“Monero has assumed the role that Bitcoin once hinted at in its earliest days: private, peer-to-peer electronic cash.”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/privacy-and-fungibility-forgotten-virtues-sound-money
Discussion
I don't think privacy was ever a primary intention of bitcoin, actually the opposite. One of it's key features is / was the public blockchain.
It was a proof of concept. Developers didn't think much about it at that time.
This is often misunderstood.
Public blockchain as in "anyone can audit it " aka no "trust me bro".
Monero is a public blockchain too, except it's opaque. It can still be verified just the same, at the cost of more computation and with the slightly added risk of there potentially being a bug in critical parts of the cryptography that makes the opaqueness possible.
A public blockchain without privacy is just a surveillance machine.
Without thinking, people have been busy normalizing that for a decade and a half now.
“Chainalysis estimated dm txs at $2.3 billion, attributing this decline to a migration from BTC to Monero (XMR). Monero is excluded from their analysis due to its private nature.”
“As the leading privacy coin, Monero continues to challenge the state’s control over money.”
What do you think about Monero’s inability to scale to support all commercial transactions. Is the goal to fix this at some point?
It will scale when it must or eventually a better coin will replace it.
Seems hard for any L1 with really good privacy to scale to VISA levels due to the encryption overhead. I’m thinking that practically you need either a solution where you use a high provacy chain for important transactions and you pay more and a low privacy chain for cheap transactions (what do I care what people know about my grocery purchases.) Either in a single Tech or mix and match chains per use case. Would love it if some amazing solution were to emerge that makes it possible all in one L1 like Monero or ZCash though.
> Transparent blockchains, by their very nature, are incompatible with sound money. Fungibility is fragile and cannot survive without privacy. Digital assets that aren’t private by default become tools of control, putting our freedoms at risk. In a world where traceable digital payments are becoming the norm, private digital cash stands as a vital bulwark against the state.
In other words, what #monero folks have been screaming from the rooftops since the beginning.
Indeed, this is essentially why Monero exists.
One would think it's not a hard concept to grasp, but alas..
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, a broken blockchain: