318 sats \ 29 replies \ @jimmysong 31 Jul 2022 \ on: For those who dislike Monero…why? bitcoin
Shitcoin is a reason.
It's centralized and not really different than any fiat money as a result. They can and do hard fork regularly and if you don't install the new software, you are out of the "real" consensus like any other shitcoin. The "real" consensus is centrally controlled, full stop.
An asinine reason that help no one, but it is easier for you to say that than to explain your reasons against something that you don't understand.
Monero has not hard-forked in almost 2y, and does not have scheduled or regular hard-forks, and hasn't for a very long time. These hard-forks are entirely community-driven and are agreed upon through social consensus, are non-contentious, and only touch parts of the protocol that the community desires to change (and fit the ethos and core social consensus of Monero from the beginning).
All planning, decisions, and code for hard-forks is done publicly with plenty of chances, platforms, and ways for anyone in the community who wants to to get involve, have a say, PR code, or push back on specific changes.
For anyone who wants to see the lack of knowledge here by @jimmysong and his unwillingness to discuss Monero properly or learn how it actually works, you can see my point-by-point rebuttal of his remarks on WBD here:
reply
'Non-contentious' is a scale. If one person has concerns about it, it could be considered contentious. This person may not make their case known for a number of valid reasons. The hard fork was then 'generally non-contentious' and had broad social consensus otherwise. However this person's status quo was changed against their will.
If the number of users of Monero increased, the number of people who would not want a given hard-fork would likely increase, and the number of people who had the protocol 'rugpulled' would increase.
This is far far less likely to happen with Bitcoin.
reply
Lovin the nickname xD
reply
Very true, and a good critique! So far I have seen literally 0 contention, but as Monero grows that will absolutely change. That is why we've already seen ossification (similar to Bitcoin) from 6mo hard-forks to multiple years between. We will see hard-forks more and more infrequently as we grow and that's a good thing, but the option does need to remain due to privacy being something that is quite fluid.
I also expect that there will be contentious changes proposed at some point in the future, and I'm sure the immune response of Monero will be strong and fight back against them (and I will gladly join forces if the proposed changes go against the core ethos and social consensus of Monero).
reply
And this is why I hate having Monero fanbois here. This guy makes all sorts of accusations against me about having no knowledge of Monero and how I'm avoiding debating him. I avoid debating him because I know it's a waste of time and all he would do is just defame my character until the focus is off of the centralization of Monero. I have no interest in feeding this troll.
For the record, I understand Monero fine. I wrote a go-library implementing a lot of its interesting features years ago: https://twitter.com/jimmysong/status/867089878739283968?s=20&t=raee0obpmoJVkwe9zbv3qQ He wants to tell me I don't understand it when I've personally implemented Ring Signatures? He's coming after my character because he has no good answer for the fact that Monero is centralized.
He spouts idiocy like "we haven't hard forked in 2 years" as if it's relevant. The Fed also didn't raise interest rates for 2 years, does that mean it's never raising interest rates? It's such a stupid and disingenuous argument that it's not worth engaging. If you hard fork at all, it shows how centralized you are. You have to download the new software or you are not running Monero. That is the big flaw. You have no recourse to the hard fork. You are forced to do whatever they decide. This is unlike Bitcoin where you have the option of not upgrading. This is a big deal because it gives you sovereignty over your own coins. You don't have that with Monero.
Centralization is very relevant and it's idiotic for @sethforprivacy to act like it doesn't. That is the main issue and the one being avoided by the OP because he, too, is a Monero shill.
I write this here because I know there are a lot of people here that have a soft spot for Monero. It's another shitcoin and @sethforprivacy is another affinity scammer and I hate seeing him pollute this community. Sadly, he succeeds with some people by writing a few bitcoin privacy focused posts. But that's how affinity scamming works.
reply
- Not a "fanboi", have shown that dozens of ways over the years. I view Monero as an immensely valuable tool, but I'm not a maximalist, am open and honest about shortcomings, etc.
- Glad you finally deemed me worthy of a reply instead of just honing your echo chamber!
- I rebutted your poorly informed claims about Monero and Lightning privacy point-by-point here and offered to discuss it further, and you never replied. Care to now? https://twitter.com/sethforprivacy/status/1514372798113886210
- Writing one Go library 5y ago certainly does not tell me anything about your understanding of Monero today, and if anything explains why your knowledge of Monero seems to be archaic and dated.
- If you had taken the time to read before rage-replying you'd realize I was saying that as a point against "Monero hard-forks regularly" and against the normal "Monero hard-forks every 6mo" FUD that you spread usually. Neither of those are true, and Monero's lack of regular hard-forks for years shows that.
- Yes, you have to update software (gasp) every few years or you can't use Monero. That's both a good thing for an improving tool in the ever-evolving race for privacy, and ensures all users adopt critical bug fixes etc. over time. If you don't like that you can use another chain that lacks privacy and doesn't iterate like Bitcoin. You also completely overlook the whole "social consensus" and "non-contentious" aspects of my response, as no Monero hard-fork has been contentious as the upgrades proposed are just continuing to improve on the things that are core to Monero's ethos. Similarly to most bitcoin changes, people approve and so they choose to run them. You also (of course) left out the whole "the entire community has a say in hard-forks and can propose/review code, participate in meetings (all are open), and give feedback through every step of the process". But you don't seem to want people to know the truth.
- There is no "they" deciding everything. I have no idea where you get this idea that there is some person pulling all the strings in Monero, but it's a decentralized grassroots community just like Bitcoin, and all community members can (and many do) contribute to the planning, code, and process of hard-forking to upgrade the network.
- I have never said that centralization isn't a problem, I am always very clear about that. My claim is that Monero is decentralized and it's one I will 100% stand by. It's in some ways more decentralized than Bitcoin, in some ways less, but is absolutely more decentralized than almost all cryptocurrencies and decentralization is a core aspect of its ethos.
- LOL at affinity scammer, I have contributed without recompense to both Bitcoin and Monero thousands of hours worth of effort. A ridiculous claim, and one you'd know was false if you didn't just block me and anyone else you don't want to hear dissenting responses from. You love your echo chamber, and I don't fit in it. That is fine, but leave the insults and egregious claims about my character out of this.
reply
-1) You may not be a "fanboi" but it is clear that you have an agenda.
-2) Nobody owes you a reply, whether they started the conversation or not they are free to leave it.
-7) If it can be hard forked (and has been hard forked) then there is a 'they'. The 'they' definition is fuzzier, but it is something like: Those who support and promote and use the hard fork, vs those who do not.
-9) People have different uses for blocking. You assume the use-case that he is using the block feature for. Is it not similar to personal privacy? It is possible he doesn't want his time involuntarily taken by those on his block list, and it is also possible that he blocks people with dissenting responses. You can make your assumption, but you can't know that your assumption is correct.
reply
Fixed formatting in above comment, thank god for timed edits.
reply
- Yes, that people have access to the truth about tradeoffs and get to choose for themselves, instead of being mislead by people who either don't understand on-chain privacy or are willfully ignoring it for some ulterior motive.
- Of course not! Doesn't change that it's rather poor etiquette to ignore + block someone who over and over tries to engage with you and provides point-by-point rebuttals in as kind a way as possible, and then block literally everyone who disagrees with you in obvious bait posts.
- (Confusing me with this numbering :P ) Yes, the "they" is the entire active community. There is no "those who do not" and has never been AFAIK. When hard-forks perfectly align with the ethos and social consensus set in place from the beginning they just make sense.
- He blocks out of "compassion" apparently. Doesn't change the effects of broadly blocking anyone you disagree with or who doesn't worship your hot takes on Twitter.
reply
The numbering was meant to match to the number I was replying to on your post. Probably more confusing that way.
The only thing I will add is that I think that you are underestimating the effect that number 3/7 (number confusion) has. I don't think that the argument that there has never been 'those who do not' yet is a strong one. You preach that Monero is a good tool for private payments, and you try to promote adoption. Currently I would argue that the people who use Monero are in-the-know and commit time to keeping up with the current state. The wider the adoption comes, the less people with be willing to do that. The less people willing to do that in the future, the harder a non-contentious hard fork will become. There will likely come a time where a hard fork is needed to implement something and there will be less consensus on the decision. This will likely lead to a split.
'
Decisions that are obvious and have a clear line to follow on the 'ethos' are not a good example to throw out there as to why hard-forking is not a problem. There may come a time where the hard-fork hard-decision times comes and it makes your argument stronger and not weaker, but only time will tell.
reply
He seems way more calm and less emotional than you. Please take a step back and really assess whether your misgivings for Monero stem from the protocol or maybe the disagreements you had with some people in the core dev team as it seems like the latter.
Logical differences can be resolved but personal differences are poison. :)
reply
I forgot about the frequent hard forks and I agree it add centralization pressure and limits the "rights" it's holders have which is why I don't invest in XMR.
However, BTC sidechains like Liquid add even more centralization to achieve confidential transactions. Similarly with Fedimint. And to some extent, LN has centralizing effects as well since we're all reliant on whatever features the major implemtations decide to add. The difference is that the "asset" in these systems is redeemable 1:1 with BTC (LBTC, ecash tokens, and millisats in a channel)
If Monero was somehow implemented as a privacy layer for BTC without a token, or you could use it via atomic swaps in such a way that never exposed you to XMR volatility or it's consensus rules, would you consider it a shitcoin? Assuming it provides useful privacy in areas where it would take more work or be more expensive to achieve comparable privacy on BTC?
reply
Great point!
And they are working on atomic swaps wirh BTC as we speak 🙃
reply
Now that I think about it, it's possible to use monero right now without exposing yourself to its volatility. If you use an exchange where you can short monero on the xmr<->btc pair, just do a 1x short.
As monero falls to lower and lower prices in satoshi terms, your bitcoin stash on that exchange will grow by an equivalent amount. Conversely, if monero grows in value in satoshi terms, your bitcoin stash will go down, but your monero stash will increase proportionally to equal out the difference. Whenever you want to cash out of monero you can sell your xmr tokens for bitcoins, putting you at the same amount of bitcoins you had when you started (minus some exchange fees).
So if you want to buy and use -- say -- $300 of xmr, first put up a 1x short on monero using $300 of your bitcoin as collateral. As you spend it, reduce your collateral til you're all out of both monero and collateral, then if you want to you can put up collateral again to repeat the procedure.
This does mean you have counterparty risk on the exchange as well as slippage risk due to trading fees and low liquidity on that trading pair. But for some people who want to treat monero like a sidechain, this is a way to do it that should work today. But the "peg" is secured by a centralized entity (the exchange), so there is that.
reply
Monero hardforks to improve privacy and make it even stronger as a Cryptographic currency
So, that’s your reasoning? You want it NOT to be hardforked because …?
Again, these kind of reasons make you sound like an NPC who heard one bad thing about it and just immediately made up his mind. 🙃
reply
Frequent hard forks = central management. I don't want my money to hard fork frequently because I don't want to do code review all the time to ensure I still have exclusive control over my money. Hard forks are an opportunity to insert coin stealing malware into the latest software. The moment you "just trust the devs" not to do that is the moment you lose your financial sovereignty.
Also, I don't like the dev tax. It's cointillionaire-ism, unequal distribution of the flow from the money spigot, not to those who worked for it, but to those who control the spigot.
Also, I don't like the perpetual subsidy. It penalizes people who just want to save their money.
Also, I don't like the inability to audit the supply. If there is a bug that lets someone print monero for free, there is no way to tell if they used it.
reply
There is no dev tax in Monero. Development is funded by voluntary donations (https://ccs.getmonero.org/).
Monero development is discussed publicly (https://matrix.to/#/#monero-dev:monero.social, https://matrix.to/#/#monero-community:monero.social) and anyone can contribute. Hard forks are discussed, planned and tested and notice is given months in advance. If you don't like a planned feature in the hard fork, you can openly discuss it in a monero-dev or monero-community meeting. Wallet updates are also released weeks in advance.
The 0.6 XMR/block tail emission trends toward 0% inflation over time (disinflationary). Right now the annual inflation is around 0.87%, which is currently less than Bitcoin and gold, and far less than fiat. The tail emission incentivizes miners (less risk of a fee market, considering that the Bitcoin block reward will drop below 1 BTC in 2032 and to 0.01 BTC in 2056) and means that it will always be possible to acquire Monero via CPU mining, which is an accessible KYC-free on-ramp (you just need a regular computer to mine Monero). The tail emission was included in the original Monero code from 2014 and became active this year. More details in this infographic: ![]()
Monero's supply is verified via range-proofs (cryptography that ensures that inputs - outputs = 0, without disclosing exact amounts). Nodes verify range-proofs for every transaction and will reject invalid TXs. Block rewards from mining are transparent and can be viewed on any block explorer. In addition, a developer is writing a script to externally audit the supply via Python: https://ccs.getmonero.org/proposals/monero-inflation-checker.html
reply
The 0.6 XMR/block tail emission trends toward 0% inflation over time (disinflationary).
Question: How does this differ from Bitcoin's emission schedule in practice? After a long enough time, it would seem as though both Bitcoin's and Monero's block rewards trend towards zero in terms of value / purchasing power. So while Monero will still have tail emission in the year 3000, the value of the token will be dilluted so much that 0.6 XMR won't be worth much regardless.
reply
By the year 3000, the total monero ever mined would be roughly 178 Million.
Ethereum is 100 million + at $4000+ and expected to increase without privacy
Other coins like BNB are at 200 million +
By the year 3000 we will either have a collapse of civilisation or be star faring, 100s of billions of humans.
Do some quick math. :)
reply
Thank you for a detailed answer 🙃
reply
Montero also hard forks to change their monetary policy. Centralized control is the flaw. Someone controls the monetary policy. This is not different in principle from central banks. Privacy for centralized control is a bad trade. The central controller can change things at any time and you have no recourse.
reply
Monero does not hard-fork to change monetary supply, that is false and yet another piece of FUD (intentional or unintentional) that you want to spread while it is entirely false. The monetary supply is entirely untouchable via social consensus, exactly the same way as Bitcoin's money supply is untouchable.
The social consensus was for a tail emission from the earliest days of Monero, and it was added in shortly after launch once the exact parameters were decided by the community. It was in the original Bitcoin Talk OP and was always the plan.
After it's inclusion in early 2015 the supply has been entirely untouchable and cannot be changed. There is no "central controller" here, and no one person or entity controls Monero's monetary supply or consensus.
Glad you can't block me here so I can actually reply :)
reply
That was my understanding as well.
It seems there are a few people who idolize Bitcoin so much that they forget that it is an EXPRESSION of Freedom from Central Control of Money.
And thus, refuse to see its shortcomings, a problem that XMR does not yet have.
And yes, free speech is not for the weak so glad that people have to either defend their reasoning or agree to disagree. :)
reply
Hard forks don’t work if the community does not support it.
See Bitcoin Cash 🙃
It’s not centrally controlled if community does not support it.
So, you need to do more research. Maybe ask some Monero guys on the subreddit
reply
Typcial altcoins defense. And exactly what would you do if some hard fork wasn't "supported by the community"? You then have to depend on a decentralized consensus that doesn't exist. It's a centrally controlled coin and a non community supported hard fork likely means it's death. You keep wanting to deny this, but this is Monero and every altcoin's flaw. You're centralized and you're one black swan from death.
reply
Bitcoin Cash was a Hard Fork that wasn't supported by the community, did Bitcoin die?
You are too emotionally involved in dying on this unreasonable hill to think through. That's ok, no one is forcing you to use Monero.
It was a question and you're clearly not ready to answer it reasonably.
Have a good day! :)
reply
Monero is not Bitcoin and the communities are not the same. Again, if the Monero developers did something against the community's wishes, you don't have a recourse. What are you going to do, trust some other group of people to hard fork regularly?
I've answered your question honestly as I could because clearly, you don't want to deal with Monero's biggest flaw which is that it's a centralized altcoin. Continuing to pretend that it somehow doesn't matter that it's centralized is disingenuous and your shilling of Monero here is making this place worse. There's someone in this conversation emotionally invested in a particular outcome and it ain't me.
reply
Monero's proposed hard forks are always broadly discussed publicly with the whole community having the chance to participate and only decided when there broad consensus for the changes, pretty similar to Bitcoin's soft forks. Those soft forks make you also be out, since if you receive e.g. a SegWit output, without updating you will not able to use it.
reply
Exactly :)
reply