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Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#71

Post by noodle »

Semaphor wrote: post #63
edent wrote: post #16

As with anything - what's the user need? The vast majority of people don't seem fazed about their credit card company knowing they've bought a sex toy. Hell, if Amex offered double-cashback at PornHub I expect they'd be inundated. For those which do want a bit more privacy, it's dead easy to buy a single-use gift card or cash card. Will that stop the police from tracing you? No, but it makes it harder for a company t…

> So you're left with things which are (rightly or wrongly) illegal. Or incredibly taboo. While I mostly agree with what you wrote, I take exception to this. Wanting more privacy can be an ends in itself. Of course, as I said, I agree with you, this doesn’t really broaden the pool of people who need Monero by a meaningful amount ;)

> Wanting more privacy can be an ends in itself.

People who are willing to jump through hoops to marginally increase their privacy and the companies willing to similarly jump through hoops to cater to these people are a subset of the overall population. Gotta break out of this subset to achieve the wide adoption OP was talking about.

Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#72

Post by mindcrime »

chaostheory wrote: post #25

HN is notoriously very anti-crypto as a community for valid reasons. While asking this question to crypto maximalists isn’t going to get an ideal answer, you’re not likely to get it here either for different reasons. Too much bias. To answer your question, as others have mentioned very few people actually care about privacy vs finding another hedge against inflation.

HN is notoriously very anti-crypto as a community for valid reasons.

While I don't disagree with that statement, I'd expand it to say that HN'ers tend to be anti-crypto in the sense of being against the absurd hype associated with crypto speculation, and a lot of the really scammy seeming NFT / Web3 stuff that's out there. I think more than a few of us could actually get behind something like Monero based on the privacy aspect. But as we've seen in a few answers already, there are legitimate technical reasons that make Monero (and its peers) less than ideal even for those who do emphasize privacy.

very few people actually care about privacy

Sad but true. :-(

Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#73

Post by datpuz »

no_wizard wrote: post #39
retrac wrote: post #5

From what I've read, some of the online drug markets only take Monero. So it would seem people who realize they need anonymity are indeed embracing it.

I'm not going to say they are the most technologically sophisticated marketplaces per se. Not doubting that this might be some obvious "litmus" test. However, I'm willing to bet this is simply due to face value claims around Monero and not because the last mile problems are solved or its provably anonymous was considered in earnest and thereby vetted deeply.

I'm thinking it probably requires some degree of technological sophistication to run an illegal website that traffics billions of dollars worth of drugs internationally. These guys are being actively pursued by intelligence agencies around the world and most of them haven't been caught.

Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#74

Post by godelski »

bestbuyer__ wrote: post #13
bergenty wrote: post #6

I watched as Monero was gradually dropped from a lot of the major exchanges over time with no real reason being provided. Same with zcash. My conspiracy theory is that there is a coordinated effort to make truly anonymous coins unusable.

Indeed. But I wouldn't consider ZCash to be in the same category as Monero, not with the way it was pre-mined, the sketchy key ceremony, the developers' willingness to co-operate with law enforcement, and the unshielded-by-default transactions.

I'm out of the loop. Why does it matter if they cooperate with police? That would be like signal's big brother, right? If it is secure then there's nothing to really give them. I did hear they are removing the unshielded wallets and fixing the ceremony process fwiw.

Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#75

Post by D13Fd »

chaostheory wrote: post #25

HN is notoriously very anti-crypto as a community for valid reasons. While asking this question to crypto maximalists isn’t going to get an ideal answer, you’re not likely to get it here either for different reasons. Too much bias. To answer your question, as others have mentioned very few people actually care about privacy vs finding another hedge against inflation.

Having an opinion and applying it to a situation doesn't make you "biased."

Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#76

Post by gerikson »

foobarian wrote: post #51
maerF0x0 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered why consumers seem to lack foresight though? Like the foresight of governmental / corporate dystopias due to information asymmetries. or foresight that exclusively buying goods manufactured abroad will eventually affect your home price as your neighbors one by one lose their local jobs... Do we know why people act in such a way? Edit: I'm quite shocked at the deep presumption of negativity. I was…

Maybe people are just like peasants and don't know any better. Maybe someone needs to do the Narodnik thing and go to the people [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_to_the_People

That was a famous fiasco.

Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#77

Post by opportune »

As a huge fan of monero, I see several reasons the general public may not want to adopt it:

1. To securely use monero you need to at the very least locally download the blockchain. The secure way of doing this takes fucking forever. You don’t need to do this, but monero’s current users are very security conscious and most tooling/the ecosystem assumes you did this.

2. Most consumers may passively want privacy but they want it to be completely frictionless. Monero has a learning curve, slight difficulty exchanging for fiat, etc. - not frictionless.

3. Monero has whales but it’s not new, so it doesn’t have a big team of centralized devs/investors trying to pump it up. As a result it doesn’t have a lot of marketing or mindshare among people who are less technical.

4. Tail emission is a perfectly valid way to incentivize POW over long time periods, but it scares off moonboys and speculators at the very least (because you’re not purchasing a piece of a fixed size pie).

5. Even if most consumers passively want privacy, in practice it’s not important enough to go out of your way for it. How many technically-able people still transact in cash in developed countries? Yes, I know you Mr HN contrarian might, but I’m talking about the general public.

6. The least important factor is that Monero does have technical drawbacks and limitations. It’s not super important but it may be a reason privacy-conscious people don’t promote it as the end-all-be-all solution to private transactions. Some examples: auditing supply, de-anonymizing correlated transactions, POW, how the blockchain could scale with more transactions, quantum-safety.

Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#78

Post by D13Fd »

mindcrime wrote: post #72
chaostheory wrote: post #25

HN is notoriously very anti-crypto as a community for valid reasons. While asking this question to crypto maximalists isn’t going to get an ideal answer, you’re not likely to get it here either for different reasons. Too much bias. To answer your question, as others have mentioned very few people actually care about privacy vs finding another hedge against inflation.

HN is notoriously very anti-crypto as a community for valid reasons. While I don't disagree with that statement, I'd expand it to say that HN'ers tend to be anti-crypto in the sense of being against the absurd hype associated with crypto speculation, and a lot of the really scammy seeming NFT / Web3 stuff that's out there. I think more than a few of us could actually get behind something like Monero based on the priv…

I think the better way to put it is that very few people care about faceless credit card companies or banks knowing what they are buying, or about the government having subpoena access to those records.

That's very different from not caring about privacy at all.

Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#79

Post by tromp »

lawn wrote: post #67
tromp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero is not a better Bitcoin; it just makes different tradeoffs [1]. [1] https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html

You're right that it makes different trade-offs, but in doing so it becomes a better currency than Bitcoin.

Many of the properties listed in that comparison table make it a worse currency. The prime ones being poor scalability (not only large txs but also having to track all historical outputs, not just the unspent ones) and poor second layer support (no relative time locks).

Re: Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide adoption?

#80

Post by novantadue »

The State is hostile to privacy-coins. Its kind of astonishing that the State is not hostile to all crypto as it seeks to separate money from state. Back in the olden days, I thought bitcoin would go to zero because of how the Feds neutralized the Liberty Dollar, this flaw in my modelling probably cost me $100m :(

(Liberty Dollar founder was convicted of "making, possessing and selling his own coins" which were either silver coins or paper-notes backed by metal)

fwiw I think NFTs will be a big deal b/c they will unlock experiences. If we ever move to a Metaverse-type system, this will enable the creation of uncopyable digital experiences (can't just rip an mp3/mpeg)

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