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Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

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Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#71

Post by jrm4 »

imtringued wrote: post #57
jrm4 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not what I've seen here. This is one of the few topics here where I think emotion STRONGLY gets in the way of reason. Too few people are "first princpl-ing" this to understand that the crypto-train, to some extent, is happening whether any of us like it or not.

The problem with the cryptocurrency advocates is that they have zero clue about money. Neoclassical economics declares money irrelevant and not something to study, so there is hardly any research how money influences a society beyond central bank policy about how much money there should be. Here is a tip. Money is a transaction cost reducing device. That is it's primary function. By transaction costs I don't mean jus…

I 99% agree and and also argue that the 1% is significant.

Money is sometimes that, but it's also merely a store of value. And I think this what people are missing. I agree that we're almost certainly not going to say paying for coffee in bitcoin.

But where it has legs is as the 401k/money in the mattress replacement; a space that's still very "competitive," i.e. a lot of the options here still really suck, thanks to inflation and/or third parties.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#72

Post by bunabhucan »

forty wrote: post #45
EscapeFromNY wrote: post #19

Monero is perhaps the only cryptocurrency that both works as advertised, and has gathered a self-sustaining userbase. No $20 transaction fees. No influencer pump and dumps. No VCs who need to extract value. No fork drama. No unrealistic roadmap. No charismatic leader boiling the frog with scope creep. It's not trying to be an investment. It's actually private. It's actually anonymous. This is all a lot of us ever wan…

I'm curious, what are people purchasing with it?

>We are seeing an emerging trend where ransomware actors first demand payment in Monero at a discounted ransom amount,

https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/news/252512142/Ran...

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#73

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

jrm4 wrote: post #61
Yizahi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inevitable for law avoidance? Sure. We know quite well that humans like very much systems which allow them to avoid laws of any kind, so of course such a system will survive for a long time. Inevitable for lawful daily usage? Nope. Fundamental problems and lack of benefits will prevent blockchain based ledgers to be deployed in any useful scalable way. Actually not "will" but rather "did". Token proposals had a decad…

Not daily and I think that's the thing. I suppose when one says "cryptocurrency," there are a lot of possible ways one might use it. I agree that for a daily driver, very unlikely. But "store of value" is still very much in play. Crypto as a competitor to the 401k or "money in the mattress" strikes me as damn near inevitable.

There's no way in hell you could convince me to invest in anything as volatile as a pile of crypto coin for my retirement. My retirement account is for slow, gentle, growth, not for a rollercoaster that could end up at zero (within the realm of reasonability - yes, the entire stock market could disappear, but at that point we're not retiring, we're firing up the pursuit special and heading into the desert). This is why ETFs are so popular - they remove a lot of the volatility.

Why would I put my money under the mattress if I could pull it out tomorrow and it'd be worth half of what I thought it was? Yes, inflation is a thing for fiat, but that's nowhere near as volatile as crypto has and continues to be.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#74

Post by kossTKR »

EscapeFromNY wrote: post #19

Monero is perhaps the only cryptocurrency that both works as advertised, and has gathered a self-sustaining userbase. No $20 transaction fees. No influencer pump and dumps. No VCs who need to extract value. No fork drama. No unrealistic roadmap. No charismatic leader boiling the frog with scope creep. It's not trying to be an investment. It's actually private. It's actually anonymous. This is all a lot of us ever wan…

[flagged]

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#75

Post by lawn »

mrangle wrote: post #69

Investing in a coin for the purpose of privacy is not a good investment. This is because the government has to criminalize every private currency and privatizing method with any significant use. If it hasn't been criminalized yet, it is just because they haven't yet gotten around to it. I'm not saying that one can't hope for privacy. Only that the investment risk is extremely lopsided in this moment. Expect that the…

The biggest issue with cryptocurrencies is that people always seem to only view them as an investment, instead of what usage they may have.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#76

Post by jrm4 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #31
jrm4 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. It's always felt like there's a disproportionate amount of hate for crypto -- not that people should like it or love it, but that I'm surprised that tech people here don't appear to understand its inevitability. So it seems like they treat it as something to be killed (impossible) as opposed to something to buckle up and get ready to manage (more or less like they correctly do with AI.)

> I'm surprised that tech people here don't appear to understand its inevitability. All progress depends on the "unreasonable man". I don't think it's inevitable at all, nor have I seen any evidence that it will be. Thus far non-government blockchains have proven to be ill suited for applications other than speculation (and crime). Central bank "programmable money" is definitely a threat - but it's hardly inevitable…

You should look harder for the evidence. 1% is all you need. There is a not-insignificant number of people using crypto to move and store money today. I agree A LOT of garbage is going to get shaken out, but this says to me "okay, what part/idea in crypto survives this bloodbath and gets bigger," not "throw the whole thing out."

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#77

Post by tromp »

ur-whale wrote: post #60
roenxi wrote: post #22

Might also consider https://www.getmonero.org/library/ which has links for both both Mastering Monero and the more technical "Zero to Monero" [0] where they go through the maths in detail. Monero really is quite something. It is eye opening to realise there has never been a situation where one person could simply transfer wealth to someone else without anyone in the middle being able to say No. A powerful tool for li…

> It is eye opening to realize there has never been a situation where one person could simply transfer wealth to someone else without anyone in the middle being able to say No. Well, this is what the promise of Bitcoin was, but the lack of anonymity in BTC missed the mark by a few inches. Monero (and it's competitors: ZCash, Grin, Beam, MWC, ...), which IIRC uses the Mimblewimble [1] principle to preserve anonymity)…

Grin and Beam use Mimblewimble, but Monero uses ring signatures to obscure the transaction graph (with every real input hiding among 16 decoys), and Zcash uses ZK-SNARK zero knowledge proofs [1].

This makes the latter two chains grow at a much faster rate [2] and leaves nodes unable to identify the UTXO set of unspent outputs, making them more resource intensive.

[1] https://electriccoin.co/blog/explaining-halo-2/

[2] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart/8114

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#78

Post by ponymontana »

When someone try to hardfork bitcoin, bitcoin remain the same and the new fork is just a fork of bitcoin. Network effect and convergence over the open standard in action; the edge that protects bitcoin.

When someone forks monero, the new fork is called "monero" and all the small userbase moves over it. The old chain simply dies. No network-effect to resist changes because theres no network at all compared to bitcoin.

Same for all the crypto.

Its absurd to save money in monero or in all the crypto where someone can easily move the inexistent userbase and do hardforks. But if you cant save because the expected value of the cryptos over time is zero, what is the meaning of exchange these assets?

All crytpos that are not bitcoin (even monero) can only work on the informative asimmetry where some people ignore these facts and, scammed by promoters, holds these non-sense assets expecting returns that will never come. The promoters, instead, will make money dumping on them.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#79

Post by jrm4 »

kelnos wrote: post #52
slowmotiony wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hear about "scam stories" because they're usually interesting and they get clicks so media will naturally put them on the spotlight. You don't hear about thoudands of people in third world countries who are able to get capital for their projects, start up their business by avoid sanctions put on their countries banking systems, NGOs who are able to collect donations while in autocratic regimes, sick people who ca…

Being able to wire $100 to your buddy across the world isn't so useful when you can't be sure if it'll be worth $90 or $100 or $110 by the time your buddy goes to use it.

Silly example.

Add some zeroes to those numbers and now it is.

(especially if the transaction fees remain in the 10s)

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#80

Post by peyton »

Yizahi wrote: post #53
suslik wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what crypto allow its users to do that they would not be able to do otherwise with less resources International money transfers, for instance. The traditional banking system was always slow and expensive, and, on top of that, countries cut each other out due to geopolitical reasons. Many third-world countries have a decent crypto adoption, you can send someone money in a matter of minutes (I do).

I can send money in minutes too from bank to bank, internationally and domestically. I could do it for years now. Some very big sums require approval and are delayed. But guess what - it's not a technical limitation but a legal one. It not like some TCP packet can transmit wire transfer of 1000 dollars and unable to do so for 50000 dollars. And we as society do want to control large sum transfers, unless we want to e…

The other day I tried to wire money to somebody in a different country, but my bank didn’t support that country. So I used USDC and sent the funds in seconds without any issue.
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