Cash is much more difficult to take across borders... Monero is superior to cash for criminal activity in just about every way, the only downside is that it's a bit less liquid. This deflection about it being used in crime less than cash is weak to the point of bad faith.

The privacy argument has more to stand on though. Although I will say "not your money, not our business" is a pretty controversial take.

Criminals send illegal goods from Colombia to Europe through amateur submarines [1].

Doesn't require much thinking to guess what submarines come back filled with.

It's not that they can't move money illegally already.

We wouldn't advocate the usage of horses in modern cities because cars make it easier for criminals to escape law enforcement.

I also don't think it's reasonable to not support Monero just because you worry it might be used for criminal activity.

[1] https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/colombia-narco-submar...

There should be absolutely nothing controversial with that. What I spend my money on that doesn't harm anyone is nobody's business but mine and whoever I'm paying. If it does harm someone, well, that's why we have laws and law enforcement. It's the harm - the crime - that gets punished or penalized. Just like someone who gets drunk and drives. The results can be heinous, so the action is appropriately and severely punished.

Anonymity, or fungibility, doesn't interfere with that. It simply requires that evidence of harm or crime not depend on an abstract exchange of information.

Monero (and others) does make ransom collection much more convenient/safe to do.

Isn't it its main use case, with probably purchasing drugs and arms?

I'm not saying that in theory people wouldn't want to privately purchase their baguette (sorry I'm French), it's just that in practice they generally don't care, unless they are doing something illegal.

I'm curious, for those of you who do, what do you actually purchase with monero that's legal? (And why?)

You want to tip people on Twitter with BTC and have your address exposed to everyone? You want people to be able to trace how much you have in that wallet? Why not let people see the transactions going through your checking account? You got nothing to hide, right?

It's a good point, but I was not thinking of using some other crypto currency instead, but just normal money (I don't have to make the amount on my account public to pay by credit card)

What if your wife hates your baguette habit and she reads your joint bank statements.

Well I would use my personal account for my baguette :)

Also I'm not sure she would like my purchasing of cryptocurrency much more ;)

10 years later, wife believes I have acquired a mistress. She files divorce, and my bank statements are entered into the court as part of the divorce proceedings. The baguette vendor I visit every night when i sneak out to buy a baguette happens to be located next to the alleged mistresse's address (wife believes I was banging her and eating baguettes, in reality the only temptress was the baguette's vendor's sweet sweet tales of doughy goodness), and now in a number of US states I now owe her increased alimony for a "fault" divorce.

I walk sadly down to the baguette shop, sobbing into my smartphone, where I beg using my tiny remains after the divorce proceeding to buy just one stale baguette. The shopkeep takes pity and pulls last weeks remains out of the trash bin.

As the salt of my tears mix with the mold of the stale baguette, I sit in torment "why didn't I pay in Monero!"

-------- Epilogue -------

3 months later, I join the legion etrangere, the last respite for a soul with no money, no skills, and no baguettes. I have no family to miss me, and any wages I get in the civilian life are garnished. I'm deployed to Mali, a land of no baguettes. 5 more days until I finally get my 200 Euro's pay -- I finally can order a baguette. I hear a loud sound. Several tribesman surround me with pointed sticks. My FAL jams, and I feel the warm fiery sensation of the sticks piercing my organs, as the life force drains out of me. One more baguette was all I wanted. If only I had bought my baguettes with a fungible untraceable currency.

The main lesson I hear here is "don't get married especially if you are in the US" ;)

In France we are lucky enough to have another kind of civil union which is much less intrusive with what you can do with your baguette ;) and also have no consequences when you end it.

I have paid for splitting a ride share, tipping open source projects, donating to development funds, etc. I use it because I hate the trend of surveillance capitalism you see with crap like Venmo and even credit cards.

> Privacy is important, and it's a binary proposition.

It never used to be a binary proposition, it used to be somewhat proportionate because (a) there was a cost to surveillance and (b) there was a cost to acting covertly - crime was inherently local and hard to scale.

So you wouldn't have the police surveilling everyone unless that was critical to the stability of the state (Stasi etc), and it was infeasible to track cash transactions so a certain amount of crime and evasion was tolerated. But it was limited because cash is inherently bulky. Even a few million dollars is hard to carry around.

Now the internet has falsified both of those. Both crime and surveillance can be scaled up and globalized. So it has become binarized, with one of two outcomes: anonymous transactions + frictionless crime, including evasion of tax and currency controls; OR omnipresent surveillance of everyone and every transaction.

Cryptocurrency is accelerating towards one of those two outcomes. I just don't think it'll be the first one.

Cash doesn't burn a bunch of electricity on a PoW scheme.

The dollar system is built on eternal growth and the oil economy, and its proof of work is endless wars. I'll take bitcoin and monero any day; they're much, much greener than what we currently have.

A wasteless means of payment and accounting is wishful thinking, from my point of view.

We don't really use cash anymore, but a digital representation of it. This comes with a lot of electricity consumption on datacenters, among other waste.

For example: financial institutions have to waste a lot of resources just to keep the system "safe", for you, the government, etc. Requires extensive cybersecurity, bureaucratic and legal spending.

The amount of electricity spent on creating and maintaining cash must be pretty big, right? Am I misunderstanding you?

How much of a carbon footprint does the global traditional cash and banking industry produce per usd relative to the equivalent footprint of a cryptocurrency?

It's not just electricity, it's concrete and steel for banks and parking lots, employees driving to and from work, armored cars transporting cash, etc. Traditional cash is many, many orders of magnitude dirtier than even the worst cryptocurrency.

If you could assess the cost in pollution and other harms, you'd also want to assess the value in jobs and infrastructure and other utility. I'd bet cryptocurrency ends up being a far better tool all around, especially if institutional protections can be emulated - some sort of fraud insurance and so on.

Anyway, it's silly to neg on crypto because it uses lots of power. Total red herring.

It's a good ambition to make crypto more efficient, but the fuss is all FUD memeing from the usual suspects.