This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero and it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to shop on amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than trying to find something locally. The speculative nature of crypto is therefore more of an annoyance as it causes the price to fluctuate too much between paying, shipping, and fund-release.

Excuse me.

The issue is that if it's too much they will still raid your place even if the evidence might not be that clear and they might ignore politicians.

Good luck defending this, it will still be annoying as fuck If your PC is gone for month

If they had proof you paid you would probably be in jail.

Can still be painful, but way better than if they had proof you bought it.

(Also, if any of your drugs dont arrive or were opened, never order any more)

It was from the state and it was dropped.

You can get quantitative GC/MS tests in addition to fentanyl / nitazene test strips.

I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable.

But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a store, buy something, then pay with Monero which is obviously disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to that, if I want to give a friend some Monero I would have to walk them through making a new account with some new app which they won't do because it's pointless anyways.

I use Monero semi-regularly to pay for things online (usually privacy products, because sadly nobody is interested in selling me groceries in exchange for xmr). You can absolutely buy things with it.

Could you offer examples? Straight-up curious.

Do you expect every store to start accepting it instantly?

Your argument does not disqualify Monero as a real currency. It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.

I looked up the history of the credit card on Wikipedia to see how fast that caught on. It seems it had a slow start as well. Things only changed when a big bank put all of its weight behind it. I don;t think something like that will ever happen with cryptocoins, since there are no big institutions that would benefit from it becoming widespread.

> I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a store and pay using my credit card

That was true at some point and I would agree that as long as it remained true "Why should I carry a credit card that I can't use anywhere?" would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

> And if I want to send some money to my friend, I have to walk them through of opening a bank account which they won't do because it's pointless anyway and I can just hand them the $50 dollar bill"

This is completely disconnected from reality. People very commonly use bank accounts and checks. I know they must exist but I cant think of a single person in my life who would need my help dealing with a check.

> It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.

You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.

But using it as an argument against credit cards is dumb.

> People very commonly use bank accounts and checks

Yes, now they do. Used to be that most people held their wealth in gold or literal cash.

> You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.

V Bucks (to my knowledge) can only be used to buy Fortnite stuff. Can I even send it to anyone I want? Guessing not. And I'm pretty sure I can't sell it on a market to anyone else either.

Monero could be used in a store and some stores do take monero! Its quick, with low fees

It has the exact same practical problems every other distributed cryptocurrency has preventing it from being useful as an actual currency. If Monero ever started seeing adoption as an actual currency it would fall apart just like Bitcoin.

The fact people aren't using it. It's just a PoW coin with some special sauce. Same grey goo energy and equipment dynamics.

When someone taps, 99% of the time the payment processor is not waiting for the funds. It’s all trust and calculations of acceptable risk (that’s why the tap limit).

Crypto can adopt that approach as well.

Yes, CCs/debit went through a period (as did cheques) where that trust was wildly abused and it’s likely any trust layer on top of crypto would have to go through the same period of abuse, but solutions [c|w]ould be implemented fairly quickly since it’s all tech.

As to your last point: credit card fraud is still rampant and hardly anyone accepts checks outside of contractual b2b transactions. The issues with those technologies are technical in nature. Sending a crypto transaction doesn't allow someone to fraudulently charge your account like those technologies do. Whether chargebacks should even exist in a secure transaction system by default is debatable. I personally don't think that kangaroo court service is worth the fraud + global ~3% fees. Think about all the chargebacks you've made in your life that weren't related to credit cards just being insecure. I'm certain they are not worth 3% of your total spending.

Half the point of a digital cash is that you never need a wire transfer because you can just exchange the digital cash directly. Effectively the same as handing someone an envelope full of physical cash.

The currency exchange step needed to convert that BTC back into real money is probably more annoying than just dealing with a wire transfer. And that is essentially my point. If you send someone USD, they can use that directly to pay for expenses like food or rent. If you send someone BTC, they need to first convert that into a real currency before they can use it. That is what I am referencing when I say "The 'Killer App' for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it as a currency".

In Australia, we have instant transfers between bank accounts.

I imagine the US will get to that point soon in which case there is no benefit to crypto for this use case.

I don't think Venmo will die since there is a need for app to provide nice interface. But Zelle has been lobbying against FedPay since it will destroy them.

You do realize crypto currencies have transaction fees, right?

Yes, I'm willing to pay for goods and services.

That's at least two decimal orders of magnitude away from being a global payment solution. It's a joke.

Vitalik gave goals of 1.33 MB per second in blob space, and a compressed tx size of 25 bytes. This gives around 50,000 transactions per second, which seems like a worthy goal.

Each L2 is its own chain that uses its own sequencer/s. The blocks from this chain are then compressed into a single blob of data with a ZK proof that the transactions are valid. The validators on L1 only need to verify that ZK proof matches the hash of the submitted data, which can be done in a few ms even if the L2 did 1M+ transactions.

I guess credit card fees are <4% so there might not be a big enough discount to offer consumers to make them figure out how to get crypto (without paying more than 4% fees somewhere). Perhaps a chargeback heavy industry such as porn or political groups could benefit from non-chargebackable transactions.

I worked on OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace using bitcoin, and no one wants to spend $5 just to buy something. Artificially reducing block sizes killed adoption.

I still think that we should not forget the "I need a censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story, but mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as an immediate need.

Not saying that this could not happen as an hypotheses but cryptocurrency foundations are far far from business execution basic practices.

As an insider I can say that most money flows to a very small group of people and the governance is not really decentralized. For example, very few people can decide on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol changes, and these people cannot be changed...

I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?

Another thing, no pun intended, is that the proof-of-stake upgrade maintains prohibitive the network fees for transactions while other technologies have low fees.

> I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?

The funding of projects is through the foundation but if I remember well the original people and contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.

Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction fees.

> while other technologies have low fees.

Any "Ethereum killer" that showed up turned out to have the same if not worse problems as Ethereum in the moment they started dealing with minimal real-world traction.

> contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.

First: source?

Second: "50% of total ETH until now" is doing a lot of work here. How much was during the pre-mine and how much was due to the sale? The pre-mine sale raised < 20 million USD. Are you counting the people who bought ETH in the pre-mine as "original contributors"?

Please don't tell bullshit. Look at Algorand and other protocols, consensus has a relationship with fees because it is linked with the cost of reaching consensus!

> Source?

It is repeated ad nauseam in Internet [1] and you can analyze the blockchain genesis to check it.

> Ethereum killer?

It is not about the protocol but the community you create. Algorand has solved the PoS before Cardano and Ethereum but they are #58 now and the creator is one of the parents of modern cryptography, Turing Prize, etc. Solana is #5. Beyond comparing the Solana protocol with Algorand it is a matter of "business" execution, technology is a smaller part. Probably if Livra from Meta was accepted it would be in the top 10.

Even when you think about Solidity as a programming language, it was not well designed (e.g. security) but that doesn't matter.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+the+original+contri...

The very first result on your google query is a bitcoin.com page that is 404, but archive.org has this:

  The Ethereum network started off with a supply of 72 million Ether (ETH).   
  Eighty-three percent of that (60 million) was distributed to people who had 
  purchased ETH in a crowd sale that was conducted in July and August of 2014.


  (...)

  Of the remaining 12 million ETH distributed at the launch of the network in 2015, 
  half was split amongst 83 early contributors to the protocol based mostly on time
  contributed. The other half were set aside for the Ethereum Foundation.

> consensus has a relationship with fees because it is linked with the cost of reaching consensus!

Wrong. Fees are determined by network activity and the amount of transactions competing to get into the block being "mined". The cost to validate a full block is not really different than the cost to validate a block that is not completely full.

If Algorand or Cardano ever got close to the transaction volume from Ethereum, you can bet that their average transaction fees would go up accordingly.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I don't know about Algorand or Cardano transaction volume, but many EVM-based blockchains process a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees. They do all have different (proof of stake still) consensus models though

For comparison: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx

Polygon: https://polygonscan.com/chart/tx

Polygon is an L2, so arguably not as decentralized.

But then there's Avalanche: https://avascan.info/stats/network-activity

Or Fantom: https://ftmscan.com/chart/tx

> a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees.

Are we talking about the base currency (Wei) or the dollar-equivalent amount? If Wei, the only way that the transaction fees can be lower is if the chain has a different set of costs for the operations.

If you are talking about the dollar-equivalent amount, then yes, transactions are going to be "more expensive". But even then, it is not related to the consensus algorithm and just the "price of the base token".

If you meant monetary volume, you should have used a different term than one which is well-recognized to refer to the number of transactions (both in and out of blockchain applications of that term)

edit: I see, you're suggesting the fees are cheaper because the token is cheaper, and somehow seem to think EVM networks will have a straightforward relationship between the number of transactions and the cost denominated in their gas token.

I don't see how this follows. The fees are entirely a function of network constants and usage, which have more to do with what people are willing to pay to get their transaction into a block.

Ethereum has a limited amount of block-space, and a fixed number of blocks per year. The gas price isn't entirely a bidding system, because there's basically a floating multiplier which adjusts automatically based on the "fullness" of the most recent however many blocks, but the principle is that you need some form of congestion control

In blockchains which have larger blocks, or more numerous blocks, or a number of blocks/block-size which adjust based on usage, it is not as costly to get a transaction included.

So I don't know about Cardano or Algorand, but many networks can handle as many transactions as ethereum while having much cheaper transaction fees, which seemed to be the point you were arguing against

Initial investors are also contributors. The number allocated initially is really huge.

And if "initial investors are also contributors", then you are just parroting the "Ethereum is pre-mined" from Bitcoiners, and we can safely end the discussion here.

TVL for Ethereum, 53B USD: https://defillama.com/chain/Ethereum

If doing DeFI on Algorand is so much better/cheaper than on Ethereum, then why is it only 1/500th of Ethereum's size?

Mind you, it seems that this calculation is not attributing "bridged" TVL as related to the chain size and activity. If it were, there are 330 Billion USD that depend on Ethereum's base layer security.

This has made you less skeptical of what he’s peddling? That slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He could be selling actual snake oil.

Effect of Erabu Sea Snake (Laticauda semifasciata) Lipids on the Swimming Endurance of Mice https://karger.com/anm/article-abstract/51/3/281/41756/Effec...

I suspect the Erabu sea snake is the Chinese water snake that was originally juiced? I don't think rattlesnake oil would have the same effect :)

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377...

OPs point is that most cryptocurrency advocates go for "but my token and hold, it is sure to grow 10x in a few months" and I (like probably OP) consider it misleading baseless hope at best, fraud usually.

From a practical standpoint, I think most people would prefer it if the currency used by their country of residence increased in value relative to other global currencies, rather than just staying stable (though for hyperinflationary countries, even that would be a major improvement).

Although stability relative to another currency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate_system) is considered (by many) disadvantageous for countries with strong economies, because you strip away the central bank's power to manage the supply. This is basically the whole Gold Standard debate.

For blockchain users who want reduced volatility and stability relative to a fiat currency, there are always stablecoins.

So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service, or some SaaS app on the ethereum blockchain, then my customers will have to pay more or less (or my costs will be higher or lower) depending on how active the network is.

That makes no sense. Day to day price and gas fee fluctuations make it hard to long term plan. Just saying that if you want price stability use a stablecoin doesn’t address that issue because we are not building the app on the blockchain of the stablecoin. There isn’t an eth stable coin that is always 1 blip to 1 eth exchange rate.

My point was that prices being "stable" isn't actually what's desirable, prices being nonvolatile is.

> So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service

I mean this is exactly how many of these things work. Uber pricing fluctuates based on demand. So do global shipping prices in many cases. So do game prices on Steam.

Even if the price was the same in the currency you're using (say USD), the value of USD is constantly changing.

> and the more people who use it the higher the value of eth is.

And I'm not sure how this follows. The more people who purchase ETH, the higher the value is.

But using the ethereum network doesn't require you to transact in ETH, only that you pay for the transaction fee (the network cost that makes it possible to to store and execute your transaction essentially) in ETH

Only if you want to have these applications fully running on the base layer, which is frankly nonsense.

To give you one practical example: Storj can provide a object storage service at AWS scale, and its pricing has nothing to do network activity and the price of storage does not change based on the amount of transactions per minute. Unless you want to be paid in real-time and account for every byte that you are storing and transmitting, there is no need to put all of the business logic in the blockchain.

- storage nodes getting audits and the results being stored in a smart contract.

- calculation of payouts.

- payouts to storage nodes with their token.

But because these games don't, it should be totally fine to delegate this application to a layer-2 system like a roll-up or a payment channel.

And again, we are talking about just to pay to play the game. Today an arcade that uses dollars may charge you 50 cents for a life. Or the equivalent in tokens (layer 2). If suddenly the value of 50 cents could pay for 10 lives, do I need to now charge customers more tokens to play? How do I plan long term with hiring or my utilities if the price I could be paying month to month can fluctuate as much as cryptocurrency does?

So, in your example, the game company could easily just say "pay us X amount of dollars however you want, and you will receive the exact same amount on the layer-2 to play".

My example was talking about using a layer 2 token. Now you’re telling me that it’s simple just use a completely different currency to buy tokens?

So what developments in Bitcoin Cash have been made in that direction? Why is is that all of the "ideological" forks of Bitcoin do nothing but tweak some parameter size in the network settings and do not go beyond that?

The purpose of OP_RETURN was to end the script. It was not designed for rando garbage overlays that are worthless; Satoshi's views on scaling were ambiguous—rather than say it "should" he was instead correcting people who thought you could break consensus by simply setting the value higher. There was absolutely zero communication between Vitalik and anybody about his "plans" to dump an overlay into Bitcoin, and his current story about 80-to-40 bytes is a pure, often debunked lie. There isn't a single communication that Vitalik himself can point to anywhere which shows he was interested in "cooperating" and then core turned him down.

His typical lie was that he was interested in stuffing data into Bitcoin, but then core devs "stopped that" by reducing the amount he could stuff into Bitcoin by half—from 80 to 40 bytes—but when he says that he also never points at any discussion, and in any event the direct history contradicts this—no versions of Bitcoin from back then ever reduced anything. It was only ever an increase: from 0, to 40, to 80 in released versions.

There no evidence these people ever give which shows some lack of cooperation with Vitalik is the reason why Hearn and Andresen "split off" to make an altcoin, which itself is quite the absurdity, and if true just means they would have been ethereum pumpers anyway.. so..

Also, why are the comments on your account 90% calling other people liars about cryptocurrency?

Satoshi's views on scaling were NOT ambiguous. He planned to increase the blocksize and have users switch to SPV wallets. Read section 8 of the Bitcoin white paper:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Also, direct Satoshi quote from bitcointalk about increasing the blocksize and hard forking to do it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

"It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade."

Regarding OP_RETURN, both mastercoin and counterparty existed because of OP_RETURN, so no, it's not "garbage". It's a data field that can be used to link L2's to the Bitcoin blockchain by embedding them in transactions. These projects, factom, and countless others that built off of OP_RETURN had to abandon Bitcoin for other chains because of the core developers' gatekeeping.

I agree with everything about the bastardization of Bitcoin, but I don't think this is why Vitalik created Ethereum

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7umljb/vitalik_buterin...

https://www.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/comment/dmce...

This is has been said about every coin since the beginning of crypto.

I've never seen Vitalik or any of the core Ethereum developers talking about the value of Ether being a fundamental metric of any kind. The incentives are made in a way to maximize utility of the blockchain, not the value of its base currency.

The "beginning of crypto" was with Bitcoin, can we agree to that?

Can we agree that Bitcoin was not claiming to "be a general platform to power distributed applications"? If you disagree, refer to the whitepaper that says "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

Can we agree that before Ethereum each chain was just a fork of Bitcoin, and that the token (aka "the currency") was "sold" to others as something that would have its value determined by supply and demand, but that the blockchain had no use that was not connected to transactions related to the token? As in: fundamentally speaking, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash... are the same?

Can we agree that Ethereum (the blockchain) enables distributed applications where people do not care at all about the price of Ether? E.g, I can host files on Storj and pay with credit card, the people hosting data are being paid in Storj's token, and everyone involved in this economy is directly using the Ethereum blockchain, but don't need to hold any Ether at all?

Saying you have some other use case besides asset appreciation is not a unique proposition.

> Saying you have some other use case besides asset appreciation is not a unique proposition.

Now, it isn't. In 2015, it pretty much was.

And they said this, including Satoshi. Yes they were wrong, but they said it.

>Now, it isn't

It's never been unique, because every coin has said it including, as you have mentioned in every response so far, Bitcoiners.

You've also said Eth guys have said. What are we left with? Every other **coin has obviously said it. I'm not arguing they all mean it, or they've been right. I'm arguing they all said it.

Then this whole discussion is pointless. Why should we care about what people say or believe, unless it can be backed by their actions?

Instead of putting them all in the same bucket because on what they said, let's judge them based on what they did. And Vitalik has consistently shown that his work is aligned with the stated plans and vision for Ethereum.

I just meant to point out that this was no special characteristic, as they all have done this. "Crypto" has been professing "use cases" since the beginning.

>Then this whole discussion is pointless.

Yes it certainly was, since you wanted to argue that you believe him, yet got caught up in trying to refute for some reason the point that they all say it. You say trust actions instead. Great, as long as we agree words are irrelevant particularly when they all say the same thing.

I never said "I believe on what he has promised". I said "all he has done and delivered has been consistent with his professed views". It's completely different, and I honestly do not see how you could interpret what I said in such a twisted way.

The only way to have a private, fungible cryptocurrency is to make privacy mandatory and not "something you enable because you are a drug dealer". Does this mean that everyone using Monero is automatically a drug dealer? Even if it does, it's waaay better to have consistency vs having a cryptocurrency partitioned into "normal coins" and "darknet market coins"

If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that division between transparent and opaque.

As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack. Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a space where they can do that, and then you as a user can privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other exchange.

Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy properties with different use cases.

Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's fantastic.

You could just as accurately say Zcash has opt-out privacy too. And the privacy is much more than a mixer since you got ZKPs.

Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability, which is why you can find it on coinbase. Not that you should need deniability, since no one has any business knowing what you're doing with your money.

So if you actually want to interact with the real world, you have to opt out of privacy? And if you enable privacy you are automatically treated as a weirdo? I don't get the whole point of Zcash.

It's the same issue as with Bitcoin – you can make your transactions private, but it's not the default and not obvious for new users, and anyone who does it is subject to suspicion.

It really looks to me like this "privacy" aspect of Zcash is just a marketing gimmick. It doesn't have any advantages to just using Monero in the first place.

Again, it is not the same as bitcoin. Using a mixer does not come with ZKPs. The transactions are also still public. You can see how much was put in and how much was taken out. Worse, you now potentially have traceable tainted coins and a target on your back.

The point of Zcash is the Z. Zero knowledge proofs. Monero uses differential privacy. Zcash has much stronger privacy guarantees.

Monero has view keys for that.

> Zcash has much stronger privacy guarantees

This is false. The fact that it uses ZKP doesn't make it's privacy stronger.

I'm not going to state more points on why Monero is ultimately better than Zcash because this has been done before: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/u3saom/eli5_whats_t...

I know it’s hard to imagine for the west but places exist where working around the local financial system is a huge benefit.

For privacy, just use a coinjoining wallet. It's a solved problem for a long time.

Commenters here are sour over bitcoin, for a variety of reasons, and ignorant at the same time.

In the last two weeks I've paid to people who cleaned my air conditioning, my girlfriend's nails, our lawyer, for delivery of some goods from US, for food delivery, for a sightseeing tour, and for exchange to local currency (delivered to my home) — all in USDT. I've also got USDT from a friend for booking Airbnb for him (he couldn't do it on his own account because of reasons). At this point, most of services in local community are advertised with payment in USDT first: via binance and bybit internal transfer, or just on trc-20.

I hear CEOs talk about how this will revolutionize the world, but realistically no one needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger to validate that someone is the true owner of concert tickets or whatever.

I do wonder, if the only real-world application that needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger, is cryptocurrency.

[1] https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1774490997789241709 [2] https://www.farcaster.xyz/