Toknormal's description of how Cryptonote works or what is required for money to work was not legitimate.
Please explain.
With his pictures, he seemed to even imply that central bankers are needed for money to function at all.
No, I think he is saying that they are required specifically when "money" is backed by debt. If money = gold (and only gold), then no central bankers are needed.
This article helped me understand how that works.
However, that raises a few other question for me. Monero (or other related coins) is not based on debt; it has a blockchain. Why does making transactions invisible lead to a lack of confidence that it is actually "money" based on something rather than just a ledger?
Here is an abridged version of toknormal's answer to this question from the thread he linked earlier:
You just cant go from a fully uncensored blockchain to a censored one and make it look the least bit attractive because the alternative is the electronic equivalent of a swiss bank account for rich people except without the "trusted third party auditor (which in bitcoin is the eyes of the world - not an algo) and therefore a breeding ground for scams, heists, deceptions. . .
Firstly, if people are using Monero, or something similar, to buy things in the real world, doesn't that make it visible in the sense of the picture above? The important thing for people to know is that it can and is being used by people in the real world to purchase things. (Or are you saying that we will never get to that point? If so, why?) The only part missing is the claim that value is maximized when "money" is fully auditable, but why is that a requirement?
Secondly, it's not clear to me how scams, heists and deceptions suddenly arise out of hiding which addresses are responsible for transactions.
in the end, you have to fully trust that the cryptography is protecting the blockchain, as there is no outside way to verify that after the fact. That is the main issue Tok is talking about. And although we think today that the cryptography is impossible to break, well, remember Bill Gates purportedly said 640KB of memory "ought to be enough for anybody."? Every computer on anyone's desktop and every smart phone out there is a super computer, almost a quantum computer to one from those days. What makes you think the cryptography wont be broken once quantum computers start to really take off?
Finally, when studying this site: https://cryptonote.org/inside, and I admit, I may not be seeing this correctly, but it seems to me that the elaborate ring signatures system only introduces as much doubt as to who the transaction belongs to as DarkSend does. I can see that you can use as many people as you like to insert doubt (the example uses 3, which is the default number used by DS) and you could use 10, 20, 50 ring signature participant, as you could with mixing. I don't see an advantage. Each ring signature comes at a cost, as each one must be stored.
Yet DS's results insert just as much doubt about who spent the funds, without fancy cryptography that could be broken at some point in the future, and keeps the blockchain easily verifiable to anyone at any time. It is completely future proof. As Albert Einstein said, as simple as possible but no simpler.