Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Monero

benkaiser.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 394 posts

Re: Why Monero

#321

Post by gojomo »

0des wrote: post #304
gojomo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps pedantically from a particular viewpoint, & if banks used a blacklist of certain bill numbers. But to financial economists, cash is a textbook example of a ‘fungible’ thing. So a statement like – “Monero is fungible, cash is not.” – implies you’re using peculiar definitions.

Fungibility means that two things are mutually interchangeable on all levels. I cannot take cash into a bank that came from a heist or a covert drug buy from the authorities for example, I'd go to jail. The term 'marked bills' exist because cash is not fungible, not all bills are equal. This is the binary quality of fungibility. There are no shades of fungibility, there is no "well this is X's definition of it".

You are free to write as many words as you’d like on your idiosyncratic beliefs, but the fields of law, finance, & economics, as practiced & documented, disagree with you:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fungibility.asp

(It is interesting to think of the ways traditional cash might not meet a physicist’s definition, or assumptions under which Monero might somehow be more fungible or less fungible than physical cash, on a spectrum richer than a pure binary. But if you remain oblivious to what the word commonly means to others, you’re failing a bit at communication.)

Re: Why Monero

#322

Post by quantumBerry »

lxgr wrote: post #305
quantumBerry wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero has infinite (but low rate) tail emission, meaning the unlike bitcoin the supply approaches infinity. Unless the basket of goods Monero can purchase also goes to infinity, Monero at some point will have inflation.

In most economic models, inflation is not defined as being equivalent to the growth of the monetary base (although that does not stop many Bitcoin and other crypto proponents to claim it is). In fact, a currency with a constant rate of issuance is actually highly deflationary in a growing economy.

Hence why I said "Unless the basket of goods Monero can purchase also goes to infinity." I understand the definition of inflation.

Re: Why Monero

#323

Post by quantumBerry »

arcticbull wrote: post #244
quantumBerry wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can't actually get any meaningful quantity of it without having a SAR or CTR filed on you (or the person obtaining it). It's big and bulky, it's uniquely numbered and traceable. You can't deposit any meaningful quantity without having a SAR or CTR filed. I could pressure wash houses for $200 a house everyday and get 100k in less than 2 years. Or bartend, work as a waitress for a few years, whatever. There's plen…

> What is the court that signs an order, based on probable cause of a crime, for each cash transaction over 10,000? It's really not interesting re-hashing how the judicial system works.

You claimed " your transactions are private until the court authorizes the police obtain them on the basis of probable cause."

It's not really interesting re-hashing an outright lie from someone who knows better.

Re: Why Monero

#324

Post by [deleted] »

akimball wrote: post #291
quantumBerry wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero has infinite (but low rate) tail emission, meaning the unlike bitcoin the supply approaches infinity. Unless the basket of goods Monero can purchase also goes to infinity, Monero at some point will have inflation.

The potential (not actual) Monero supply will surpass the Bitcoin supply in 2044. Lost keys may exceed emission, which would imply deflation of actual supply.

[deleted]

Re: Why Monero

#325

Post by sireat »

As the article states the biggest problem is onramp (just like with most crypto).

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.

Re: Why Monero

#326

Post by [deleted] »

quantumBerry wrote: post #323
arcticbull wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the court that signs an order, based on probable cause of a crime, for each cash transaction over 10,000? It's really not interesting re-hashing how the judicial system works.

You claimed " your transactions are private until the court authorizes the police obtain them on the basis of probable cause." It's not really interesting re-hashing an outright lie from someone who knows better.

[deleted]

Re: Why Monero

#327

Post by tromp »

fragmede wrote: post #270
tromp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expe…

There must be some subtlety I'm missing because you say it's hard to have a light client because there's no way to have a subset of transactions/checkpoint, but then say its PoW is so expensive that starting from a checkpoint is the default.

Keeping data from all tx indexed entails a large memory footprint during all client use. The checkpoint issue affects only the initial sync. Making that trustless by turning off the checkpointing makes turns a moderately slow sync into an extremely slow sync.

Re: Why Monero

#328

Post by tromp »

lawn wrote: post #319
tromp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expe…

Monero's PoW being "expensive" is not an actual scaling concern, and checkpoints makes sense for all blockchains.

Other chains like bitcoin still verify that their checkpoint has the most cumulative work behind it, so you have additional assurance that the miners are also attesting to the checkpoint correctness. In Monero you have to trust the checkpoint to represent the most worked chain.

Monero's super expensive PoW also makes it very hard to interface with other smart blockchains that may want to verify the amount of work behind a Monero block, or to support useful techniques like flyclient [1].

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/226.pdf

Re: Why Monero

#329

Post by R0b0t1 »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #265
R0b0t1 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With monero you can analyze residuals to deanonymize people.

How does this work?

The video was posted elsewhere I think. Basically, if you view enough of the residual ring inputs you can link them together. This is not quite practical yet but assuming wide adoption of XMR chain stores, etc, would be able to do this attack.

Re: Why Monero

#330

Post by R0b0t1 »

lottin wrote: post #202
R0b0t1 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most promising? What do you mean? BTC and XMR already work and don't have the downsides of Taler. Usability could be improved for those, yes. Outside transparency is not a benefit. Most people I've talked to about crypto don't see the opacity as a detriment. They do not trust the government or tax policy. Most of these people are also generally happy to pay their taxes but can see reasons when they would want to…

This shows how little cryptocurrency users know about how governments collect taxes. The government doesn't go around checking people's bank accounts in order to get tax information. This would be terribly inefficient. What they do instead is pass laws that require employers to disclose how much they pay their employees and to collect taxes on their behalf, before the taxpayer even receives the money. Therefore priva…

For salary or wage payments, kind of. If you received your normal wages in XMR then the government would have a hard time proving anything illegal is happening, even if both your employer and you are breaking the law.
Post reply on HN