“ Cash is Censorship-Resistant, meaning it cannot be blocked by banks or governments”
No crypto is large enough to be useful as cash and yet still censorship resistant. Governments can and have censored developers, miners, and exchanges. Monero is no exception, as highlighted at the beginning of the article. Further censorship is just a matter of time, not capability.
Yeah, I never understood this "censorship resistant" nonsense. It seems completely disconnected from the real world. The Internet is not some magic fantasyland in another dimension. If a government made it illegal to possess, use, or accept any crypto your choice of protocol won't matter.
If it's so easy, why don't they just enforce it? Go ahead and try and catch people when they make Monero transactions and arrest them, considering the entire protocol is designed to make that as hard as possible.
A law making something like Monero illegal isn't intended to catch all users of the thing, it's intended to be able to add charges to cases involving other things.
Sure - you can't stop regular people from making small purchases from other regular people.
But the INSTANT that a regular person becomes a regular small business, the tax authority can and likely will ask to see their records. The INSTANT someone buys a car, the government will be interested in knowing how they paid for it.
Even in the most extreme situation, the government can and will demand taxes to be paid in its preferred currency. How are you gonna get hold of a substantial amount of dollars or remnibi or whatever without getting caught?
This stuff is enforced and no amount of math can beat thousands of years of the state figuring out how to collect taxes.
Yeah, it's not the 90s anymore. "Cyberspace" does not exist outside national boundaries and laws... and law enforcement is tech savvy, they WILL drop the hammer. Checkmate, lolberts.
You almost seem gleeful at the idea of creeping repression, increasingly severe social controls and a heavy handed state being able to crush what it pleases, with no recourse for rebellious efforts.
So much for the "hacker" in hacker news, and all the ethos behind that word. Instead what we get is pedantic social control freaks flinging smugness as if it were feces at anyone who dares think about the usefulness of things that work around surveillance.
Satoshi also claimed (in an email to Mike Hearn) that Bitcoin can beat VISA with higher transaction volume and lower processing fees. Has Monero achieved this goal as well?
Bitcoin could have achieved that goal if it had been allowed to scale. Monero uses a dynamic block size so will be able to achieve the transaction throughput if usage reaches that level. Transaction fees on Monero however are limited to a few tiers in order to make it more difficult to deanonymize transactions by fee size, so without a fork in the future (which is a normal occurrence on Monero) the fees will remain higher than Visa.
One of cash's characteristics is that I can give my neighbor $1 and my net worth drops by exactly $1 and theirs goes up by that amount. There's no fee.
That's not actually true. The fee is implicit in the continuous and perpetual inflationary devaluation of the currency. Moreover, this fee applies whether you transact or not.
Monero was the only coin that made sense to me back in the 2017 crypto craze. A real anonymous and government free currency. To this day I am salty that Bitcoin won, such a shitty coin, now firmly embraced by governments, full of regulation. Slow, high fees, not really accepted by merchants. Just a "gold" made out of thin air.
HN is all about privacy, security, never trusting Google ever ever, etc. until it comes to crypto, and then all of a sudden it's well only criminals would want that and don't you know they can probably trace you anyway etc.
this place is only good for reading about topics that don't get opinionated coverage from the media. otherwise, you just get regurgitated diarrhea from people who are incapable of forming their own opinions or keep their existing opinions in face of adversity, when the overton window shifts.
crypto got heavily bombarded with bad press at some point during COVID era - I remember seeing 2-3 articles per day on the front page here, for weeks, about how le bad it is for the environment, etc. and that was enough to change the public sentiment here from indifference to knee-jerk, Pavlovian reaction to anything related to it.
There are many objections to crypto on this site and they're almost never about privacy or security. It's disingenuous to pretend that:
- stability
- throughput
- power consumption
- taxation
- monetary policy capabilities
are all made-up objections from people watching too much cable news.
Yes, the consequence of crypto's failure to support a large subset of these is best distilled as "this is useful for criminals, grifters and not many others."
Even Litecoin officially supports privacy these days via Mimblewimble / MWEB, although the privacy is not as strong as Monero. Litecoin is easier to work with since all crypto exchanges support it unlike with Monero. I would like to see Bitcoin similarly support Mimblewimble / MWEB.
Bitcoin Lightning also has privacy, although it's not as strong as MWEB and obviously nowhere near Monero.
Not sure if it's still the case, but Monero's main use case seemed to be making CPU mining viable (ie, hacking cloud accounts for profit). It's so fun to deal with $50k of surprise AWS charges on a Saturday morning. (Thankfully AWS is pretty forgiving in terms of letting you get those charges removed)
No crypto is large enough to be useful as cash and yet still censorship resistant. Governments can and have censored developers, miners, and exchanges. Monero is no exception, as highlighted at the beginning of the article. Further censorship is just a matter of time, not capability.
But the INSTANT that a regular person becomes a regular small business, the tax authority can and likely will ask to see their records. The INSTANT someone buys a car, the government will be interested in knowing how they paid for it.
Even in the most extreme situation, the government can and will demand taxes to be paid in its preferred currency. How are you gonna get hold of a substantial amount of dollars or remnibi or whatever without getting caught?
This stuff is enforced and no amount of math can beat thousands of years of the state figuring out how to collect taxes.
So much for the "hacker" in hacker news, and all the ethos behind that word. Instead what we get is pedantic social control freaks flinging smugness as if it were feces at anyone who dares think about the usefulness of things that work around surveillance.
> public ledger cryptocurrencies have most of the characteristics of cash except one thing: Untraceability
The author argues Monero fills a missing case:
> untraceable cryptocurrency while keeping all of cash’s characteristics
> cryptocurrencies have most of the characteristics of cash
I’m assuming it isn’t cause having privacy so great a whole industry can be revolved around it is indeed something to be proud of.
crypto got heavily bombarded with bad press at some point during COVID era - I remember seeing 2-3 articles per day on the front page here, for weeks, about how le bad it is for the environment, etc. and that was enough to change the public sentiment here from indifference to knee-jerk, Pavlovian reaction to anything related to it.
- stability
- throughput
- power consumption
- taxation
- monetary policy capabilities
are all made-up objections from people watching too much cable news.
Yes, the consequence of crypto's failure to support a large subset of these is best distilled as "this is useful for criminals, grifters and not many others."
Bitcoin Lightning also has privacy, although it's not as strong as MWEB and obviously nowhere near Monero.