FCMP++ upgrade will be huge for sender privacy bringing Monero's technical strength in line with ZCash.
The new site[1] looks great as well; it was funded by the CCS.
I will be buying some Monero for the first time because of this thread.
Drop a Monero address here and I'll send you a tiny amount for your first transaction.
I recommend CakeWallet, which is cross-platform, user friendly, and does a lot of good for the community, but any of the wallets recommended on the official[1] website are fine.
p.s. you or anyone can reach out via my contacts in bio if you have any questions about Monero.
Drop me your address, and I will also send a little bit your way, to get you hooked!
45nQZrXEDSL8UPj7DeJRrcdFkAteCajG4bGGsQP7cmWwiZU63dpfWe9RPpas38BAU4Kwv5NSKBsnacXewQszMhrx7fgTQLe
And interestingly, it's one of the least-used least-hyped options. It's as though we didn't actually want privacy in our money system.
I think a hint into this is actually in one of these posted features: https://repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/me...
One of the reasons for building a proper payments system is "Casino games"...
con: this improves the chances if the world to devolving into an authoritarean hellscape
While I am here, I might as well give you a brief Esperanto lesson. Mono = money, ero = piece/quantum. So, "pano" = bread, "panero" = bread-crumb. Thus, "monero" = coin.
Many previous international currencies (all of them created with Swiss involvement), were also given Esperanto names: Spesmilo (thousand speso's (speso is analogous to "penny")), Stelo (star).
There is even a luxury watch-brand (from Switzerland) called "Movado", which is Esperanto for "Movement" (made back when watches were made with mechanical movements).
And I also learned, from the linked thread (disclosure, I am a participant), that there is a soft-drink called "Mirinda". This is an adjective that means "awe-worthy".
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Esperanto/comments/1sobiko/comment/...
There is lots of interest from individuals. But governments all around the world have done their best to suppress it. They indeed do not like privacy and independence. They are the ones who sued and pressured exchanges into delisting Monero.
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/grincoin/comments/mu88ow/comment/gv6...
Official condemnation doesn't work like that. Facebook's cryptocurrency, Libra, was also condemned, and we know it didn't work because it never actually existed.
I asked an honest question about the pros and cons. Every technology has pros and cons, right?
ETA: just to be clear - that's a genuine question. I don't know much about monero, so if it really is possible to have untraceable money, that seems like a prudent investment for precaution. I've just always assumed that digital money is inherently traceable, so I always assumed genuine privacy is a mirage. I assume I'm wrong about that, somehow, so I'm curious about the mechanisms of that anonymity.
And outlawing bitcoin has become basically impossible after the large amount of ETF inflows. Monero is nice technology, but I think the ship has already sailed for Bitcoin (and L2 solutions like lightning).
What are the pros of Monero, and what are the cons?
Pros:
1% inflation
no fixed supply (makes it more of a currency than an asset)
privacy by default,
fungibility—every coin is the exact same, no coin history
prevents financial surveillance by corporations,
protects against government abuses,
useful tool for activists, journalists, minorities, useful for domestic abuse survivors,
useful for businesses sending money across borders,
protects against stalkers,
protects against advertisers profiling you,
reduces identity theft,
prevents databreaches of personal info,
pushes forward cryptography,
allows people to purchase drugs (you decide if this is good or bad),
prevents financial censorship,
allows anonymous donations,
low fees,
more decentralized than bitcoin due to RandomX CPU mining,
prevents crypto robbery,
allows you to buy your adult content without anyone knowing.
large developer community iirc 3rd after bitcoin, eth
less volatile than other cryptos
usually most used crypto for payments when accepted at merchants
Cons:
20 minutes to use funds again
hard to aquire
number go up slower
hard to convert back to fiat
hard to convert to fiat
used by "criminals"
lots of nazis like it
used for unethical purposes
I am not a bitcoin-as-currency evangelist. I see it more as digital gold, and gold is not a currency today. It will have its role as a store of value and fallback unit of trade that keeps government currencies in check - another pillar in financial checks-and-balances.
So the 'true cryptocurrency' hasn't been tried yet, eh? ;)
And the US government is being bribed by Silicon Valley to adopt crypto...
> I am not a bitcoin-as-currency evangelist
Then why all the talk about Lighning and the dismissal of Monero?
apart from waiting for the confirmation, otherwise you're in double spend territory.
Any high-volatile asset such as bitcoin is IMHO not suited as currency. The good news is, with the bitcoin taproot upgrade and latest lightning standards, you can actually issue stablecoins over bitcoin's taproot asset protocol, and send it over the existing lightning network. My bet is on stablecoins-over-lightning as currency, and bitcoin as store of value. One blockchain to rule them all, other chains not need (for financial transactions at least).
- Ethereum's blockchain consumes less energy, is more decentralized, it's a lot more resistent to any form of attack and it can also host fixed-supply coins.
- Market cap is a meaningless metric, it's at best circular logic and at worst it's just a "one billion flies can't be wrong" argumentum ad populum.
- It baffles me how the Bitcoin enthusiasts talk so much about ideology and freedom, but get completely silent about the fact that most mining operations are done in countries with oppressive regimes, financed or subsidized by dictators with access to cheap fossil fuels.
Plus the global transaction rate would also stop it really being useful for day to day spending for a country.
"Fully anonymous" is a strong term. Even cash is not fully anonymous. I would give monero that it is more anonymous than lightning because it is a core design principal. There is a spectrum to anonymity, however. As public enemy number one, such as Snowden or BinLaden, your anonymity requirements are different than a citizen buying illegal erectile dysfunction medication online.
If you consider the new features added in lightning over the past 24 months such as trampoline payments, blinded paths etc. - you will find that lightning is anonymous enough. Plus, you can increase anonymity in the client implementation at the expense of higher transaction fees (longer paths, more trampolines). Lightning's BOLT12 standard, which is currently finalized, will increase anonymity even further.
> Ethereum's blockchain consumes less energy, is more decentralized, it's a lot more resistent to any form of attack and it can also host fixed-supply coins.
Thats is factually untrue. First, ethereum famously had a human-coordinated rollback with a controlled restart organized between devs and node runners over Discord. Second, Ethereum is not decentralzied at all, because that is a core property of proof-of-stake: There is no way at any given time that you can be sure that the majority stake is not already in a single entities (or colluding group) possesion - and would thus have absolute control. It is therefore never guaranteed at any given time, that the network is decentralized.
> Market cap is a meaningless metric, it's at best circular logic and at worst it's just a "one billion flies can't be wrong" argumentum ad populum.
Price is ultimately what determines the value of anything. It is absolutely far from meaningless, as the market cap is also a big factor if a crypto asset can be outlawed or banned. Given how many investors in the west already own bitcoin, there would be a massive outcry if it is suddenly outlawed. I say you could outlaw Monero tomorrow and the mainstream media wouldn't even cover it.
> It baffles me how the Bitcoin enthusiasts talk so much about ideology and freedom, but get completely silent about the fact that most mining operations are done in countries with oppressive regimes, financed or subsidized by dictators with access to cheap fossil fuels.
You mean, such as the United States? Because the US (especially Texas) is one of the biggest miners of bitcoin currently.
But you can only make any claims about the properties of a system when looking at the extremes. If Bitcoin's blockchain does not make strong anonymity guarantees as Monero, then Bitcoin by definition can not be the "blockchain to rule them all" that you so desperately want.
>ethereum famously had a human-coordinated rollback with a controlled restart organized between devs and node runners over Discord.
That was achieved through social coordination. No backdoor was exploited, no one had their coins stolen on the original chain. The system worked as intended.
Can you say the same about Bitcoin? Do you think that all these banks and exchanges trading ETFs have secured access to the bitcoins they claim to have? When one of these institutions goes bust, who is going to bail them out?
You keep trying to argue that Bitcoin is more valuable because it is more likely to be supported by the powers-that-be, and that is the strongest indicator that all your evangelism is driven by "Greater Fool" dynamic. Satoshi's idea for crytocurrencies was to have an alternative system that worked despite adversarial governments, yet we keep getting time-and-again evidence that it can only work if it becomes of an instrument for the powerful institutions that caused the problems in the first place.
Bitcoin and its blockchain has no intrinsic value. Unlike Monero, it is not fully anonymous. Unlike Ethereum, it has no utility for decentralized applications. It can not be used as a currency. All Bitcoin has is first-mover advantage and a huge number of people with cognitive dissonance trying to keep the bubble inflated.
> Because the US (especially Texas) is one of the biggest miners of bitcoin currently.
Access to cheap fossil fuels? Check.
Facilitated by the government? Check!
Serving the interests of the elites and the aspirational 14% instead of the general populace? Check!
No, Layer-2 systems only transfer cryptographically signed IOUs between nodes.
Settlement only happens when these IOUs are cashed out, and to cash out you need a transaction in the blockchain layer, so the point about latency still stands.
Anything offchain has a whole bunch of issues that are either naively or deliberately obscured by the fact that it _eventually_ writes to the blockchain. The exchanges that offer instant settlement are circumventing trust by doing the settlement for you. You get speed, but not security that they have done what they have said they have.
To be honest I think the issue here is not due to speed of settlement, but layer-2 is not an acceptable substitute because it does not allow reversability. For the merchants it's good that they are getting the money right away, but most consumers will not dare to pay anything via layer-2 networks simply because they won't have any recourse in case they want to undo the transaction.