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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?

#101

Post by lawn »

tromp wrote: post #96
lawn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This list doesn't even list the important properties of a currency, such at it being fungible or it being cheap to transfer, both which directly disqualify Bitcoin. Also, both of the ones you list are the same (scalability), whose purpose is to keep transfer fees low. Which, again, Bitcoin utterly fails at.

Fungibility is split out into three separate properties: Hides amounts, Hides addresses, Hides the transaction graph (untraceability). Bitcoin tx fees are near all time lows [1] although many people still overpay. And lightning fees are way lower still. [1] https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight

All time lows at only $2/tx... While the median Monero fee is at $0.0012. Even if LN transactions are free (they aren't) you still need to make hundreds of transactions before you recoup that one Bitcoin fee.

And the kicker is that Bitcoin's fees goes up when more people use it, while in Monero the fees get lower.

It's laughable to suggest Bitcoin scales better wrt to regular payments than Monero, despite Monero transactions being larger and the blockchain is harder to prune.

https://www.monero.how/monero-transaction-fees

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

#102

Post by paxys »

ls15 wrote: post #91
paxys wrote: post #59

Can my mom get started with it in under 5 minutes? If not, it will never see wide adoption.

Can your mom get started with Paypal in 5 minutes? When I set up a Paypal account recently, it took days to "get started", because that's how long it took them to verify my bank account.

> Can your mom get started with Paypal in 5 minutes

Absolutely. I can't talk about the merchant experience, but setting up a new Paypal account and paying for something via credit card takes like 2 minutes.

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

#103

Post by tromp »

lawn wrote: post #101
tromp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fungibility is split out into three separate properties: Hides amounts, Hides addresses, Hides the transaction graph (untraceability). Bitcoin tx fees are near all time lows [1] although many people still overpay. And lightning fees are way lower still. [1] https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight

All time lows at only $2/tx... While the median Monero fee is at $0.0012. Even if LN transactions are free (they aren't) you still need to make hundreds of transactions before you recoup that one Bitcoin fee. And the kicker is that Bitcoin's fees goes up when more people use it, while in Monero the fees get lower. It's laughable to suggest Bitcoin scales better wrt to regular payments than Monero, despite Monero tran…

The chart shows many Bitcoin txs clearing (with some delay) at the minimal 1 sat/vbyte, which typically comes to a ~400 sat fee, or about 8 cents. This is also shown at [1]. Many people don't bother picking their feerate though, and go with their wallet's overestimate.

It's laughable to think Monero scales better when it uses much more resources (bandwidth and memory and diskspace) to support a given transaction rate.

[1] https://bitcoinvisuals.com/bitcoind-minfee

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

#104

Post by JohnFen »

I don't see the value in it. Cryptocurrency in general is far riskier and more costly than I am willing to put up with unless there's a benefit that makes the risk worthwhile.

When I want to do pseudoanonymous transactions, I have a wide variety of ways to do that which appear to be lower risk.

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

#105

Post by ChadNauseam »

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.

even if they’re only cargo-culting, the ones who use monero will be less likely to be caught. so in the long run we should expect to see them using monero

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

#106

Post by ChadNauseam »

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.

note that if they lied in the ceremony process, the only thing they could do is undetectably mint zcash. they would not be able to deanonymize shielded transactions

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

#107

Post by imtringued »

ls15 wrote: post #91
paxys wrote: post #59

Can my mom get started with it in under 5 minutes? If not, it will never see wide adoption.

Can your mom get started with Paypal in 5 minutes? When I set up a Paypal account recently, it took days to "get started", because that's how long it took them to verify my bank account.

My mom doesn't have paypal.

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

#108

Post by _nalply »

Sometimes something fails at a purchase: a misunderstanding, failed delivery, fraud, bad quality, and/or many other problems. In my experience, in about one of three of my online purchases there was some hitch.

Therefore we need arbitration and the possibility to roll back the purchase. This doesn't always work well in the traditional finance, granted, but not at all for privacy coin schemes.

Without these possibilities people tend to feel that they are doing something risky. They don't trust that they get something of value if they use the privacy coin. They are afraid that they get bamboozled or scammed and have a feeling of powerlessness. This deters people and hurts adoption.

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

#109

Post by pwinnski »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #100
soco wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter, but first things first. If you struggle to breathe your first priority won't be finding food, but your entire energy will go into solving the most urgent problem.

Yeah I get that, I guess for me I just see it like . Imagine some town with lots of manufacturing jobs and so many people are shopping at walmart for foreign made wares. How does it not click "If people dont buy local our local made wares, how will our factory stay open?" . I'm not saying so much like right right now, it's obviously too late in many industries to go back any time soon. But like in the 70s-90s, why di…

Humans almost always and almost everywhere in almost every context make the short-term choice with immediate consequence with very little concern for the long-term effect which is usually much more diffuse.

Person A going out to buy a Chinese-made microwave from Walmart today isn't going to lead inexorably to decreased property values, but it is going to give Person A something in which to stick their microwavable popcorn tonight. In fact, many Person As have been buying Chinese-made microwaves from Walmart for many years now, and still property values are going up!

Eventually, sure, enough people making those choices on a macro scale leads to factories closing close by, and if there's no corresponding rise in other industries, that will lead to negative economic consequences for the entire area. But that's a far off problem with a lot of uncertainty, and this popcorn isn't going to pop itself tonight!

Of course, it is also true that Person A could go out of their way to shop at a local store and buy a microwave made by an American company, but that the American company decides that there's much more profit to be made by moving production overseas, and the negative economic consequences happen anyway. Not because of the short-sightedness of Person A, but the greed and short-sightedness of CEO B. That's even more reason for Person A to not be too worried about their individual purchase.

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

#110

Post by tatertots1234 »

Because there is a small group of people that care enough to use it. Most anti-crypto people do not want anything to do with it. Neutral-crypto people don't see the reason for enhanced privacy, or are afraid it might put them into trouble with regulators.

Pro-crypto people can be broken into different tribes. Bitcoin maxis feel that only Bitcoin is worth using, and they might think the privacy of Bitcoin is "good enough." Ethereum maxis want to use applications and smart contracts for DeFi, escrow, exchanges, lending, stablecoins, and Monero does not support that. Ethereum maxis also feel that privacy is solvable with ZK proofs and private rollups. Then there are other tribes like Solana users who are looking for scalability for games and apps, and don't care as much about privacy.

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