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I feel like Monero is in a tough spot. Not enough network effect to compete with Bitcoin, and new scaling layers like Arc and Lightning actively building out to provide privacy.
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I don't see cryptocurrencies as something to be killed. I think the vast majority of them are illogical, based on wishful thinking and severe ignorance or outright scams. People will point out one among twenty thousand without realizing that the exception proves the rule. Yeah sure keep speculating on your "digital gold" I don't care. Unlike holding dollars as demand deposits or cash, you can't hijack the economy. Yo…
> People will point out one among twenty thousand without realizing that the exception proves the rule. This argument doesn't hold well. Creating huge amounts of value is expected to be the exception rather than the rule - one of the powerful mechanisms at play here is this is an unusually free market where failure is cheap and all the money clusters to success. It is reasonable to ignore the thousands of failures. T…
The speed and amount of effort to innovate, by basically every demographic of persons, is breathtaking and exciting. Due to low startup costs (lack of gatekeepers), most will fail. That is okay, because the builders are not playing with super powder.
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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.
It's been almost 15 years. There's still no valid crypto use case outside of speculation and crime.
Parallel to barter, desire-to-use is all that is required for use-case.
Governments are going to remain challenged by the need to now assert that possession or use of a legal instrument, with no inherent illegal characteristic, is now evidence of intent to crime.
Not that I don't expect them to rise to the occasion. As they have been by implementing crude sanction power in place of legislation.
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?
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Sure, and that's exactly why sovereign states don't like monero and mixers - but that is their problem, not mine. Also, in many cases transferring crypto is not illegal - for instance, it is legal to transfer money to non-sanction banks in Russia, but in many countries, the banking system doesn't allow that. If you had a 90y.o. starving grandma there, you'd be grateful for the crypto.
Via sanctions, it is illegal for you to use specific mixers assuming you are a US citizen. Which does make it your problem. And if you have a mixer or private coin that isn't under sanction, it is only a matter of time as determined by the US gov's assessment of the risk of it being widely adopted.
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The whole point of monero is that it's none of other people's business what I buy with my money.
Sorry maybe my question was not well asked. I don't want to know what you buy, but more generally what can be bought with it.
I did confirm at least one store: 3% discount for BTC and XMR https://shopinbit.com/electronics/tablets-smartphones/tablet...
I feel like Monero is in a tough spot. Not enough network effect to compete with Bitcoin, and new scaling layers like Arc and Lightning actively building out to provide privacy.
The network effect will come when the FED and ECB "save" everybody from their manufactured hyper inflation (give or take 2 years from now) through CBDC.
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?
In such an environment, being able to donate money with anonymity quickly starts to look like a political necessity. And being able to support people directly if the financial system is further activated as a political weapon (I suspect not much has actually changed, just the records are more easily available - but for the sake of argument lets say this is a new phenomenon that we happen to have also just developed a method for resisting).
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/08/biden-mag...
Going to mention this as a top level comment because a lot of people here seem to believe that Monero is an anonymous cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, techniques to break Monero's anonymity have been known since 2018, and these techniques are effective at breaking essentially any partial-mixing based cryptocurrency. (Monero, Lelantus, CoinJoin, Wasabi, etc). Initial attacks (famously The Flashlight Attack) were capable…