins.
- Market cap is a meaningless metric, it's at best circular logic and at worst it's just a "one billion flies can't be wrong" argumentum ad populum.
- It baffles me how the Bitcoin enthusiasts talk so much about ideology and freedom, but get completely silent about the fact that most mining operations are done in countries with oppressive regimes, financed or subsidized by dictators with access to cheap fossil fuels.
> Lightning is not fully anonymous. It can still be traced by the participating nodes.
"Fully anonymous" is a strong term. Even cash is not fully anonymous. I would give monero that it is more anonymous than lightning because it is a core design principal. There is a spectrum to anonymity, however. As public enemy number one, such as Snowden or BinLaden, your anonymity requirements are different than a citizen buying illegal erectile dysfunction medication online.
If you consider the new features added in lightning over the past 24 months such as trampoline payments, blinded paths etc. - you will find that lightning is anonymous enough. Plus, you can increase anonymity in the client implementation at the expense of higher transaction fees (longer paths, more trampolines). Lightning's BOLT12 standard, which is currently finalized, will increase anonymity even further.
> Ethereum's blockchain consumes less energy, is more decentralized, it's a lot more resistent to any form of attack and it can also host fixed-supply coins.
Thats is factually untrue. First, ethereum famously had a human-coordinated rollback with a controlled restart organized between devs and node runners over Discord. Second, Ethereum is not decentralzied at all, because that is a core property of proof-of-stake: There is no way at any given time that you can be sure that the majority stake is not already in a single entities (or colluding group) possesion - and would thus have absolute control. It is therefore never guaranteed at any given time, that the network is decentralized.
> Market cap is a meaningless metric, it's at best circular logic and at worst it's just a "one billion flies can't be wrong" argumentum ad populum.
Price is ultimately what determines the value of anything. It is absolutely far from meaningless, as the market cap is also a big factor if a crypto asset can be outlawed or banned. Given how many investors in the west already own bitcoin, there would be a massive outcry if it is suddenly outlawed. I say you could outlaw Monero tomorrow and the mainstream media wouldn't even cover it.
> It baffles me how the Bitcoin enthusiasts talk so much about ideology and freedom, but get completely silent about the fact that most mining operations are done in countries with oppressive regimes, financed or subsidized by dictators with access to cheap fossil fuels.
You mean, such as the United States? Because the US (especially Texas) is one of the biggest miners of bitcoin currently.
> There is a spectrum to anonymity, however.
But you can only make any claims about the properties of a system when looking at the extremes. If Bitcoin's blockchain does not make strong anonymity guarantees as Monero, then Bitcoin by definition can not be the "blockchain to rule them all" that you so desperately want.
>ethereum famously had a human-coordinated rollback with a controlled restart organized between devs and node runners over Discord.
That was achieved through social coordination. No backdoor was exploited, no one had their coins stolen on the original chain. The system worked as intended.
Can you say the same about Bitcoin? Do you think that all these banks and exchanges trading ETFs have secured access to the bitcoins they claim to have? When one of these institutions goes bust, who is going to bail them out?
You keep trying to argue that Bitcoin is more valuable because it is more likely to be supported by the powers-that-be, and that is the strongest indicator that all your evangelism is driven by "Greater Fool" dynamic. Satoshi's idea for crytocurrencies was to have an alternative system that worked despite adversarial governments, yet we keep getting time-and-again evidence that it can only work if it becomes of an instrument for the powerful institutions that caused the problems in the first place.
Bitcoin and its blockchain has no intrinsic value. Unlike Monero, it is not fully anonymous. Unlike Ethereum, it has no utility for decentralized applications. It can not be used as a currency. All Bitcoin has is first-mover advantage and a huge number of people with cognitive dissonance trying to keep the bubble inflated.
> Because the US (especially Texas) is one of the biggest miners of bitcoin currently.
Access to cheap fossil fuels? Check.
Facilitated by the government? Check!
Serving the interests of the elites and the aspirational 14% instead of the general populace? Check!
Maybe I did not state my orinignal question correctly.
What are the pros of Monero, and what are the cons?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pros_and_cons
Really up to you personally what is a pro and a con. For me this is a starting list. A lot of these are a result of the technical differences as well as I listed the technical differences.
Pros:
1% inflation
no fixed supply (makes it more of a currency than an asset)
privacy by default,
fungibility—every coin is the exact same, no coin history
prevents financial surveillance by corporations,
protects against government abuses,
useful tool for activists, journalists, minorities, useful for domestic abuse survivors,
useful for businesses sending money across borders,
protects against stalkers,
protects against advertisers profiling you,
reduces identity theft,
prevents databreaches of personal info,
pushes forward cryptography,
allows people to purchase drugs (you decide if this is good or bad),
prevents financial censorship,
allows anonymous donations,
low fees,
more decentralized than bitcoin due to RandomX CPU mining,
prevents crypto robbery,
allows you to buy your adult content without anyone knowing.
large developer community iirc 3rd after bitcoin, eth
less volatile than other cryptos
usually most used crypto for payments when accepted at merchants
Cons:
20 minutes to use funds again
hard to aquire
number go up slower
hard to convert back to fiat
hard to convert to fiat
used by "criminals"
lots of nazis like it
used for unethical purposes
All of the pros - minus the inflation - also exist for Bitcoin-over-Lightning. Non of the cons exist for Lightning. Especially no waiting time. In lightning you can spend your received bitcoin after a split-second - no waiting whatsoever.
I had a terrible experience trying out Lightning. Could you tell me where I went wrong? I hit high fees converting to Lightning, and I hit high fees sending Lightning transactions.
The problem with Lightning or Zcash is that it is not private by default. A private currency has to be private by default, with the option to share info on the transaction—that's Monero.
Lightning is centralized, Chainalysis supports Lighning tracing—it does not support Monero tracing.
You could get the same advantages of Lightning on Bitcoin by making a layer-2 solution on Monero. Monero beats lightning at layer one.
Fees are not part of the technological stack, but the economics behind the providers you chose. Just as with the Internet, you can host your own webserver or datacenter at home and run your own AS in your bedroom. But most people chose to pay someone to do that. Right now regulation kills all sorts of crypto (Monero included) and drives up prices because it is mostly startups that provide services around that, and they are crushed by the paperwork.
> no waiting time
apart from waiting for the confirmation, otherwise you're in double spend territory.
what you says applies to bitcoin onchain, but not lightning. Lightning settles instantly.
pro: if the world devolves into an authoritarean hellscape, people will still have a form of undetectable currency until they find a way to get rid of this
con: this improves the chances if the world to devolving into an authoritarean hellscape
Moreso than controllable, trackable money helps the world devolve "into an authoritarean hellscape"?
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Monero is the only real CRYPTO currency.
Please look into the benefits. Consider the upsides. I have considered the downsides. Try to understand the importance of Cash and private money and its role in a free society.
I get that you were swept up in that period when crypto got bashed left and right. I agree, there are a lot of problems with crypto and 99% of cryptos are scams, but Monero has a huge use case for internet money. Monero is creating whole new parallel economies[1] and protecting activists and everyday people that value privacy.
[1] https://xmrbazaar.com/, https://monerica.com/
Visiting those linked websites, they feel sketchy. It seems they are offering gift cards and different pirated digital goods in exchange for Monero. Red flags all around.
Monero is a community project. There are no official websites, only community contributions and consensus. Sure, some sketchy sites are inevitably going to be listed on Monerica, but it lists which have been verified as working by the site owner, and they show reports of scams. Here[1] you can see a list of projects that accept Monero donations.
xmrbazaar allows only legal listings, it is by no means a DNM, but it is a free market. There are multi-sig wallets with mediators to prevent scamming by either party, and there is a reputation system.
Yeah, some of the boosted listings are for financial services; I see plenty of sketchy listings on FB marketplace.
Examples of normal listings: See these eggs[2], real estate[3], italian meat[4].
[1] https://monerica.com/non-profits
[2] https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/yWKK/
[3] https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/kAEU/
[4] https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/cdpN/
I think it's philosophically closest to Satoshis dream
Monero is the only real "private" way to send money to another party. And there is demand for that, so yes still a thing.
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Privacy tools will be used in ethical and non-ethical ways. I get that it is annoying that crypto facilitates cybercrime, but that is the cost of privacy for everyone. Everyone gets those rights, because there is no other way. I will say that Monero is vastly used for ethical purposes[1].
I guess encryption shouldn't exist because cybercriminals use it to communicate privately. Privacy is a human right, and payments are essential to modern life.
Also, good luck on "crash and burn", Monero has been going steady, being the most freedom protecting crypto, for 12 years, celebrating its 12th birthday two days ago.
[1] My emotional reaction to your comment, https://xmrbazaar.com/, https://monerica.com/
> Privacy tools will be used in ethical and non-ethical ways.
Monero is not a privacy tool. It's a criminal money laundering tool.
So far, the *coin ecosystem has given us nothing _but_ negatives. It's kinda unique in that regard.
> I guess encryption shouldn't exist because cybercriminals use it to communicate privately. Privacy is a human right, and payments are essential to modern life.
Privacy is, money laundering isn't.
A tool should not be regulated based on what it can do. Regulating tools rather than the action or intention of a person or group is inherently backwards and wrong imo.
> A tool should not be regulated based on what it can do.
They should be regulated on their primary purpose in practice and the damage that they cause. And Monero is unwilling or unable to police itself, even as it does damage that dwarfs pretty much any other computing technology.
And not just nebulous "missed sale" damage, but very real damage that often results in dead people and ruined lives.
> Regulating tools rather than the action or intention of a person or group is inherently backwards and wrong imo.
We absolutely regulate tools that can inflict a disproportionate amount of damage. For example, I can't just buy high explosives even if I just want to do a cool video of me launching a manhole cover into the air. Or nuclear materials. Or surface-to-air missiles. Or....
How is monero not a privacy tool?
> I get that it is annoying that crypto facilitates cybercrime, but that is the cost of privacy for everyone.
Who decided this, was 'everyone' consulted on what they'd rather have? Because it seems to me like cyber-criminals and a handful of idealists got what they wanted, and everyone else can suck it...
Who decided you can post this? Was 'everyone' consulted on what they'd rather you post? Because it seems like you and a handful of politicians posted ideas you wanted and everyone else can suck it...
I hope you see the absurdity of your 'everyone' claim.
I see the absurdity of claiming that something (in this case absolute financial privacy) is for the benefit of everyone and worth the costs without taking into account whether the tradeoff does actually benefit everyone, or if the price is something that most people, let alone everyone, would be willing to pay.
Because claiming cybercrime is a price that is worth it for everyone to have this privacy comes across a lot like Trump saying "Don't expect the US to fight your wars for you any more, you're welcome, ingrates" while waging an unnecessary war nobody else wanted.
The vast, vast majority of "criminal" money goes through fiat banking, not crypto. Crypto makes privacy and freedom accessible to regular people.
Crypto makes cybercrime pay, without it collection would be almost impossible. The post I'm responding to argues that it is worth it. I disagree and think it's presumptuous to claim it has anything of a net benefit for society.
The idea that it doesn't make whole categories of crime profitable and therefore attractive, or that the impact is negligible, is not really supportable in a world with rampant cryptolockers and other crypto-currency enabled extortion.
Further, the appeal of this sort of financial privacy for non-criminal use is pretty limited. But you know all this, the alleged privacy benefits have been a talking point for many years now but in the end there's no real legit crypto use cases and still no real interest in crypto beyond crime and gambling.
I'll add some numbers to back up crypto—it is built on trustless numbers, unlike your fiat, after all.
Chainalysis's most recent report puts "illegal" activity at under 1% of total crypto transaction volume[1]. UNODC[2] estimates "The estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 - 5% of global GDP, or $800 billion - $2 trillion in current US dollars. Due to the clandestine nature of money-laundering, it is however difficult to estimate the total amount of money that goes through the laundering cycle."
HSBC[3], TD[4], Cred Suisse[5], and others have each been moving cartel, sanctioned, or Iranian money in sums that dwarf every ransomware payment ever made combined. If enabling "crime" disqualifies a payment method, then fiat loses in that comparison by more than an order of magnitude.
>Crypto makes cybercrime pay, without it collection would be almost impossible.
Ransomware predates Bitcoin by two decades. The AIDS Trojan in 1989 demanded a cashier's check to Panama. Pre-Bitcoin lockers like Reveton and Winlock collected via MoneyPak, Ukash, Paysafecard, and wire transfers.
>Further, the appeal of this sort of financial privacy for non-criminal use is pretty limited.
Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, which accepted crypto after Russia froze its banking. The Ukrainian government, which received over $100M in crypto donations in the first weeks of the 2022 invasion. WikiLeaks, after Visa/MC/PayPal blockaded it in 2010 with no court order. Nigerian #EndSARS protesters, whose bank accounts were frozen. Iranian, Argentine, Lebanese, and Venezuelan savers watching double-digit monthly inflation destroy their hard earned wages. Migrant workers send remittances home for ~1% instead of Western Union's 7–10%. Here[6] is a list of hundreds of Non-profits that accept Monero—because people want to be able to donate, privately. The FSF received[ a total of 900,000 USD in Monero donations in two large contributions just in this past year. GrapheneOS, which has employees across many continents, pays all but one of it's 10+ developers in cryptocurrency.
>no real interest in crypto beyond crime and gambling.
Besides pushing back on the idea that, "crime", without a specific definition of what is happening, is bad, XMRBazaar hosts over 8000 legal, trustless craigslist-style listings[7]. Eggs, real estate, italian meats. I'm shivering in my boots at all this Crime[1].
[1] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2026-crypto-crime-report-in...
[2] https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.htm...
[3] HSBC: https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...
[4] TD: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c153d14vqwyo
[5] Credit Suisse: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/credit-suisse-agrees...
[6] https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-h...
[7] https://monerica.com/non-profits/page/2
[8]https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/yWKK/, https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/kAEU/, https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/cdpN/
Ah, "Crime", it irks us so much.
Gay people need to respect the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminalization_of_homosexuali...
Women need to respect the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law_in_the_United_Sta...
But legal things like Flock Cameras, Mass surveillence, civil-asset forfeiture. All these things should be protected.
Some of your response is disingenous. Ransomware has been around a long time, certainly, but adding cryptocurrency payrails has made it far more prevalent, those other methods are much harder and riskier to execute well.
Other parts of your response are irrelevant and nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Because bad laws exist with regards to abortion and sexuality, we should disregard all laws, is that your argument?
And searching for people's experiences on XMR Bazaar is hilarious - "When looking at the platform's homepage statistics and browsing other listings, it seems like the vast majority of offers never see a single trade, even the interesting ones with Escrow enabled. There appear to be significantly more listings than actual completed orders."
So I'm not sure that's an argument for there being general interest in day to day use of cryptocurrency.
Lots of your other claims are easily dismissed - migrant workers are still not really using crypto for remittances, it's estimated at under 3% of the market, and is also rife with predictable problems - https://www.austrac.gov.au/news-and-media/media-release/aust...
There are some interesting edge cases in there, when it comes to Ukraine, certainly. But in general we appear to have the same handful of enthusiasts doing niche things, no general interest, and a lot of dodgy shit.
Fundamentally, I wonder what the rest of the on-chain transaction volume can be, because cryptocurrency has failed to go mainstream as a payment service over the course of 17 years now. Investment/speculation springs to mind as an obvious candidate, so we're effectively back to gambling by proxy at that point.
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Right, because if we can trust centralized control, we can't trust anything. Bring on the social credit!
Like they banned music and movie pirating?