Quote from: Peter R on May 18, 2015, 07:12:19 PM

Quote from: rpietila on May 18, 2015, 05:57:47 PM

Monero is...what Bitcoin was promised to be (but is not, and likely cannot be) - private cash, and nothing more.

What was Bitcoin "promised to be"? How does the Bitcoin of today not fulfil the description from the Satoshi white paper? Bitcoin is more useful than Monero because it does not force privacy upon its users. It gives its users the freedom to choose their privacy requirements. Cryddit (Ray Dillinger) made a series of insightful posts beginning here arguing against all but niche adoption of strong-privacy coins.

Cryddit's logic is a dinosaur still stuck in the brick-and-mortar Industrial Age, and entirely missing the point of the Knowledge Age. In the Knowledge Age, we obviate the need for trust and everything moves to a meritocracy on the actual content and knowledge, e.g. open source. I have specific ideas of how this will interface with crypto which I won't detail now. You can't have a meritocracy if you can't avert the Economic Totalitarianism coming. We've moved beyond being able to choose. It is being forced on us.

Bottom line is a paradigm shift coming which is going to sweep away your jaded, outdated assumptions.

OTOH, I do understand the criticism that if you have strong anonymity in a coin, then the authorities might be more likely to crack down on it in the future. Thus my thought is that if you put strong anonymity in a coin, you better have all the other aspects worked out so that the coin can't be attacked technologically. Monero doesn't appear to have done that afaik.

Quote from: Peter R on May 18, 2015, 07:12:19 PM

Furthermore, even if you assume that protocol-enforced privacy is a positive (which I don't), the trade-offs made to get that privacy have real costs. But we won't fully know what these costs are until something like Monero is trading at a much higher market cap and transaction volume.

That being said, I like Monero because (a) it had a fair launch, and (b) it offers something unique. I would love to see it overtake Dash (Darkcoin) and then Litecoin. But I think best-case scenario for Monero is a few % of the bitcoin market cap.

Monero's anonymity is optional.

I am an autodidact psychologist. I think you like Monero's "fair launch" (no it wasn't entirely fairly launched but that is not relevant to the point I am making) because that "fair launch" has made it nearly impossible to fund the massive amount of work that needs to be done so that it could slaughter Bitcoin. And you really don't want any altcoin to slaughter Bitcoin.

Monero has one small piece of the puzzle done (but not quantum secure and thus in perhaps 15 years all your anonymity is removed), but not nearly enough to scale on all the various points about distribution, use as currency, and scaling the mining decentralized, etc.. And I am not 100% confident that Monero is anonymous but I don't make any specific allegation. I am just not yet comfortable because I haven't put in the effort to do the analysis in great detail on the crypto and the combinatorial type attacks on the rings.

Nevertheless if you need a few years of anonymity on a blockchain, I think Monero is probably the best there is right now. And kudos to the devs!