The vast majority of people don't seem fazed about their credit card company knowing they've bought a sex toy. Hell, if Amex offered double-cashback at PornHub I expect they'd be inundated.

For those which do want a bit more privacy, it's dead easy to buy a single-use gift card or cash card. Will that stop the police from tracing you? No, but it makes it harder for a company to build a profile or a spouse to snoop.

So you're left with things which are (rightly or wrongly) illegal. Or incredibly taboo.

Is there a huge market for those things? If so, what are the customer benefits of Monero against cash? Or barter? Or owing a favour?

How easy is it - for both sides - to get set up? I can check cash isn't forged to a high degree of accuracy very easily. How much hard work do I have to do for Monero? How much educating my customers do I have to do? If Monero is restricted to shady stuff - how much of a target am I painting on my back?

It's possible for a company to stimulate and create user need. But that's a lot harder than tapping in to a currently unsatisfied niche.

In crisis, only the most adventurous ones of us gamble, any grow addicted to it, and most lose... A lot.

The traditional rule books are key to survivability in tough business times... Tangible goods and services, a deep focus on quality, reasonably paced sales growth, customer support, low dependency on external factors and suppliers... Crypto and Web3 represents none of those things, and that's why a lot of the time it is based solely on marketing vapor, and also why many don't want to invest in it (unless perhaps they are addicted to gambling or unless they want to promote a particular aspect of it for their own personal financial gain).

or foresight that exclusively buying goods manufactured abroad will eventually affect your home price as your neighbors one by one lose their local jobs...

Do we know why people act in such a way?

Edit: I'm quite shocked at the deep presumption of negativity. I was genuinely trying to discuss and explore the phenomenon of choosing long term detriment for short term gain.

Hierarchy of needs. Maslow is obviously not accurate, but people focus on basic survival and prioritize themselves and their families first. You do not even reach the level of contemplation of politics until you have food, shelter, comfort and a degree of safety. Most Americans struggle to satisfy all of these consistently.

If you want more people to care about privacy, solve their basic needs first. Then they will care about big picture items.

It seems like it was more like "Well I could have a TV now, or a TV + Microwave now" and that was the micro decisions that lead to a hollowing out of the labor force.

I'm just armchair speculating here, happy to learn more in a concise way (ie doesnt require me to go get a degree on the subject) .

Person A going out to buy a Chinese-made microwave from Walmart today isn't going to lead inexorably to decreased property values, but it is going to give Person A something in which to stick their microwavable popcorn tonight. In fact, many Person As have been buying Chinese-made microwaves from Walmart for many years now, and still property values are going up!

Eventually, sure, enough people making those choices on a macro scale leads to factories closing close by, and if there's no corresponding rise in other industries, that will lead to negative economic consequences for the entire area. But that's a far off problem with a lot of uncertainty, and this popcorn isn't going to pop itself tonight!

Of course, it is also true that Person A could go out of their way to shop at a local store and buy a microwave made by an American company, but that the American company decides that there's much more profit to be made by moving production overseas, and the negative economic consequences happen anyway. Not because of the short-sightedness of Person A, but the greed and short-sightedness of CEO B. That's even more reason for Person A to not be too worried about their individual purchase.

> definitely part of the dystopia.

How so?

It's very immature (or complicit with what you categorized as dystopian there).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_to_the_People

I suspect this is a huge sticking point. The last time I tried to pay for something using bitcoin, I failed. I tried again with monero and, once again, failed. Zelle worked just fine.

While I mostly agree with what you wrote, I take exception to this. Wanting more privacy can be an ends in itself.

Of course, as I said, I agree with you, this doesn’t really broaden the pool of people who need Monero by a meaningful amount ;)

People who are willing to jump through hoops to marginally increase their privacy and the companies willing to similarly jump through hoops to cater to these people are a subset of the overall population. Gotta break out of this subset to achieve the wide adoption OP was talking about.

I presume giving money to Canadian protestors is the former?

1 - A tiny percentage of crypto holders regularly use crypto as a currency, most people just use it as a store of wealth (ie digital gold) or a way to speculate/gamble.

2 - You can't buy it on Coinbase, because the US government can't track its usage so Coinbase would lose their regulatory advantage if they allowed it on their exchange.

So that means it's more difficult for the average person to acquire, and at this point most people are using crypto more like stocks than currency so they'll just speculate on something that's easier to get their hands on.

1. Most people only care about speculation, and don't care at all what cryptocurrencies are or what they can do. And Monero doesn't do much for these people.

2. Monero is more inconvenient to use than Bitcoin is. SPV wallets aren't possible, so you need to rescan all outputs since you last opened your wallet which is very time consuming. Also you need to wait 10 blocks (~20 min) before you can spend an input, but with other cryptos you can spend a 0-conf transfer immediately.

It's unfortunate because Monero really is a better Bitcoin.

You probably just described 99% of the crypto market. If the buyers of crypto actually cared about the features and usage you wouldn't have so many random shit coins getting pumped then dumped.

[1] https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html

Also, both of the ones you list are the same (scalability), whose purpose is to keep transfer fees low. Which, again, Bitcoin utterly fails at.

Bitcoin tx fees are near all time lows [1] although many people still overpay. And lightning fees are way lower still.

[1] https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight

And the kicker is that Bitcoin's fees goes up when more people use it, while in Monero the fees get lower.

It's laughable to suggest Bitcoin scales better wrt to regular payments than Monero, despite Monero transactions being larger and the blockchain is harder to prune.

https://www.monero.how/monero-transaction-fees

It's laughable to think Monero scales better when it uses much more resources (bandwidth and memory and diskspace) to support a given transaction rate.

[1] https://bitcoinvisuals.com/bitcoind-minfee

Even if someone hand-delivered a smart-phone that had a Monero wallet on it to facilitate me paying for a banned_book_123, it's still an order of magnitude fussier and slower than, say, using a Visa gift card. Or cash.

And what happens if I somehow fuck up the transaction? It has none of the protections offered by the Visa gift card, with all of the shit-out-of-luck properties of physical cash.

On the other hand, it doesn't scale well and thus cannot be used for digital microtransactions.

Any of the solutions I see for scaling could just be used without having a blockchain-based cryptocurrency on the backend.

Anyhow, when it's this difficult to use, it seems perfectly logical that it only gets used in niche cases where the sender/receiver is willing to eat the cost of all the friction, headache, and risk-of-loss of using it (not to mention price fluctuations). So ransomware, paying for illegal goods... what else is there?

Related: I think the motto of blockchain should be: A Solution Begging for a Problem. All these HN posts about it make me think of "The Herlihy Boy" from SNL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXyW5w5RRFY

- You are doing something illegal and don't want to get caught.

- Powerful actors in the economy are abusing their power, and you want to avoid/prevent that abuse.

Most people are not criminals, so let's focus on the second use-case.

If the government created a 1000% tax on all person-to-person transactions, you can bet nearly everyone would switch off of Venmo or Cash App and onto something like Monero. Or if Apple/Google said "we are now going to monitor your bank accounts, and we will be taking a share of all purchases made from your phone," you can bet people would switch.

Another type of abuse might be political. "We will be compiling a list of everyone who donates to the opposing party."

One might argue that those abuses of power already exist, and are already actively harming the average consumer. For example, Experian's multiple data breaches[0]. But the thing is, the average person doesn't feel very affected. If you came after their Venmo or their bank account, they'd feel it.

In a way, I think privacy coins are already benefiting all of us. The "powers that be" know that it's possible for us to switch, and that we will switch if they push us too hard. So they don't push us as hard as they could.

I also want to point out: MobileCoin. Your premise seems to be that privacy-focused coins aren't in wide use, but I don't think that's a certainty. Signal has deployed MobileCoin to potentially hundreds of millions of people. But they are secretive about their numbers, so we don't know how widely it's really used. I've tried MobileCoin with friends who use Signal and it works great. They will surely beat out Monero and others, simply due to the ease-of-use they've created, and the integration with an already-widely-used private messenger.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian#2015_data_breach

No. Here's the rub... the problem I see, and what makes Monero less usable to my way of thinking, is the "last mile" problem of getting value in and out of the Monero ecosystem. In my case, specifically, the question of how I transfer value I currently hold - which is almost 100% in fiat currency (USD) - into Monero, in an anonymous fashion. Yes, it can be done. No, it's not easy. And then for the merchant who accepts Monero, they probably have the inverse problem of exchanging their Monero for the desired fiat currency (which you still need to buy most things) without revealing information they may not want to reveal.

We already know how to solve this problem fyi but it seems no one is interested in helping me implement it.

It’s not really that complicated if you are comfortable managing wallets and making on-chain tx’s, but your average person in crypto is probably just buying crypto on a centralized exchange (most of which don’t support monero, though some do) and also selling it there.

However, I'm willing to bet this is simply due to face value claims around Monero and not because the last mile problems are solved or its provably anonymous was considered in earnest and thereby vetted deeply.

1. To securely use monero you need to at the very least locally download the blockchain. The secure way of doing this takes fucking forever. You don’t need to do this, but monero’s current users are very security conscious and most tooling/the ecosystem assumes you did this.

2. Most consumers may passively want privacy but they want it to be completely frictionless. Monero has a learning curve, slight difficulty exchanging for fiat, etc. - not frictionless.

3. Monero has whales but it’s not new, so it doesn’t have a big team of centralized devs/investors trying to pump it up. As a result it doesn’t have a lot of marketing or mindshare among people who are less technical.

4. Tail emission is a perfectly valid way to incentivize POW over long time periods, but it scares off moonboys and speculators at the very least (because you’re not purchasing a piece of a fixed size pie).

5. Even if most consumers passively want privacy, in practice it’s not important enough to go out of your way for it. How many technically-able people still transact in cash in developed countries? Yes, I know you Mr HN contrarian might, but I’m talking about the general public.

6. The least important factor is that Monero does have technical drawbacks and limitations. It’s not super important but it may be a reason privacy-conscious people don’t promote it as the end-all-be-all solution to private transactions. Some examples: auditing supply, de-anonymizing correlated transactions, POW, how the blockchain could scale with more transactions, quantum-safety.

1. False. There are mobile wallets that download only part of the blockchain.

2. This applies to all crypto, not only Monero.

3. True!

4. The number of coins added by the tail emission is too small to affect the size of the pie. The inflation rate from tail emission is asymptotically zero.

5. Privacy or no privacy, it's still crypto, which protects your fiat from inflation.

6. Monero can scale on the lightning network to millions of transactions per second. The more technical reasons, like auditing supply and POW aren't big enough problems for consumers to worry about.

It is only offered on one exchange (Kraken) which inherently limits availability, there are certain vendors who do accept Monero such as Mullvad, and a popular wallet for iOS (CakeWallet) will soon allow you to redeem Giftcards for Monero.

Right now, if I gave my friend 1 XMR, what could he do with it?

It seems pretty benign to buy a whole bunch of CPU/GPUs on the used market and then have them mine you cryptocurrencies (not just monero, but notably monero is CPU favorable). This might be a massive onramp for fiat to cryptocurrencies.

A quick google talks a lot about tumblers and other buy/sell strategies, but I'm curious about mining.

I would hate to be the lackey who suggested it to their boss last fall only for them to see their laundered money fall > 50% though.

Because buy and sell NFTs leaves a ledger trail that can lead you to your cash onramp being illegitimate money.

Whereas minted money is legitimate by default (and has no ledger history).

I suppose the IRS could ask "where'd the money to buy 1000 GPUs come from" though? IDK, I'm not smart enough to be a criminal :lol:

Stable value

Fast finality, low fees, high throughput

Privacy/anonymity/fungibility

Usability

No cryptocurrencies meet these requirements so far.

Why would anyone use a less well understood, harder to use, less ubiquitous, and unstable currency?

Tell site owners "here is a service that manages all payments including a ton kf crypto and converts it to uour local currency, also, users can sign up with us and use as an idp so they don't have to register on your site" .

In other words, an Oauth2 extension for payment processing providers + federated identity and services that provide easy integration into your registration+payment workflow might be lacking. Also, with any crypto it is a PITA to just obtain crypto without KYC laws, so more accessible exchanges that are somewhat anonymous without needing Tor that let you barter cash or other payment with them (not other users, it's a mess) might help too.

There are many patents by Visa and Mastercard backing crypto. Paypal lets consumers buy products with crypto.

Do you seriously believe big payment processors have as one of their goals to never, ever, under any circumstance use blockchain?

Non-cash anonymous financial transactions have been no-no for a long while, in particular under AML/KYC.

Over a certain amount, even cash transactions get wrapped in KYC/AML papertrail for law enforcement facilitation.

Monero is only available on the exchanges operating on the fringes of the banking network, or which don’t connect to banks at all.

I want to do some commerce in Monero but since Monero is banned on most/all marketplaces, it'd be nice to get it easily via decentralized exchange swapping it for Solana. Doing commerce with Monero and then swapping it back to Solana and later FIAT.

I assume the issue with this setup even if one builds it, you still have to tell the government what happened and how exactly you earned your coins? Or maybe you can build another DEX converting Monero to FIAT 'cash' avoiding such questions?

It's not a /nice/ DEX but amoveo exists, almost no liquidity but in theory it works.

It's not hopeless but it is important to understand how impactful solving the oracle problem would be. The implications are IMMENSE. Literally obviates the need for governance.

So idk, monero is too small (in some sense) to really be useful and the oracle problem is too big (in some sense) for a solution to it to be "one of many" - it'll transform everything and it can't happen unless people make it happen.

Maybe it’s just a hopeless dream.

Women are high consumers of luxury goods across the world. The luxury goods market was estimated at more than $400b in 2020, and increasing. If you take into consideration the fact that a large portion of these transactions undergo banking fees at around 2%, that makes more or less $8bn of revenue turned into smoke, which luxury companies lose to banking intermediaries.

The two main reasons why these companies agree to pay banking fees is insured transactions (the buyer pays with a credit card then fails to reimburse the bank) and convenience (most luxury goods customers carry more than one credit card with them).

Pseudo-DeFi offers a good replacement to the first cost (insurance). However, first, most luxury clients actually don't need the credit card: they simply cannot pay easily without pulling out a bag of cash (and look like crooks) or use a credit card.

Second, crypto payment is not yet convenient: we need to offer women an attractive, portable and easy to use wallet mechanism that can easily withstand loss/theft of mobile device, easy to top up, and in the correct cryptocurrency that is accepted across luxury brands. Think of it as the iPhone problem: there were many smartphones with a touch screen before the iPhone, but none of them looked attractive.

Once luxury brands solve this problem (or Apple, I can easily imagine Apple solving this problem, because 94% luxury clients have iPhones), in my opinion, crypto payments will take off worldwide and there will be no looking back. They will reduce costs to both sellers and shoppers, which qualifies quite well to the "why" question.

As an user, I simply don't need it. Most of the time I buy physical products so I have to give them my real address anyway (I could set up an alternative way but again too much hassle for almost zero benefit). For these few times when I actually buy digital products, I simply don't care enough and I pay via Paypal. So yes, they can profile me using my Paypal address, but that's the price I'm willing to accept.

As a merchant, I simply wouldn't accept it because of high volatility and related problems. Also, in my country there are certain rules for entities of certain size and I'd need to do additional bookkeeping just for that.

Anonymity in particular over pseudonymity only has compelling use cases for frankly, illegal activities. There are others of course, they're just not compelling.

Pro-crypto people can be broken into different tribes. Bitcoin maxis feel that only Bitcoin is worth using, and they might think the privacy of Bitcoin is "good enough." Ethereum maxis want to use applications and smart contracts for DeFi, escrow, exchanges, lending, stablecoins, and Monero does not support that. Ethereum maxis also feel that privacy is solvable with ZK proofs and private rollups. Then there are other tribes like Solana users who are looking for scalability for games and apps, and don't care as much about privacy.

Over the past 3 years the number of Litecoin transactions increased 5x. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/litecoin-transactions.h...

What do you mean privacy coins aren't seeing wide adoption? Are you deliberately being wrong on the Internet to have someone correct you to draw attention and increase adoption?

Therefore we need arbitration and the possibility to roll back the purchase. This doesn't always work well in the traditional finance, granted, but not at all for privacy coin schemes.

Without these possibilities people tend to feel that they are doing something risky. They don't trust that they get something of value if they use the privacy coin. They are afraid that they get bamboozled or scammed and have a feeling of powerlessness. This deters people and hurts adoption.

The vast majority of people want to purchase things as simply and cheaply as possible. And that's going to mean not paying a premium to purchase their money from other people. And since they'd be buying it via their existing non-anonymous means, it wouldn't do anything anyway.

If an economic system already existed, so that people could receive their paychecks in a cryptocurrency and spend it freely at any store, they'd accept that. But anonymity isn't going to be all that much of a draw for anybody who is used to making purchases already via non-anonymous means. The only people who feel compelled to do so are those purchasing things illegally -- which just makes people who would want to purchase things legally even less interested.

tl;dr: Privacy advocates put a lot more weight on anonymity than most people do.

This is a case where the cryptocurrency world wants "anonymity on paper, but not that much anonymity"

When I want to do pseudoanonymous transactions, I have a wide variety of ways to do that which appear to be lower risk.

Not all NFTs are the same or even JPEGs. 90% of them are useless though.

The blockchain domains are the only valid NFTs that cannot be right-click saved and are useful.

> the only utility I see in cryptocurrency is the anonymous and decentralized transfer of value.

> However interestingly the coins that do this well like Monero are not seeing wide adoption.

The regulators would like you to pick one trait of (not so) 'anonymous' or (not so) 'decentralized' cryptocurrencies.

Those that can fully guarantee both decentralization and privacy are the privacy coins like Monero, MobileCoin, Grin, Zcash, etc (To some extent Litecoin with mimblewimble privacy) which will basically be banned from exchanges as they are attractive to money laundering, illegal activity, ransomware and payments between criminals and scammers. No legitimate business wants to be associated with that, hence why they haven't got any wide spread legitimate adoption.

But they all do have widespread adoption with illegal activity.

Weirdly you can trade mobilecoin on a major centralized exchange, but is "proof of intel" really a good consensus mechanism lol

Us tech-savvy we know there are probably a few privacy minded people using it honestly.

Absolutely. I can't talk about the merchant experience, but setting up a new Paypal account and paying for something via credit card takes like 2 minutes.

The only problem right now is buying the MobileCoin in the first place. I live in the U.S. and the process was, uh, sketchy at best.

But if the payer in the transaction already has MobileCoin, it's a breeze from there. If your mom can do Venmo, she can do it. It's instant, fees are basically zero, it shows you the dollar amount, and it comes with the same strong privacy as Signal itself.

From what I have seen, MobileCoin is positioned to be the winner on all fronts. It's the only cryptocurrency I've ever seen that actually feels usable -- and I'm including back when Bitcoin was $10 and you could actually send transactions on the network.

That... seems like a necessary part of "get started"?

Once you have Monero on a mobile wallet, its just as easy to send it.

(Liberty Dollar founder was convicted of "making, possessing and selling his own coins" which were either silver coins or paper-notes backed by metal)

fwiw I think NFTs will be a big deal b/c they will unlock experiences. If we ever move to a Metaverse-type system, this will enable the creation of uncopyable digital experiences (can't just rip an mp3/mpeg)

To answer your question, as others have mentioned very few people actually care about privacy vs finding another hedge against inflation.

While I don't disagree with that statement, I'd expand it to say that HN'ers tend to be anti-crypto in the sense of being against the absurd hype associated with crypto speculation, and a lot of the really scammy seeming NFT / Web3 stuff that's out there. I think more than a few of us could actually get behind something like Monero based on the privacy aspect. But as we've seen in a few answers already, there are legitimate technical reasons that make Monero (and its peers) less than ideal even for those who do emphasize privacy.

very few people actually care about privacy

Sad but true. :-(

That's very different from not caring about privacy at all.