Skepticism Sunday #3 — August 11, 2024 (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 months ago by aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/monero@monero.town

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Crap, i forgot about last week. Time for another Skepticism Sunday!

Stay on topic:

This thread is only for comments discussing the uncertainties, shortcomings, and concerns some may have about Monero.
NOT the positive aspects of it.
Discussion can relate to the technology itself or its economics.
Talk about community and price is not wanted, but some discussion about it maybe allowed if it relates well.
Be as respectful and nice as possible. This discussion has potential to be more emotionally charged as it may bring up issues that are extremely upsetting: many people are not only financially but emotionally invested in the ideas and tools around Monero.

How it works:

Post your concerns about Monero in reply to this thread.
If you can address these concerns, or add further details to them -- reply to that comment. This will make it easily sort-able.
Upvote the comments that are the most valid criticisms of it that have few or no real honest solutions/answers to them.
The comment that mentions the biggest problems of Monero should have the most karma.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman

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[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 3 points 3 months ago

Why is this the background image?

[-] aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months ago

Vibes

[-] HardenedSteel@monero.town 1 points 3 months ago

its a meme about Monero doesn't have public blockchain unlike bitcoin or others.

[-] kenkenken@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago

Development is not very active in recent years. I doubt we will ever see FCMP++s on the mainnet.

[-] admin@monero.town 3 points 3 months ago

FCMP is being worked on by kayaba who has delivered in the past.

[-] americanscream@lemy.lol 2 points 3 months ago

Development is active, but unfortunately slow due to the limited number of developers and incompetence within the community. Unlike BTC and ETH, which have significant financial incentives, Monero relies solely on community-funded initiatives, which are infrequent and unreliable. Monero tends to attract hobbyist developers because of this who lack the motivation to deliver timely results, treating the project as a mere experiment to tinker with.

For example, Monero has not seen a proper DEX release in years, with projects like Haveno being complete failures with barely any volume and a basic AMM DEX has been in development for over two years by the so-called revered kayabanerve without any mainnet release - quite literally a Uniswap clone taking over 2 years without any solid results - how sad!

[-] jeffro256@monero.town 4 points 3 months ago

quite literally a Uniswap clone taking over 2 years without any solid results - how sad!

This is also completely false. Serai is not a "Uniswap clone"; Uniswap only supports ERC20 tokens, where Serai can support almost any coin from any chain, given the right validator setup. Also, there have been "solid results": there was a testnet 5 months ago.

[-] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 3 months ago

Cake wallet takes quite a bit of time to sync sometimes, I worry about that when advocating for normal people to try monero. Nobody wants to try to do a. Transaction and then wait 30m while your wallet syncs.

[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 3 months ago

What kind of Monero node does it connect to? Did you try a different one?
For example in my experience with the desktop wallet is that syncing through I2P send to be generally extremely slow, it did not complete in hours after being unused for a few months.

[-] aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 months ago

xmr-node.calewallet.com:18081 syncs instantly for me. But i run my own node

[-] k4r4b3y@monero.town 2 points 3 months ago

Last week's Skepticism thread was here: https://monero.town/post/3884733

[-] aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 months ago

Oh, my bad 😣

[-] americanscream@lemy.lol -3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Monero will never succeed. Monero only serves as an illegal tool to facilitate crime online until it will be regulated by our governments (hopefully this happens soon).

I will provide FOUR irrefutable arguments against Monero below.

Monero is supposed to be a cryptocurrency. As they say in the community, "Monero means money". However, Monero does not even satisfy the criteria of money. Money is defined with the following properties: medium of exchange (widely accepted), unit of account (measure of trade for goods and services), and store of value (self-explanatory). Monero fails to be a medium of exchange that is widely accepted, except for crime and extremely niche cases that will eventually be regulated to oblivion. Neither is Monero a store of value. As proved by past price history, its extreme volatility and reliance on the price movements of BTC/fraudulent cryptocurrencies means that when they eventually fall, Monero will follow. No one on this planet would save or transact in a currency with extreme volatility that could mean losing half the fiat value of your money over night.

Monero has a tainted reputation. Governments are trying their best to delist Monero from CEXes to reduce its usage - for a good reason! Chain analysis companies have proved that almost all of Monero's usage is crime-related darknet activity. Ransomware, drugs, CP, and all the worse things you can imagine are used strictly with Monero in mind.

A common counterargument to Monero being used mostly for crime by their many fanboys is: muh banks and muh fiat currency has crime usage too

Indeed, the US dollar is used in criminal activities due to its status as a global reserve currency. Unlike Monero, the USD serves as a medium of exchange, a fundamental property of money. The prevalence of crime associated with the USD is not a reflection of inherent evil within the currency itself, but rather a reflection of human behavior. In contrast, Monero is designed with a primary focus on privacy and anonymity, making it attractive for illicit activities. The majority of its usage is related to such activities, with only niche cases that the community often highlights as an exception.

Let us assume that Monero is not built for crime and used for good intentions. Let us assume cryptocurrency is not a ponzi and Monero will actually be used worldwide. Even in this best case, Monero can't even serve as a global currency with serious use! It uses old blockchain architecture that only allows one block every 2 minutes with limited transactions that can barely handle the transaction throughput of Visa or Paypal. Adding on, Monero is confusing for average people to use. You have to sync the blockchain worth hundreds of gigabytes, which is continuing to grow infinitely, to run your own node. In the future, normal people won't even be able to run any node as the size of the Monero blockchain grows extremely large. It will rely on data centers and centralized entities like Bitcoin making the network vulnerable to attacks. Also, unlike Bitcoin or other transparent blockchains, you have to scan the entire history of Monero that can take hours if you have unluckily stored your money in it long ago. Imagine waiting hours at the cashier register waiting for the blockchain to sync so it can register that $5 of Monero that you stored years ago!

Monero is centralized, as development and the community-funded initiatives (known as CCS in the Monero community), are vetted by a small group of people who have a complete say in what will or will not be allowed to be hard-forked. If Monero ever gets big, it will face the same problem as Bitcoin, where the community can't decided unilaterally on what they want on the network leading to technical stagnation. If Monero develops a centralized entity, like making a foundation, as seen in Ethereum, to oversee development, this can be solved. But this can never happen because of legal reasons!

When considering these arguments, which are rarely mentioned in this delusional echo chamber, one begins to realize the absurdity of Monero. Apart from its association with illicit activities, the community often justifies its existence by conjuring up a CBDC boogeyman that governments are supposedly planning to release. The persistent fear of a CBDC's arrival has been used for years without any tangible results. I was going to release a documentary on Monero, but I chose not to as Monero is the same as every other scam cryptocurrency, except instead of financial crime, Monero enables all crime.

[-] bobr@lemmy.libertarianfellowship.org 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Monero only serves as an illegal tool to facilitate crime online

Well, that's provably false :) I pay for hosting and domain of my instance with Monero, quite sure this is legal. You can prove yourself wrong by paying for something legal with Monero, if you want.

until it will be regulated by our governments (hopefully this happens soon).

They already try to do that, don't they? I wish them to have as much success as they had (and have) with banning drugs. They can't really stop Monero (unless they force people into whitelisted internet, or find a critical bug in the software).

Monero fails to be a medium of exchange that is widely accepted, except for crime and extremely niche cases that will eventually be regulated to oblivion.

This is not a valid argument.. There's no "medium of exchange" that is accepted everywhere (even US dollar). Zimbabwean dollar is also not widely accepted, yet I suspect you would call it a currency. You can argue (and you would be correct) that it is not widely accepted, but you can't say that it's not a currency because of that.

Neither is Monero a store of value. As proved by past price history, its extreme volatility and reliance on the price movements of BTC/fraudulent cryptocurrencies means that when they eventually fall, Monero will follow. No one on this planet would save or transact in a currency with extreme volatility that could mean losing half the fiat value of your money over night.

This is an even more invalid argument.. How many fiat currencies have failed, how many had hyper-inflation? And yet again I suspect you would call them currencies. And people transacted and saved in them.

Monero has a tainted reputation

I guess in some sense it's true. But that's part of a bigger problem. People need to understand that just because some government labels person a criminal, does not mean that they have actually done anything bad or are a bad person. My country considers me, and many more people like me, criminals - because we don't want to go to a war and die for a Nazi regime.. They freeze our bank accounts for that as well (and yes, Monero fixes that). I'm sure you consider me a bad person for that and would rather see me dead or at least my money confiscated, but oh well - I don't.

It uses old blockchain architecture that only allows one block every 2 minutes with limited transactions that can barely handle the transaction throughput of Visa or Paypal.

This is being worked on, right now stress test is conducted on stagenet and results are being used to improve scalability :)
There's always an option to introduce L2s, if they will ever be needed, etc. It's just not a priority right now because in the current state the network can handle order(s) of magnitude more transactions than it has now.

You have to sync the blockchain worth hundreds of gigabytes, which is continuing to grow infinitely, to run your own node. In the future, normal people won’t even be able to run any node as the size of the Monero blockchain grows extremely large. It will rely on data centers and centralized entities like Bitcoin making the network vulnerable to attacks.

You can sync a pruned node, which take around 70GBs now, that's less than some modern games. If that ever becomes a problem, a pruned node can sync an even smaller percentage of total blockchain to make it viable for more people to self-host.

Also, unlike Bitcoin or other transparent blockchains, you have to scan the entire history of Monero that can take hours if you have unluckily stored your money in it long ago. Imagine waiting hours at the cashier register waiting for the blockchain to sync so it can register that $5 of Monero that you stored years ago!

With FCMPs we will have a new type of private key, that you can share with a remote node to scan the blockchain for your transactions, without a significant loss of privacy :)

Monero is centralized

Well, I guess this argument is valid (just as much as it is valid with other cryptocurrencies). But you can always fork. People didn't like where BTC was going, BCH was forked. If people won't like where XMR is going, XCH (or whatever) can be forked :)

I will provide FOUR irrefutable arguments against Monero below.

Dunno, seems quite refutable to me 🤷

[-] jeffro256@monero.town 5 points 3 months ago

Chain analysis companies have proved that almost all of Monero’s usage is crime-related darknet activity. Ransomware, drugs, CP, and all the worse things you can imagine are used strictly with Monero in mind.

This is not skepticism. This is bullshit, plain and simple. Unless you have behind-the-scenes knowledge that the public does not currently possess, there is zero evidence to suggest that almost all of Monero's usage is crime-related. As of 2024, the IRS has still not paid out their final bounty for a tool to trace Monero transactions, and almost all spokespeople for chain analysis companies (some of which I have personally talked to) say that Monero is effectively untraceable in the majority of cases. As such, I don't see how you conjured up this statement unless you have a specific distaste for Monero and no sense of obligation to speak truthfully. Please point to a source where chain analysis "proved" the majority of Monero usage is illicit. Even if we take at face value that Monero is the currency of choice for many criminal rings, there still needs to be evidence of actual numbers related to the criminal volume versus total Monero volume. Some organizations have tried scoping this out, but I honestly know of no source that pins it anywhere near that high. Most place it around the same as USD and BTC at ~1-3%, with some going as high 15%. There is a ton of variability in those figures, and all acknowledge that comprehensive data collection is inherently impossible (criminals don't report their transactions, and good financial data is hard to collect even for honest participants), and not a single one has ever claimed to "prove" any of those figures.

[-] americanscream@lemy.lol 0 points 3 months ago

Monero usage from criminals can be tracked from CEXes, swaps, and cross-chain bridges. It can also be tracked by vulnerabilities mentioned in the "Breaking Monero" series. You are being dishonest by ignoring the main use of Monero among criminals. Your community is also vocal about Monero replacing Bitcoin on darknets and view it as positive.

Sources: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/csam-cryptocurrency-monero-instant-exchangers-2024 https://www.ft.com/content/13fb66ed-b4e2-4f5f-926a-7d34dc40d8b6 https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2024-crypto-money-laundering

[-] jeffro256@monero.town 4 points 3 months ago

None of those linked articles support the claim that "almost all of Monero’s usage is crime-related".

[-] g2devi@feddit.nl 2 points 3 months ago

The "sources" are extremely sus. Most CEXes have delisted Monero and no-KYC exchanges by definition don't have KYC. The addresses are not stored on the blockchain. If an address is known to be CSAM, it would be blocked off so no transactions would have been made and because of the previous point, you can't go back in the blockchain to find past offenders. The CSAM site likely has other non-CSAM porn so many actual purchases would be legal so usage on honeypot exchanges would not mean much. Reading between the lines, the article is basically coming up with its statistics via inference. (1) Most BTC blockchain activity is speculation, (2) CSAM makes up a significant percentage of BTC actual usage, (3) Monero's popularity is growing, (4) Criminals prefer privacy, (5) therefore Monero's growth is mostly from CSAM. The main counterpoint to this is Monero's increase use in coin cards, VPN and other privacy tool/services purchases, Shopinbit, etc where Monero's use exceeds that of BTC and lightning. So (1) does not apply to Monero, and it's likely (2) if it were ever true is increasingly not the case so (5) is absolutely false.

[-] gunnm@monero.town 2 points 3 months ago

Criminals will use the best tool of their choice as USD. Monero and cash works as intended regardless if it's used by criminals or not. Privacy is a right.

[-] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 3 months ago

If you have decided it's not for you, why are you here?

[-] americanscream@lemy.lol -1 points 3 months ago

I want to help people who might be suffering from the propaganda in this echo chamber or who hold Monero to see the truth. My points against Monero are valid, and I don't want anyone to be misled by Monero. If at least one person benefits from reading my valid skepticism that discredits Monero and decides to leave it behind, I would consider that a success. Monero is not for me or for anyone who is not a criminal.

[-] xmr_unlimited@monero.town 5 points 3 months ago

Tomorrows criminal did nothing wrong yesterday until someone changed the rules today.

[-] jet@hackertalks.com 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Sounds like you're invested in the project's failure.

Which means you're not an objective and impartial observer. You're invested.

Just like social media, just like Facebook, just like Instagram, just like YouTube, the best way to kill something is to ignore it and not give it any attention. If you really want monero to die, don't use it, don't talk about it, let it disappear

[-] americanscream@lemy.lol 1 points 3 months ago

I tried ignoring Bitcoin for some time before modding r/Buttcoin and r/CryptoReality as well as creating the ioRadio podcast. It only became more and more popular. I don't want the same to happen with Monero. I don't want people to lose their money or unknowingly engage in helping online crime grow.

[-] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 3 months ago

How is your campaign against Bitcoin going?

[-] americanscream@lemy.lol 1 points 3 months ago

Pretty well. Over the years I've managed to persuade people to avoid Bitcoin and received many complements. You can view my efforts in more detail on my ioRadio podcast. I've also created an entire documentary criticizing cryptocurrency and blockchain as a whole. I don't have any vendetta against Monero, and all of them are the same.

My podcast and channel where you can view my work: https://ioradio.org https://www.youtube.com/@AmericanScreamVideo

When cryptocurrency eventually collapses, Monero included since it's correlated with Bitcoin, my voice will finally be heard as a prophecy.

[-] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 3 months ago

You can make a anticrypto community here on Lemmy.

[-] gunnm@monero.town 3 points 3 months ago

Tell us your bags. If you know Monero you must be using some other coin.

[-] LobYonder@monero.town 2 points 3 months ago

Hidden amongst all your bullshit (which Bobr has dissected) you do have a few reasonable points

barely handle the transaction throughput of Visa

Firstly that's a non-sequitur, you don't need Visa throughput to be a currency, but scalability is a genuine issue in the long term. That will need a 2nd layer technology, probably using sharding or other approach for more parallelism and throughput.

Monero is confusing for average people

Generally true. Any self-custody solution will be more complex than just trusting a bank service, but substantial UI improvements can be made and some trusted simple apps will develop.

Monero is centralized

There is currently a small group of developers and researchers, but they are distributed geographically and not connected except by their involvement in the project. All hosting and communication occurs on multiple platforms, including distributed ones like this one. It's one of the most decentralized open-source projects around, certainly far better than BTC or ETH for example.

will not be allowed to be hard-forked

Bullshit, no-one can prevent hard-forks. Both source-forks and chain-forks can be created by anyone. That is a concern actually as bad actors can cause confusion.

community can’t decided unilaterally ... technical stagnation

It will be the reverse. Unanimity or a centralized foundation would cause stagnation. Monero has had forks in the past, and it will have more in the future. That guarantees technical innovation. Customers will choose their preferred version. It's a free market for currency innovation.