To be frank:
A public forever storage of all transactions is not good but bad for privacy.
Send money to someone and they can see your wallet and all transactions.
Identifying wallet owners may require different levels of effort. But that's kinda besides the point.
I thought Monero solves this issue, with a level of effort large enough that it's almost impossible to crack.
and here lies the issue with asking about crypto in non-crypto circles… everyone thinks they completely understand blockchain in its entirely. what they actually have is a rudimentary understanding of a single blockchain as it was literally 15 years ago
of course the problem with asking in crypto circles is that they’re all trying to sell you their new big thing which is probably total trash
so really there’s no good way to ask and get reasonable answers about crypto
Have they solved the problem yet that proof-of-work essentially makes the whole thing an environmental nightmare and means it doesn't scale to anything useful in terms of transaction rates? Or the problem that "proof-of-stake" is essentially just a "the rich get richer" scheme? Or the problem that transaction latencies are huge compared to traditional payment methods? Or the problem that blockchains do not have a defined point where a seller of some good or service can be sure the transaction is actually part of the longest chain? Or the problem that the blockchain only ever grows which means it is not feasible to work directly on it on most devices? Or the problem of uncontrolled deflation with a fixed money supply (well, shrinking really if you take into account wallets people lost access to)?
The whole concept is just deeply flawed and meanwhile 99% of actual uses that are not just research are basically scammers.
I could go through each of your concerns, but I'll just leave it at two:
The reason I'm not going to go through each is because each problem has a solution, whether that's in an already existing currency, or will go away as it scales.
Here are the real problems as I see it:
Even if we get past the FUD, we're still going to have adoption issues because of the above. And I don't have a good solution for that, but we need adoption to stabilize the currency and motivate solutions for problems.
I like the idea of cryptocurrencies, but we need a large institution to normalize it before people will adopt it, and I don't see that happening. Maybe stable coins are the way forward, IDK.
One thing I'm interested in is GNU Taler, which is a relatively simple digital transaction system that preserves payer privacy. If we could get a big institution to use it (e.g. Mozilla for micro payments to websites), people may feel more comfortable experimenting with digital currencies.
GNU Taler isn't cryto. (Which makes much better)
The problem with crypto is that there really isn't anything to give it value. It basically is a super unpredictable stock.
imo i actually hate the idea of a public crypto currency
people think that the government having their hands on the levers of a fiat currency is a bad thing, but it’s an incredibly useful property to make sure that we can stabilise things and push away from recession etc! without those levers we can end up in a spiral a lot easier
i think though that where these problems don’t exist is behind the scenes: what if the whole world replaced SWIFT with a private blockchain? maybe a wire transfer wouldn’t take 5 days and cost like $20 (or maybe it would because it’s probably not the technology that makes these things slow)… in this case, you have a known group of semi-trusted actors (international banks), which is actually a perfect set of properties for a blockchain: they’re all able to cooperate but don’t implicitly trust, and can verify each other but mainly use blockchain so they can all automatically agree
I'm not saying government fiat currencies shouldn't exist, just that they aren't needed for regular transactions.
Argument that monetary policy can be harmful
The natural business cycle has booms and busts, and government interference in that cycle (i.e. attempts to prevent the busts) can instead delay the busts and result in more severe downturns.
For example, look at the recent inflationary period. We had a huge bull run largely fueled by really low borrowing rates, so when things started to crash, we couldn't lower rates to encourage expansion (or at least as refused to go negative), so we instead threw money at the problem, which is an inflationary policy. The result was rapid inflation, and we had to rush to raise rates to get that back under control, and the rapid rate hikes resulted in bank failures, layoffs, and high borrowing rates. If we had instead raised rates slowly from 2014 or so and on, we could've cut rates instead of throwing stimulus money at the problem.
But the main problem with fiat currencies is that the issuing authority has a vested interest in tracking transactions. Cash isn't really a thing for digital transactions, and if the government realizes it can discourage use of cash, it will.
Fiat and cryptocurrencies can absolutely exist. Use fiat when interacting with the banking system (loans, savings, etc), and use cryptocurrencies like Monero for keeping transactions private (e.g. shopping). The government raising rates only really impacts borrowing, so companies and borrowers will use the local fiat currency and you'll get the desired effects.
what if the whole world replaced SWIFT with a private blockchain?
I'm honestly not familiar enough with international transactions to really weigh in on this. Maybe it's a good idea, IDK.
Energy costs are magnitudes less than banks
Much like the claim that it improves privacy cryptocurrency has not really achieved any of its claimed advantages and its successes are mainly in the field of scamming people out of their money.
Manual targeted identification is possible even if you use public WiFi + VPN + Tor with 100 nodes. It's just a matter of user behavior analysis. Same goes with anything digital nowadays. You're either protected only from automatic spyware (Google, Meta etc) or not protected at all. At least some entity you're interacting with (whether it's a website, a person, a company or whatever else) is going to have some sort of tracking to it unless there are no network devices and physical surveillance agents in the area. Finding someone isn't hard. It sometimes can require irl interrogation though. At least that's what I know. Even if something I said isn't true, digital cryptocurrency transactions are still a little bit better than using a credit card (maybe unless you buy a fake entity but that's still breakable). I don't know any better alternatives (cash doesn't count because it's not digital)
Not true for Privacy Coins
I see no point for it to exist.
Morgan Stanley boot licker this one
No, I have no love for financial institutions.
What value does a crypto bring by itself? It's not land or a business so you can't develop it. It's not a person or application so it can't perform labor. Crypto is not even physical so I can't eat it, burn it, or use it as a paper weight.
It's only purpose is to be speculated on for trading purposes for REAL MONEY. Crypto currency life cycle ends with it being exchanged for another currency, that's just redundant. It's a griff like speculation on old comic books was back in the 90's, except you don't even get nerd crap you're trying to offload.
Finally it's not backed by the violence of another country. Ever since USA moved off the gold standard "the faith and credit of the US government" which is a fancy way of saying the military industrial complex. That's real and powerful if not ambiguous, which is more than I can say for a list of completed math problems. You and your kind are too weak to have a currency.
You are not an economic revolutionary. You are part of an insular group participating in a ponzi scheme that is desperately trying to get mass adoption so you're not "holding the bag". In crypto there is someone always "holding the bag" because crypto has no innate value.
I dislike it being misused for gambling on it's value, but see the importance of currencies like Monero.
It's not real currency, it's a token.
I can't use it to pay my taxes to the US federal government and it must be traded in for actual currency to do so.
Just like a token at an arcade.
They are also vehicles of wild speculation... And unlike stocks (where I gain partial ownership of a company) and bonds (where I gain a claim on their monetary inflows and primacy if the venture crumbles), crypto gives me... What exactly?
I don't get to be an owner or a creditor. I become... Holder of a mining incentive?
I'm sorry it's not what a lot of people seem to think it is.
You can also not use euro to pay for your federal taxes in USA. You can however convert your euros to USD in order to pay for them. If you think euros are more trustworthy and give you full self custody, then it's a good reason to hold your money in euros . Plenty of people do that in the world; they store their money in USD rather than their inflated less reliable national currency.
Victim to speculation? Unfortunately yes, but same thing goes for stocks, even basic foods and raw materials nowadays. What do they give you? Whatever matters to you: full privacy? Full ownership? Freedom of movement for your money? Not one central entity deciding on the amount that's printed? Voting power in the tech that's being built? Most stocks nowadays don't give you anything as well, but the fake belief on how much it's worth and a lot of people agree nowadays they don't represent true value of the company in many cases (Apple, Facebook, Tesla, etc.). You don't get voting rights, you don't get dividends. A lot of Cryptos do give those.
Having said those counter-arguments, of course there's flaws too and frankly more with the majority of them. It's those select few that could matter on long-term
bringing back cash anonymity
Most cryptocurrencies do not have this. It is trivial to tie bitcoin to an identity. Given the nature of publicly posting the transactional records, all it takes is tying any given purchase to someone one time, to identify them and view their entire purchase history.
Monero being an exception.
They're called Privacy Coins for a reason. Monero is just one.
It's more complicated than this, and it gets more complicated every year, especially with lightning. It's certainly not monero in terms of privacy, but it's not the same Bitcoin it was 10 years ago where this was more or less true.
Trust me on this. I know what you're thinking, "Blindly trust an internet stranger? No thank you." That's good, but this time, you should listen because you care about your privacy.
It's not different enough to matter... yet.
Identifying users was still trivial as of 2 months ago, which is the last time I brushed up on implementing smart contracts. Bitcoin Lightning came out somewhere around 7 years ago. Unless something fresh and hot hit the market within the past 60 days, and has been implemented, do not, I repeat DO NOT trust your privacy to bitcoin, especially if you're doing something your governing body disapproves of.
Monero's privacy protections are still a generation ahead, but still not a big headache for the good ol' 5-Eyes. Probably not for the 14-Eyes either, but who knows what they know.
I assume you're talking about blatantly illegal transactions, like trafficking or drug deals, but if that's not part of someone's threat model, is Bitcoin still reasonable private?
As in, if we remove state-level actors from the threat model, is Bitcoin still safe enough? I'm more interested in not getting doxxed for my choice in VPN, email service, etc if I choose to run for office, and Bitcoin is accepted by enough places to be useful enough.
Also note that lightning is an off-chain centralized approach. It loses a lot of benefits of decentralized layer 1 like bitcoin and monero. Privacy at a centralized entity is like having no privacy at all.
i think it's really cool in theory, but only the anonymous ones. i don't use crypto personally, but it's important that something like it exists.
cryptobros and capitalism have ruined what little reputation the name had, and it's obviously not going to replace "normal" money any time soon.
i feel like it's kind of similar to the cashless systems that most banks use, but you're trading lots of electricity for "not having the economy be owned by a couple of massive corporations". obviously it has it's flaws, but i see that as a worthwhile trade.
edit: oh yeah, i didn't mention it, but this is another vote for monero (it's private and it's an esperanto word :P)
I use Monero for private transactions and I am thankful for the existence of a private, untraceable currency (like most cash transactions IRL). I am concerned by the amount of energy expended on crypto-mining... it is a dreadful use of energy that could be used for far more productive purposes.
The original idea was to take back control of our money from greedy and corrupt banks and politicians. Very very very few people use it as that now though. Most just see it as a get rich quick scheme.
As we are in the privacy sublemmy: All of the privacy issues have already been solved, those that keep saying that it is a log of everyone you ever paid kept forever have no idea what they are talking about. Just simple thing like that you should (almost) never use an address twice removes a lot of the privacy concerns. There are also other ways to obfuscate and stay anonymous.
Just simple thing like that you should (almost) never use an address twice removes a lot of the privacy concerns.
Then how do you connect the incoming money to the outgoing money (and split it up or combine it in the process assuming most income flows do not exactly match a spending flow exactly in value)?
edit: since the well-akshullies are out already, I'll say this is massively simplified because anyone who cares about the actual cryptography or terminology can go read the fuckin docs; it's detail that isn't necessary here.
Wallet addresses are just the public part of a public/private key pair. You can generate another public key with the private key so the address is different, but your private key can still sign transactions for both addresses.
Most just see it as a get rich quick scheme.
It sucks, I don't see how it could ever get past this.
fuck that utterly horrible shit
No as it pretty much a scam
The initial idea and the aspect of "fuck the banks" intrigued me. Of course now the space is filled with scams and weird crypto dudes (srsly, why so many dudes?) and I have lost faith that the money schemes of the world will ever change.
I think we can all agree on this at least, Monero is Love, Monero is Life
Nice tech surrounded by scams.
I use it on a regular basis. I also run a non-profit that funds open source tools for scientists, it makes accepting donations a lot easier for us among other benefits for our donors (they don't have to pay capital gains on the coins they donate, just like stocks).
Bitcoin is pretty incredible and offers decent anonymity which continues to improve, Monero offers more. Lots of scams in the "crypto world", but Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policy promises for 15 years:
Monero's privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to, that is the biggest long-term risk to Monero IMO. That and centralization of block production due to increased block size. Bitcoin worked around this block size problem with L2s like lightning, Monero chose bigger blocks though of course it could always add an L2 if it wants to.
It's a nice technology that should exist as an alternative to personally identifyable and government-ID-connected transactions. It's not perfect in any way though
I'm for it in theory. I explored it for a while, since at least March 2010, cf https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Bitcoin
But, sadly, I'm against it in practice. You can see that the same page hasn't been updated since 2016. This is because even though is does work, technically speaking (which is in itself a feat!), socially speaking the impact is IMHO negative. The main use case is speculation about itself and it comes at a huge side effect, namely energy usage (cf IEA's https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/bitcoin-energy-use-estimates ). This isn't even about taking into consideration much worst usages, e.g money laundering. Another difference since the early days is that traditional institutions have started to use or sell them. This is very positive in terms of trust, namely that such institutions do a lot of checks because they are legally required too. This is though quite negative from my own ideological standpoint on the very raise d'etre of cryptocurrency because I was initially seeing it through the lens of anarchy, where participants in a system rely on each other and manage their own structure. Few interesting projects happened along those lines, both physically and digitally, but in practice those are, in terms of volume of transactions (and thus energy consumption) marginal. They are mere demonstrations.
So yes I was excited by the prospect, both socially and technologically, but since I've became disillusioned. Cool idea, even cool implementation, boring usage, literally life threatening effect to our one single planet. Not worth it.
I will add this retrospective to my Bitcoin page to reflect that soon.
PS: I understand that Bitcoin is not all cryptocurrencies. I also dabbled (and by that I mean code, including making my own transactions to explore smart contract before it was in the main blockchain) with other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum. I also had few assets which I liquidated a little while ago from at least 4 different cryptocurrencies. I'm using Bitcoin as a simplification for others because that's where the value literally is today. I'd also argue, which is just me speculating here, that if Bitcoin falls, all other follows even if they'd be technically viable.
BTC, ETH, and XMR are the only ones that matter. Some stable coins (USDC, GUSD) are okay, too.
BTC (Bitcoin) is good because it's the most widespread. If a vendor accepts crypto, odds are they accept BTC. However, the blockchain is easily traceable.
ETH (Ethereum) is good because its blockchain is far more versatile, so it can be used for other things than just crypto payments. However, it's less widely used for payments than BTC and is also easily traceable.
XMR (Monero) is excellent. It's extremely difficult to track an individual user. Your transactions are private. There are some possible attack vectors for the future, but they'd require that you be an actual target to be worthwhile. Someone that's going to track you is going to find a different way than XMR to do it. XMR isn't as widely used as the others, though, and it's also not on as many crypto exchanges. Kraken has it.
However, crypto as an investment is not a good idea. Spend your crypto.
Ethereum is unregistered security token.
It's really useful for committing crimes on the Internet but as a daily cash replacement I remain unconvinced mostly do to the woeful speed of confirming transactions in most currencies I'm aware of.
I think a lot of us first heard about bitcoin when Paypal shut down donations to Occupy Wall Street and later WikiLeaks.
Both of them turned to bitcoin to accept permissionless donations.
Bitcoin was just the first majorly successful coin. I think most orgs should accept Monero these days, for Privacy reasons.
Its awesome if you have some, its basically all time high price these days 😉
Well it was until today. It just went on sale
I have used Bitcoin a number of times for international purchases. Its not really got to the point of currency so much as a medium mostly of speculation and often interchange for crime but it can improve your privacy. The user experience of the payments isn't the best but international transfers are often hard to do anyway and in that particular field it can often be a lot quicker, cheaper and easier.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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