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

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111–120 of 121 posts

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money was initially private and decentralized. When it lost those attributes theft and economic instability became the norm.

I think it's the opposite. Theft and economic instability were the norm until we developed things like economic regulations and a banking system. The Wild West was not known for its economic stability for example. Neither were the Dark Ages.

What passes as economic stability these days just makes things more fragile, e.g. propping up failing businesses w/ other people's money.

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not a very comforting thought...

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because the main use-case of a privacy coin is for illegal transactions such as drug sales on the dark web, so co-operating with law enforcement entirely defeats the point.

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

#114
I think it's because women haven't integrated the technology yet. Please let me explain :)

Women are high consumers of luxury goods across the world. The luxury goods market was estimated at more than $400b in 2020, and increasing. If you take into consideration the fact that a large portion of these transactions undergo banking fees at around 2%, that makes more or less $8bn of revenue turned into smoke, which luxury companies lose to banking intermediaries.

The two main reasons why these companies agree to pay banking fees is insured transactions (the buyer pays with a credit card then fails to reimburse the bank) and convenience (most luxury goods customers carry more than one credit card with them).

Pseudo-DeFi offers a good replacement to the first cost (insurance). However, first, most luxury clients actually don't need the credit card: they simply cannot pay easily without pulling out a bag of cash (and look like crooks) or use a credit card.

Second, crypto payment is not yet convenient: we need to offer women an attractive, portable and easy to use wallet mechanism that can easily withstand loss/theft of mobile device, easy to top up, and in the correct cryptocurrency that is accepted across luxury brands. Think of it as the iPhone problem: there were many smartphones with a touch screen before the iPhone, but none of them looked attractive.

Once luxury brands solve this problem (or Apple, I can easily imagine Apple solving this problem, because 94% luxury clients have iPhones), in my opinion, crypto payments will take off worldwide and there will be no looking back. They will reduce costs to both sellers and shoppers, which qualifies quite well to the "why" question.

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

#115
post #103
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#116
post #79
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

There's work underway for Monero to use the Lightning network, which scales to millions of transactions per second.

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

#117

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 the…

Are you serious? I'm starting to wonder if this whole "Ask HN" was posted to dissuade people from buying crypto.

1. False. There are mobile wallets that download only part of the blockchain.

2. This applies to all crypto, not only Monero.

3. True!

4. The number of coins added by the tail emission is too small to affect the size of the pie. The inflation rate from tail emission is asymptotically zero.

5. Privacy or no privacy, it's still crypto, which protects your fiat from inflation.

6. Monero can scale on the lightning network to millions of transactions per second. The more technical reasons, like auditing supply and POW aren't big enough problems for consumers to worry about.

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

#118
post #37

No one is backing them. Users don't care about how crypto works they care if the product works. Take applepay for example, majority of merchants use it because users want to pay with it. Users don't care about a lecture on privacy and government overreach. Tell them it does 2 tap/click payment and also it manages your cc and then give merchants free crypto payment terminals. You can onlh use it online and only if the…

> "No one is backing them"

There are many patents by Visa and Mastercard backing crypto. Paypal lets consumers buy products with crypto.

Do you seriously believe big payment processors have as one of their goals to never, ever, under any circumstance use blockchain?

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

#119
Over the past 3 years the number of Monero transactions increased 10x. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactions.htm...

Over the past 3 years the number of Litecoin transactions increased 5x. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/litecoin-transactions.h...

What do you mean privacy coins aren't seeing wide adoption? Are you deliberately being wrong on the Internet to have someone correct you to draw attention and increase adoption?

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

#120
post #37

No one is backing them. Users don't care about how crypto works they care if the product works. Take applepay for example, majority of merchants use it because users want to pay with it. Users don't care about a lecture on privacy and government overreach. Tell them it does 2 tap/click payment and also it manages your cc and then give merchants free crypto payment terminals. You can onlh use it online and only if the…

> "No one is backing them" There are many patents by Visa and Mastercard backing crypto. Paypal lets consumers buy products with crypto. Do you seriously believe big payment processors have as one of their goals to never, ever, under any circumstance use blockchain?

No, but they aren't supporting as part of their network either. Their plans and actions are different things.
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