🔸 Durable
🔸 Portable
🔸 Fungible
🔸 Divisible
🔸 Scarce
🔸 Verifiable
🔸 Free from censorship
Discussion
That's monero. Bitcoin sadly isn't fungible.
Can you verify the total supply?
I can't look in your wallet and you can't look in mine so no. Can you do that with gold, silver, or any other currency? I guess you could work out a total supply that's been minted since inception, but that doesn't account for lost or burnt values.
Well done, you just perfectly explained why gold and silver failed as money.
Gold failed as money because the government made it illegal to hold. It had nothing to do with how much gold there was (or how much could be confirmed) in the world. It had to do with the fact that they wanted to print money and needed people to use the money they were printing.
Gold failed because as hard money because it’s not easy verifiable. Not being 100% certain about the total supply and the supply in your vault. Exactly the same with monero.
That’s why it won’t work. Open distributed ledger wins
It's funny it took thousands of years, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and legislation making it illegal to use to convince people of this :smirk:
Gold is still the second best. But it’s not the perfect fit in a digital world.
Actually gold failed because it can’t be transported well. That’s the main reason fiat outcompeted it, the others are secondary
With regards to the unverifiable supply, we believe that’s a major negative of Monero.
It makes no sense to trade off an unverifiable supply for privacy on the base layer.
It is better to build privacy on a second layer - regulations allowing.
If Bitcoin was private by default on layer one, it’s adoption would be a much bigger hurdle and much less of a given. It’s not very free market, not very libertarian, etc - but it is the world we live in
Good arguments brother 🫂
I guess it depends on who we want adopting it. If we want regulators, advertisers, auditors, and global financial manipulators interested, sure making an open ledger is a great idea. If we just want to trade privately amongst ourselves I don't see why it needs to be publicly readable.
You verify both Bitcoin and Monero supply in the same fashion - by running a node. Monero is more complex math, but math nonetheless.
But in practice, verifying is exactly the same. Why? Because no bitcoiner is manually tallying all UTXOs every time they audit to make sure it is correct. They just run a node.
Right that's basically the whole point of the concept of code is law which applies to xmr as much as bitcoin.
Gold didn't fail because of it's difficulty in transport. That's a cope. It was banned by bankers who wanted to control the money supply. They took everyone's gold under threat of imprisonment. It was used for thousands of years prior to that, and the transporation technology has only improved over the centuries.
My point was simply that the verifiability of the world supply isn't what ended it's reign as a currency. some 40 or 50 years where it was illegal to hold let the generations who were famliar with using it as a currency die off. In the meantime people were conditioned to believe that paper held similar value (once upon a time it did).
and the core reason for paper existence and proliferation was the difficulty and risk in transporting gold
World War 2 was the major reason. There is a book that talks about the flow of gold during the war - it is a massive logistical headache and risk
I don't have a problem with "paper" per se. I have a problem with a currency that is based entirely on debt. The Fed was born in 1918. WWII didn't start until 1939. Gold was outlawed in 1933 "in order to prevent the export, hoarding, or earmarking of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency" not because it was difficult and risky to transport.
> on April 5, 1933, one month after taking office, Roosevelt used the powers granted to the president by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to make gold ownership illegal. He issued Executive Order 6102, which made gold ownership--both in coins and in bars--illegal for all Americans and punishable by up to ten years in prison. Anyone caught with gold would also have to pay a fine of twice the amount of gold that was not turned over to the Federal Reserve in exchange for paper money.
You *could* argue that WWII was a money printing bonanza and the first test of the new system put in place in 33, but it decades after the Federal Reserve was born.
> Open distributed ledger wins
Klaus is that you?
How do you verify your bitcoin? Do you manually count every UTXO in existence?
Or do you rely on a node to do the work, exactly like Monero, and just like to be an audit larp?
Monero isn't verifiable nor scarce so there's that.
Not sure what you mean "monero isn't verifiable". If you mean you can't know how much I have without me letting you know sure that's true. If you are talking about individual transactions you are mistaken. You can generate payment proofs if necessary. As far as scarcity goes, the supply isn't fixed like Bitcoin (inflation is programmed in), but this means miners aren't going to lose interest unless we crank up the fees. The tail emissions in monero still inflate the currency far slower than regulators and bankers do.
Monero is scarcer than Bitcoin right now so I don't know if you want to go down that route...
How do you verify your bitcoin? Do you manually count every UTXO in existence? Or do you merely run a node exactly like Monero and just like to be an audit larp?
One thing running a node won't tell you that you might be able to discern on bitcoin is how much of the currency is locked up in lost wallets. On bitcoin you can just watch those wallets for activity, but in monero any lost currency still counts as part of our total supply since the lost addresses can't be identified by their lack of activity.
Being able to watch a wallet sounds more of a bug than feature to me.
My point was, in practice, everyone is relying on a node to do that work. They are not verifying it for themselves. They have no clue how much bitcoin is out there for certain.
Regardless, there is no definitive way to prove what bitcoin is lost. You can never be sure sure if an address truly lost their keys or are just hodling. Something like 80% of bitcoin is illiquid. Even Satoshi's unmoved bitcoin could suddenly start moving. We don't know for certain what bitcoin is truly lost.
Yeah I agree I was just saying this is about the only difference as far as the ability to audit supply. You are right there is no way to know if a wallet is lost or held in diamond hands.
And then someone comes and messes up this beauty with
🫠 Stable