Bitcoin is totally useless as a currency because it’s slow, has high transaction fees, and easy to trace. So it’s bad for both regular consumers and criminals alike.
Monero is a solid improvement because it has low fees (so far) and is very hard to trace. So it’s popular for criminals or intense privacy types. It’s still far too slow and hard to use to ever be accepted in your local grocery store. It’s also hard to buy with fiat because most exchanges are scared of it.
What’s really remarkable is how little any of this has changed since ~2016 which was two crypto boom cycles ago. Every single popular cryptocurrency still has the same massive flaws. They’re all either too traceable, too hard to use, too centralized, too slow, too expensive, or too energy intensive. Most of them are many of those things.
In 2010 I was a crypto believer. But the whole space has made so little forward progress in 10+ years. In fact there’s been a lot of backwards progress. Mostly all that’s happened is a lot of people have become obscenely rich from speculation, scams, or the intersection of those two things.
Those of us who hoped for a new way to pay for things in real life are still waiting.
Regarding the speed, many believe that instant / unconfirmed transactions are safe for day to day activities up to 10000USD. It's very difficult to double spend or inject numerous conflicting malicious transactions in hopes that the victim sees a legitimate transaction but a fraudulent transaction gets mined.
Regarding the ease of use, have you tried featherwallet.org or mymonero.com for mobile?
You are correct on the Bitcoin-is-easy-to-trace point but transactions in the Bitcoin Lightning Network are instant and very cheap.
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with guaranteed-not-to-change monetary policy and supply cap. That's because Bitcoin as a whole is uniquely hard to change.
Monero is great but easy to change and so not a reliable store of value.
>> Bitcoin is totally useless as a currency because it’s slow, has high transaction fees...
No longer true for slow and high transaction fees, after the lightning network. With the lightning network, it is FAST and much LESS transaction fees.
Oh, and the lightning network is no longer a pipe-dream. It is here and actively in use. If you sincerely want to try it, try using the Breez wallet https://breez.technology/
I'm not really happy promoting a cryptocurrency these days, given that most of them are get-rich-quick schemes, but Monero has been solid for the past 5-6 years that I've been using it. It's completely anonymous, sends quickly, has minimal fees, and it hasn't been as full of cultists as some of the other coins I've seen.
I use it to pay for some things and it's always a pleasant experience. I recommend it. The only downside is that, due to the anonymity, the clients aren't as convenient (because the server can't know your transactions, it's hard to have "light clients").
It's hard to have a light Monero client, because it has to have some data indexed about all past transactions, whereas a Bitcoin client only needs to maintain the MUCH smaller UTXO set, i.e. the unspent transaction outputs.
This is one of the ways in which Monero scales poorly.
Another problem is that Monero's PoW is expensive to verify where a good PoW should be instantly verifiable. In fact, it's considered so expensive that by default, the Monero client uses a checkpoint block without verifying all the PoW that led to the block.
Monero is one of the truly useful coins and perversely one of the worst performing coins price-wise. There is a horrible lesson in there somewhere about hype and endless promises and markets.
> I'm not really happy promoting a cryptocurrency these days, given that most of them are get-rich-quick schemes
I can't agree with that sentiment at all. Sure, there a those schemes, but most of the time they are easy to spot. If you have a look at the top 50 coins on CMC [0], you will find mostly solid projects that have large ecosystems with much brainpower locked in.
My fear with strongly anonymous DeFi is indirectly harming the environment and supporting crime. Sadly doesn't look like Monero resolve these concerns.
For those that may not be familiar, the relatively strong anonymity on Monero is via a cryptographic mechanism known as "ring signatures". Separate from cryptocurrency they are a useful cryptographic technique for many things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature
GNU Taler is (for Europeans at least) the most promising system, because it is controllable (at least on the merchant side).
The users themself are anonymous, just like when using cash!
That is a good system because it enables governments to still being able to tax businesses and control illegal activities. Such system will also gain more acceptance among the common folks.
When you develop a value exchange that is perfectly designed for facilitating human kidnappings and subverting international sanctions, you should not be surprised when other humans decide they value institutions over this level of personal privacy.
The narrative that this type of value exchange will protect people is as easily argued that it will put others at risk. We have institutions for a reason, and nobody living in a free country should desire such an absurdly dangerous means of value exchange.
At least when you exchange physical currency, it's actually physically difficult for a kidnapper or bank robber to handle the actually physical volume of $1M.
Well, paper money is also used for crime. In fact, illegal uses of paper currency are so common, U.S. authorities commonly seize cash from civilians deemed to be carrying too much of it!
In light of this - I think it's rational to remove paper currency from circulation and to move to a digital system where every transaction is tracked to a real person. This could be as simple as using existing banking structures, or maybe some sort of cryptographically-secure, immutable ledger of some sort, tying every transaction back to a real person. Almost like a centralized, managed "block chain".
There is one problem: freedom is necessarily also freedom for people you don't like. There's no way to make living free for good guys, and limited for bad guys. Limiting things for bad guys, you also limit them for everyone — hopefully to a lesser extent. By putting a lock on your door so that a burglar won't enter, you also prevent your friends from entering.
There is a certain balance of downsides and upsides of limitations on freedom. If you move the "safety" knob all the way to maximum, you will get a high security prison with creature comforts. Indeed, being watched and tracked at all times, and limited in what you do and where you go, you can definitely be kept out of the harm's way. If you like the motion towards this, welcome to mainland China. (If you want an antidote, re-read the Brave New World.)
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, that is, liberty is a somehow unsafe condition, else vigilance won't be needed. Some people prefer certain upsides of liberty more than certain upsides of safety. Such people founded the U.S., and it still shows here and there. (Not much, of course.)
These are good points, but they all go away if the crimes you're most worried about are the ones being committed by the people who run your institutions.
Those institutions that are supposed to protect us are systematically stealing from us without due process via civil forfeiture, and they're doing it on a scale that outweighs all burglaries nationwide.
You shouldn't be surprised when Americans value privacy over institutions. Our institutions are more criminal than our criminals.
How can anyone think this is a good thing? At least other crypto projects have a degree of transparency going for them.
I don't understand how people can possibly think that identity obfuscation at scale is a good thing for a financial system. The rule of law and democracy are far from perfect, but it is unquestionably the safest, cushiest time to be alive in human history right now for the average human being.
Let's make our financial system completely opaque and make it impossible to enforce laws. That'll really help us!
This is a blindness that can only come from a lifetime of extreme privilege.
Monero sounds great as a starting point since it can theoretically mimic an in-person cash exchange as far as anonymity is concerned. But to encourage adoption we need to be able to do more than that.
Is it possible to design a "chargeback" mechanism on top of monero? What if I want the ability to allow an intermediary to arbitrate a dispute between me and the other party?
Finality is usually considered a feature of blockchains, not a bug. Chargebacks work on networks like Visa and Mastercard because we trust the network (visa) to step in arbitrate disagreements, but there's no central actor here.
There’s no reason that intermediaries couldn’t be used. But it wouldn’t be part of the actual core tech. There should be multiple options for such things as well. All competing for better service.
I'd be curious to hear from Monero fans why one might select it over Zcash? Zcash seems to have stronger security guarantees when shielded transactions are used.
How will you find and maintain experts who are convinced of the greatness of some investments, but refuse to invest, because they want to remain impartial? I think your demands are unrealistic.
Also, you could just as well consider it a positive signal (putting money where their mouth is).
I guess even better would be posting a proof of ownership. Not sure if that would be possible with Monero, but it would be possible with Bitcoin.
Monero shines bright in a world where privacy is constantly being eroded.
I very much want to live in a future where there is a digital payment method that’s as anonymous as cash. As far as I can tell Monero is the front runner
Once people realize that when they transact a BTC transaction and all their history can be tracked, they won't like it. Most people think they are hidden behind pseudo-address, but that really is not the case anymore. Go figure. Imagine your bank account is transparent. Every transaction can be seen by everyone. Scary stuff... And it's not about illegality. The fact that everyone can know how much money my neighbor has or his spending habits whatever. Just horrible horrible horrible. It's awful. I can't wrap my head around it. And it's only gonna get worse with more KYC. Coinjoin isn't practical. There is nothing that can fix this. Some people already find this troublesome. You might not feel bothered holding 0.1 BTC, but if you have more than that? People are crazy. It maybe isn't problem now, but the future?
> Your wallet contains a private key that can prove ownership of "outputs" from previous transactions on the blockchain.
If that private key is compromised can law enforcement read your past transaction history?
And if law enforcement compromises the private key on the other side of the transaction can they connect the two of you, and all your prior mutual transactions?
I used to hold Monero, my issue with it is that it's main use case of anonymity aids the anti-crypto story of crypto being used for money laundering or other illicit activities.
How do I get some monero? I've only ever bought crypto with the consumer-level apps and know nothing about mining. (Original article isn't loading, in case it has any info in there)
You can mine it on your computer with some software (e.g., https://xmrig.com/ is popular but not the only option). Then you typically join a "pool" (because your little CPU is just a drop in the vast ocean of compute power hashing away and the next Monero block). The pool will pay you a little bit of Monero, based on your compute contributions to the pool.
They pay the Monero to your Monero wallet, and then it's up to you to decide how to use it. Whether or not mining is financially viable (e.g., electricity cost) depends on a few things. You can use a calculator/website like whattomine.com, cryptocompare.com, coinwarz.com, minerstat.com, etc. to get a rough idea of your potential mining profitability.
[+] [-] habosa|4 years ago|reply
Monero is a solid improvement because it has low fees (so far) and is very hard to trace. So it’s popular for criminals or intense privacy types. It’s still far too slow and hard to use to ever be accepted in your local grocery store. It’s also hard to buy with fiat because most exchanges are scared of it.
What’s really remarkable is how little any of this has changed since ~2016 which was two crypto boom cycles ago. Every single popular cryptocurrency still has the same massive flaws. They’re all either too traceable, too hard to use, too centralized, too slow, too expensive, or too energy intensive. Most of them are many of those things.
In 2010 I was a crypto believer. But the whole space has made so little forward progress in 10+ years. In fact there’s been a lot of backwards progress. Mostly all that’s happened is a lot of people have become obscenely rich from speculation, scams, or the intersection of those two things.
Those of us who hoped for a new way to pay for things in real life are still waiting.
[+] [-] boogerlad|4 years ago|reply
Regarding the speed, many believe that instant / unconfirmed transactions are safe for day to day activities up to 10000USD. It's very difficult to double spend or inject numerous conflicting malicious transactions in hopes that the victim sees a legitimate transaction but a fraudulent transaction gets mined.
Regarding the ease of use, have you tried featherwallet.org or mymonero.com for mobile?
[+] [-] New_California|4 years ago|reply
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with guaranteed-not-to-change monetary policy and supply cap. That's because Bitcoin as a whole is uniquely hard to change.
Monero is great but easy to change and so not a reliable store of value.
Bitcoin and Monero need each other badly.
[+] [-] husamia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobrains|4 years ago|reply
No longer true for slow and high transaction fees, after the lightning network. With the lightning network, it is FAST and much LESS transaction fees.
Oh, and the lightning network is no longer a pipe-dream. It is here and actively in use. If you sincerely want to try it, try using the Breez wallet https://breez.technology/
[+] [-] stavros|4 years ago|reply
I use it to pay for some things and it's always a pleasant experience. I recommend it. The only downside is that, due to the anonymity, the clients aren't as convenient (because the server can't know your transactions, it's hard to have "light clients").
MyMonero works really well, though: https://mymonero.com/
[+] [-] tromp|4 years ago|reply
Another problem is that Monero's PoW is expensive to verify where a good PoW should be instantly verifiable. In fact, it's considered so expensive that by default, the Monero client uses a checkpoint block without verifying all the PoW that led to the block.
[+] [-] Mistletoe|4 years ago|reply
https://cryptorank.io/performance
[+] [-] henriquez|4 years ago|reply
Plus it's fun to mine, you can do it on a CPU instead of needing a massive GPU swarm.
[+] [-] delaaxe|4 years ago|reply
The app crashes randomly, hangs, and worst of all, refuses to send transactions using a hardware wallet when running as a full node.
The hardware wallet is only able to sign transactions when connected to a remote node, which is much worse privacy wise.
Monero needs much more developers & funding to succeed.
[+] [-] dna_polymerase|4 years ago|reply
I can't agree with that sentiment at all. Sure, there a those schemes, but most of the time they are easy to spot. If you have a look at the top 50 coins on CMC [0], you will find mostly solid projects that have large ecosystems with much brainpower locked in.
[0]: https://coinmarketcap.com/
[+] [-] kongin|4 years ago|reply
Now if only they could stabilize the price so you can pay for things instead of gamble on it.
[+] [-] paulryanrogers|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cinntaile|4 years ago|reply
Didn't they have a Church of Monero a few years back? That was kind of... weird? It was probably started as a joke or something, I can't remember.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hamburgerwah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdze|4 years ago|reply
The users themself are anonymous, just like when using cash!
That is a good system because it enables governments to still being able to tax businesses and control illegal activities. Such system will also gain more acceptance among the common folks.
https://taler.net/en/index.html
[+] [-] scoofy|4 years ago|reply
The narrative that this type of value exchange will protect people is as easily argued that it will put others at risk. We have institutions for a reason, and nobody living in a free country should desire such an absurdly dangerous means of value exchange.
At least when you exchange physical currency, it's actually physically difficult for a kidnapper or bank robber to handle the actually physical volume of $1M.
[+] [-] sealaska|4 years ago|reply
In light of this - I think it's rational to remove paper currency from circulation and to move to a digital system where every transaction is tracked to a real person. This could be as simple as using existing banking structures, or maybe some sort of cryptographically-secure, immutable ledger of some sort, tying every transaction back to a real person. Almost like a centralized, managed "block chain".
/s
[+] [-] nine_k|4 years ago|reply
There is a certain balance of downsides and upsides of limitations on freedom. If you move the "safety" knob all the way to maximum, you will get a high security prison with creature comforts. Indeed, being watched and tracked at all times, and limited in what you do and where you go, you can definitely be kept out of the harm's way. If you like the motion towards this, welcome to mainland China. (If you want an antidote, re-read the Brave New World.)
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, that is, liberty is a somehow unsafe condition, else vigilance won't be needed. Some people prefer certain upsides of liberty more than certain upsides of safety. Such people founded the U.S., and it still shows here and there. (Not much, of course.)
[+] [-] oliv__|4 years ago|reply
So you're saying 99.9% of the population shouldn't benefit from this because there will be a tiny percentage misusing it?
I take it you're against privacy, encryption and gun ownership too then right?
[+] [-] dp115|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpadkins|4 years ago|reply
Monero is light years easier for law enforcement to find kidnappers (exchanges, honeypots, network access) than cold hard cash.
Was there a plague of kidnappers when the world used 'absurdly dangerous means of value exchange' like paper currency and gold?
edit: my reply was before you edited to discuss physical currency. $1M in $100 bills is 22lbs. Hardly a deterrent.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] darksaints|4 years ago|reply
You shouldn't be surprised when Americans value privacy over institutions. Our institutions are more criminal than our criminals.
[+] [-] cowpig|4 years ago|reply
I don't understand how people can possibly think that identity obfuscation at scale is a good thing for a financial system. The rule of law and democracy are far from perfect, but it is unquestionably the safest, cushiest time to be alive in human history right now for the average human being.
Let's make our financial system completely opaque and make it impossible to enforce laws. That'll really help us!
This is a blindness that can only come from a lifetime of extreme privilege.
[+] [-] henron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teawrecks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easrng|4 years ago|reply
Use a 2-of-3 multisig for dispute resolution.
[+] [-] chizhik-pyzhik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olah_1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahnick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bb88|4 years ago|reply
> Personal Speculation
> Disclosure: I own a small amount of Monero, Bitcoin and Nano.
How small? $1M might be small to a billionaire. To others $50k is a large amount.
Otherwise it seems like yet another blog post shilling crypto.
[+] [-] benkaiser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notanzaiiswear|4 years ago|reply
Also, you could just as well consider it a positive signal (putting money where their mouth is).
I guess even better would be posting a proof of ownership. Not sure if that would be possible with Monero, but it would be possible with Bitcoin.
[+] [-] Rijek33|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stiltzkin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomhodler84|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmotic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loughnane|4 years ago|reply
I very much want to live in a future where there is a digital payment method that’s as anonymous as cash. As far as I can tell Monero is the front runner
[+] [-] melenaos|4 years ago|reply
Its almost 6 months and i havent made a singe sale in Monero, but it doesnt matter. Its about widening the purchase power of the coin.
[+] [-] price112|4 years ago|reply
Financial transparency won't prevent crimes. And KYC doesn't prevent crimes either.
Optional privacy also isn't a solution. All transactions must look the same or very similar otherwise you stand out.
Monero solves all of this. It still has a long way to go though.
[+] [-] lamontcg|4 years ago|reply
If that private key is compromised can law enforcement read your past transaction history?
And if law enforcement compromises the private key on the other side of the transaction can they connect the two of you, and all your prior mutual transactions?
[+] [-] pedalpete|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sireat|4 years ago|reply
When using it for payments is that it is hard to make a case for a regular user (new to crypto) to use it.
The onramp is too painful/expensive/convuluted + payment is without recourse.
Joe Customer needs a really good incentive to use crypto. Currently this means something shady.
So only normal crypto use is for those who already hold some crypto.
PS I've looked for a good solution to this since 2011 and the progress has been glacial.
[+] [-] webwielder2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cornstalks|4 years ago|reply
They pay the Monero to your Monero wallet, and then it's up to you to decide how to use it. Whether or not mining is financially viable (e.g., electricity cost) depends on a few things. You can use a calculator/website like whattomine.com, cryptocompare.com, coinwarz.com, minerstat.com, etc. to get a rough idea of your potential mining profitability.
[+] [-] stavros|4 years ago|reply