Threat to what? Monero isn't a threat to the monetary system like bitcoin because it doesn't beat inflation enough to demand more adoption. Monero doesn't have a supply cap. So if monero isn't growing in purchasing power at a faster rate than bitcoin, it won't be adopted by majority of people. And if it isn't adopted in large numbers, then you'll be stuck in the fiat system. Why? Because you can't pay your mortgage in monero. You can't pay it in bitcoin either but which currency is more likely to be accepted by everyone in 10 years? It's bitcoin. So as long as people want to live in a home, you have to convert to fiat first. Unless bitcoin dies, monero can't be the answer. Money is a winner take all game. History supports this view.
Discussion
I’m talking about exchanges banning Monero by being forced by regulators why would they take the effort to ban it if is wasnt any threat.
And if the threat is the privacy then why not ban lightning too. Same reason they went after Samourai they don’t want private bitcoin tx to exist
The problem with samourai is that they were centralized. That was a bad mistake. I don't think it's a coincidence they went after samourai right when they started to decentralize it. They didn't even have real evidence they just made up some bs excuse and then started building a case against them.
But again private transactions is a big enough threat to build a case against ppl with no real evidence as you put it. Message seems pretty clear to me.
They had no case. That's what I'm trying to argue. The don't need one. If you believe that 2 + 2 = 4 but I have a gun to your head and say that 2 + 2 = 5 then I am right. There is no justice. They don't need to build a case. They just need to maintain the image that they built a case and delivered justice. And people are retarded so they don't notice and proceed as usual. They can literally make a case based on anything they want because no one can stop them. They'll kill you.
One more point. As I mentioned before, these regulators are human. They operate off incentives just like we do. The reason lightning isn't banned MAY simply be because they don't want to lose the revenues they generate off capital gains taxes. If you send bitcoin from an exchange to a base chain address, you can then move that into lightning. Banning lightning on exchanges doesn't stop lightning from being private. So it may not make a big difference to regulators and chainaysis if you withdraw main chain or through lightning. But you are giving these regulators too much credit. They are not as smart as you are making them out to be. If chainalysis can't track lightning because it's impossible, it is in their best interest to hide that information from regulators because they want more money for themselves.
And if we are going to make reaches based on little evidence, you could argue that this is just a psyop to make monero seem like it's more private in order to make bitcoiners think that lightning isn't private. And that makes bitcoiners more likely to pay their capital gains taxes. That's what regulators care about more than anything else after all: money and power. If monero grew in popularity, the potential return on capital gains taxes would be higher. Then regulators would be more likely to add monero back to the exchanges. I'm not saying these things are true but if we are going to make arguments without evidence and just speculation, you can speculate a million different things in millions of directions.
The thing is Monero is growing independent of CEX. The future we are building just ignores centralised third parties as stated in Satoshi's whitepaper.
Why would I care about capital gains, when there is a sufficient secondary market and DEX. You are caught in the old TradFi paradigm, but with orange color.
Yea pretty suspect they were on the verge of decentralizing whirlpool coordination + adding Monero swaps for toxic change around the same time they were raided
Yea I remember listening to a podcast about them working on decentralized coordinators and shortly Samourai wallet was down and they were arrested they both side must have sensed the urgency.
You want to know why.
TVL in LN is abyssimal. Of that low number 90%+ is controlled by bank like operators that have deals with chainanalytic companies (Binance, Kraken,...).
That's the network side.
Then you have the user side.
90% of users use custodial services with 0 privacy.
If you use LN in a self-custodial way you are such an exception that you stick out between all the others which ironically increases your fingerprintability.
As LN growth the centralisation that liquidity demands will only ever increase.
There is strength in numbers.
Idk. Regulators are humans too and they don't always behave rationally. Also, there are ways to de-anonymize monero. nostr:npub1yxp7j36cfqws7yj0hkfu2mx25308u4zua6ud22zglxp98ayhh96s8c399s has shown this. So if your argument that monero is more private simply because regulators chose to ban it isn't a strong piece of evidence.
Yea in summary if you send it to a KYC exchange or you swap it with a transparent chain you can link it up to a person but this is more user error type of gotcha. It’s not evidence it is a thought experiment.
It's the biggest threat there is. That you can not see that makes you more of a BTC normie, that signed up for the fiat gains.
Enjoy your ETF IOU KYC NGU coin that's now pumped and dumped by BlackRock like a shitcoin.
Btc normie is wild lmao you monero bros really want to be different so bad