Live data from Hacker News

Why Monero

benkaiser.dev

351–360 of 394 posts

Re: Why Monero

#351
post #246

Waaaay down at the bottom you see something like this: > Personal Speculation > Disclosure: I own a small amount of Monero, Bitcoin and Nano. How small? $1M might be small to a billionaire. To others $50k is a large amount. Otherwise it seems like yet another blog post shilling crypto.

0.5XMR if you're interested, worth about $125 USD

Maybe put that at the top?

Re: Why Monero

#352
post #347
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For salary or wage payments, kind of. If you received your normal wages in XMR then the government would have a hard time proving anything illegal is happening, even if both your employer and you are breaking the law.

If your employer wants to help you committing tax fraud, they would have to cook the books, which is a lot of work and entails a considerable amount of risk. Whether they pay you with a cryptocurrency or real money doesn't make any difference, as far as I can see.

No, they can just not withhold your tax obligation. Mandatory withholding is not even the norm -- KS and MO don't require it, it seems only Eastern seaboard states and maybe CA do.

People keep walking this back to massive fraud but more likely what anonymity will do is just allow businesses to escape onerous operating issues. E.g. having employees in some states is worse than having them in others because of those state's perceived requirements to operate an LLC in that state, and other related rules. It's not even clear if some of these requirements are enforceable federally.

Re: Why Monero

#353
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 makers How would they do that?

In theory couldn’t they exclude any transactions made by an ‘exile’ from the chain? I’m not sure how much that differs from doing the same thing on a PoW coin. It is harder to start as a PoS miner but to have the kind of iron control over a coins distribution means you’d have to make it effectively worthless because only the current owners could be ‘trusted’ to be the receivers of transactions. So while it’s theoreti…

> In theory couldn’t they exclude any transactions made by an ‘exile’ from the chain? I’m not sure how much that differs from doing the same thing on a PoW coin.

That is also my thinking, that there basically isn't any difference between staking and mining oligopolies.

> So while it’s theoretically possible for a miners cabal to lock out a new entrant it seems pretty opposed to the value of their own holdings so it’s left to something like a country that wants to shut it down through throwing money at the problem then I guess?

In theory, if the stakers are anonymous, this make PoS more resistant to nation state attacks since it would be easier for a nation state to find the mining equipment producers and direct all hardware production to themselves until they acquire 51% of hash rate than it is to find the stakers and take their keys.

Looking forward to lmm explaining how we are wrong.

Re: Why Monero

#354
post #223

Bitcoin is totally useless as a currency because it’s slow, has high transaction fees, and easy to trace. So it’s bad for both regular consumers and criminals alike. Monero is a solid improvement because it has low fees (so far) and is very hard to trace. So it’s popular for criminals or intense privacy types. It’s still far too slow and hard to use to ever be accepted in your local grocery store. It’s also hard to b…

The fees will remain low in terms of fiat value assuming that if the price goes up, activity goes up due to Monero's adaptive blocksize. See https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/12729/when-monero... Regarding the speed, many believe that instant / unconfirmed transactions are safe for day to day activities up to 10000USD. It's very difficult to double spend or inject numerous conflicting malicious transactions…

This view seems to imply the double spend problem wasn’t really a problem after all, which seems to invalidate the reason why a peer to peer proof of work/stake system is implemented from the start.

Re: Why Monero

#355
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory couldn’t they exclude any transactions made by an ‘exile’ from the chain? I’m not sure how much that differs from doing the same thing on a PoW coin. It is harder to start as a PoS miner but to have the kind of iron control over a coins distribution means you’d have to make it effectively worthless because only the current owners could be ‘trusted’ to be the receivers of transactions. So while it’s theoreti…

> In theory couldn’t they exclude any transactions made by an ‘exile’ from the chain? I’m not sure how much that differs from doing the same thing on a PoW coin. That is also my thinking, that there basically isn't any difference between staking and mining oligopolies. > So while it’s theoretically possible for a miners cabal to lock out a new entrant it seems pretty opposed to the value of their own holdings so it’s…

There are records of every coin purchased that is staked. Unless you were able to get someone to anonymously sell you a stake worth, staking is very far from anonymous. In practice, most are going to be using staking providers or delegated proof of stake, and these are corporations that will absolutely be corrupted by states.

Mining is anonymous and portable.

Re: Why Monero

#356
post #178

GNU Taler is (for Europeans at least) the most promising system, because it is controllable (at least on the merchant side). The users themself are anonymous, just like when using cash! That is a good system because it enables governments to still being able to tax businesses and control illegal activities. Such system will also gain more acceptance among the common folks. https://taler.net/en/index.html

With Monero you can still let the government see your transactions, by sharing a view key with them.

And you also have the possibility to avoid taxes if you want. So, it's a superior system because it allows both use cases ;)

Re: Why Monero

#357
post #119
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human kidnappings and subverting international sanctions account for what? 0.0001% of all transactions? So you're saying 99.9% of the population shouldn't benefit from this because there will be a tiny percentage misusing it? I take it you're against privacy, encryption and gun ownership too then right?

I'm for expansive, but limited versions of these things. I think your love letters should be private from the gov't, I don't think your income should be private from the gov't. I think nearly everyone should be able to own a rifle, but I don't think any private citizen should be able to own a tank. There are many aspects of life where I think the costs outweigh the benefits for citizen in society. Since there are tri…

I'll take tyranny of the minority over tyranny of the government any day.

Re: Why Monero

#358

I used to hold Monero, my issue with it is that it's main use case of anonymity aids the anti-crypto story of crypto being used for money laundering or other illicit activities.

We should not use USD then.

That's an argument against paper currency, not for Monero.

Re: Why Monero

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if you're buying a car the same is unlikely to be true. I don't see why not, it's not like you can buy a car anonymously. If anything there's more security there than with the coffee, and no one is going to attack the Monero network to create a double spend for the price of a car.

>I don't see why not, it's not like you can buy a car anonymously. You can buy a car with cash. Monero is digital cash.

I think you're agreeing with me.

Re: Why Monero

#360
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reddit user someone else linked to pretty clearly explained the Monero side. Zcash has a bad reputation with darknet markets and the like that use Monero. Some of it deserved. ( I say this as someone who wrote original Zerocash protocol) https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/oui6zj/zcash_vs_mon... Also, Zcash has optional privacy. On the other hand, the decoy based privacy protocols Monero uses are not…

Are there coins that learned from the bungled launch of zcash and did things right according to what was valued by the community? Like private by default, avoiding perceived trust issues by being more above board, making ASIC resistance a priority, adopting a public irreverence of compliance, not being associated with people who worked with untrusted organizations and so on?

Bitcoin gold has a asic resistant pow, but all the same btc issues so far as I know, because it’s a btc fork.
Post reply on HN