261–270 of 394 posts
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It depends on the kind of crime. Some crime is easier with cash. For example, many professional bartenders commit tax fraud every day by not reporting cash tips. This is directly facilitated by paper currencies.
It is not "facilitated" by it, that is just because cash tips are given in paper currencies and not in Monero. If tips were given in Monero, the tax fraud would be even easier.
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My fear with strongly anonymous DeFi is indirectly harming the environment and supporting crime. Sadly doesn't look like Monero resolve these concerns.
I don't know how it could resolve the "supporting crime" concern, really. When something is anonymous/private, it's going to be used for things you don't like. It's then all about whether you think the tradeoff is worth it. Personally, I think it is, but I understand how others can have different viewpoints. I think the logical conclusion if you take the opposite stance is that you're against anonymity and/or privacy…
People are all for anonymity until law enforcement can no longer catch criminals. There's a balance there your statement is lacking. It's kinda like saying if you support anonymity, you must be clearly pro-crime, which I don't think you are.
E.g. Banking regulations don't allow banks to publish details of customer's accounts. But KYC allows banks to report questionable activity to FINCEN, say. And that seems to strike a balance between regulation and anonymity.
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Oh no, it works like cash! People will do things with money that you're uncomfortable with. If it's criminal, then laws and enforcement and investigation will have to evolve. That doesn't mean "well, I guess we have to give up privacy now. " Not your money, not your business. Privacy is important, and it's a binary proposition. It's either part of the currency or it's not. You can't have any gray area because people…
Cash doesn't burn a bunch of electricity on a PoW scheme.
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Financial anonymity is important — just because the panic of the day is “secret Nazis” doesn’t make this untrue. Consider a woman trying to escape domestic abuse, who has been financially trapped. If all transactions are untraceable, a $20 to “a grocery store” here and there can very well be her escape route. Same goes for oppressed individuals attempting to escape abusive families, neighborhoods, countries. Realisti…
Just because the government knows about my bank account doesn't mean my wife/neighbor/rando does. No one is talking about radically public bank accounts; the surveillance is only for the government.
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ZCash is controlled by a privately-owned company in the U.S., who gave themselves founder's rewards. It's also designed in a way to allow "poison pills" - i.e. those in control can force a single transaction on a block, thus giving a vector to deanonymize someone. You may ask, "Who would do something like that?" and the answer would be the U.S. government who can compel privately owned organizations via secret court…
With monero you can analyze residuals to deanonymize people.
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You are correct on the Bitcoin-is-easy-to-trace point but transactions in the Bitcoin Lightning Network are instant and very cheap. Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with guaranteed-not-to-change monetary policy and supply cap. That's because Bitcoin as a whole is uniquely hard to change. Monero is great but easy to change and so not a reliable store of value. Bitcoin and Monero need each other badly.
In a few decades, when the block subsidy dwindles to insignificance, Bitcoin relies on a constant backlog of high fee paying transactions to provide security. If that cannot be maintained and Bitcoin becomes prone to 51% attacks, then one can imagine Bitcoin adding a tail emission. A cryptocurrency with a fixed emission of 1 coin per second forever is more guaranteed never to change, as it is already as simple, non-a…
Monero is changing (hard-forking) regularly, so your point is broken on arrival - and I am saying this as Monero proponent. I love Monero but it is easy to change.
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It's harder for mining oligopolies to exclude new entrants.
How? The only way I can think of that staking oligopolies can exclude new entrants is if they somehow manage to remove the crypto from markets. Basically killing their stake. It is far easier for me to buy some crypto and stake it than it is to buy mining hardware and mine.
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My fear with strongly anonymous DeFi is indirectly harming the environment and supporting crime. Sadly doesn't look like Monero resolve these concerns.
There's lots of things that an order of magnitude more folks do that harm the environment than DeFi/cryptocurrency/shitcoin gambling. I'd love to revisit the environmental impacts of cryptocurrency after we've moved to electric cars, decreased car usage, decreased HVAC waste, made our toilets/sinks/showers more efficient, made our factories run on hydrogen instead of coal, and clean up shipping emissions. Once we're…
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How? The only way I can think of that staking oligopolies can exclude new entrants is if they somehow manage to remove the crypto from markets. Basically killing their stake. It is far easier for me to buy some crypto and stake it than it is to buy mining hardware and mine.
Mining hardware just means commodity electronics; the guys with ASICs may be faster but they can't shut you out entirely, and the miners don't generally control the people who make hardware (even the specialised ASICs). Whereas the stakers inherently control the supply of the crypto in question (and they can can e.g. cut off people who sell large amounts to outsiders, in a way that they couldn't cut off hardware make…
How would they do that?
I'm not really happy promoting a cryptocurrency these days, given that most of them are get-rich-quick schemes, but Monero has been solid for the past 5-6 years that I've been using it. It's completely anonymous, sends quickly, has minimal fees, and it hasn't been as full of cultists as some of the other coins I've seen. I use it to pay for some things and it's always a pleasant experience. I recommend it. The only d…
It's hard to have a light Monero client, because it has to have some data indexed about all past transactions, whereas a Bitcoin client only needs to maintain the MUCH smaller UTXO set, i.e. the unspent transaction outputs. This is one of the ways in which Monero scales poorly. Another problem is that Monero's PoW is expensive to verify where a good PoW should be instantly verifiable. In fact, it's considered so expe…