Topic: BTC vs. Monero (Read 4259 times)

All righty! I hope that narrative works out for Monero and you.

Done.  Thanks for the inspiration; feel free to piggy back off my words as well.    
 
 
 

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You see this? This is a thousand dollar gold certificate. Back during the roaring 1920's you could take five of these and buy just about any property you wanted. No bank was involved, and besides stirring up some local chatter, no one even needed to know about it. Hell, five of them didn't even make a noticeable bulge in your wallet. You know what that was? Freedom, true freedom, of money.

What we have now? Every dollar of what we earn is tracked and scrutinized by governments and corporations, each step designed to make sure we only spend money in the ways they approve of... Living under the threat that at any moment if we are even *suspected* of a crime the powers that be can swoop in and confiscate every cent we own.

That's not freedom. That's not even close.

But technology is about to change all that. The Internet gave us back true freedom of information for the first time in centuries, and now cryptocurrency is about to give us back true freedom of money as well.

Banks, corporations, and governments know they stand to lose a lot of power with decentralized digital money like bitcoin and Monero, so you can expect they won't be thrilled about its rise.

But the most powerful thing on Earth isn't a corporation or government.

It's an idea whose time has come.

Just caught my attention, may be a small opportunity here. I'll keep my eye on it. Peace.

Provided you don't require much of a trading position in Monero, it is not unhealthy to notice certain trading patterns and act accordingly.

A 10% gain in litecoin this past week yields about a 7-7.5% gain in XMR for an individual, for which XMR would also gain immensely from an increased trading volume in turn.

Not sure about next week though, as I'm not feeling that ballsy

There seems to be some xmr hedge against litecoin on poloniex for some reason I will never understand. A trader I am not, any good reason for a pump on the horizon? Just curious.

I agree with your first point--my point is that any currency can suffer this fate if it is viewed as "unwanted" by TPTB--it isn't a matter of group size as the Nazis proved with wealth seizures and the US government proved with gold bans. The only thing a privacy coin can do is be private on chain, the rest is up to you. In this case i can create an off-chain wallet and fill it with coins bought through I2p/tor using best practices (not revealing an IP) and no one will know the asset I hold or how much. Asking any more of a privacy coin is asking it to control the human actions involved too.

The second point misses that black market channels will still be available, and if we are living in this type of draconian control environment, many will only use monero as a wealth protecting asset. The fact that this kind of environment is being talked about as normal (even being taken for granted) should give some insight on how far we've come to the Orwellian idea of thought criminals--asset criminals isn't that big of a step towards the quicksand of full-fledged control systems.

Thanks a lot yourself!! Feel more than free to swipe whatever you like from it.

It's actually $0.000784 and $0.00034

Bitcoin Is Gold
Litecoin Is silver
MOnero Is :poop:  

you can continue discussion at reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/3eqk9s/question_about_monero_vs_bitcoin/

I'm not going to quote your entire essay Nxtblg, but that was beautiful.  I'm going to use that parable about the thousand dollar bills going forward; thank you.

Noob question, trying to understand, pls be gentle on me...

I think btc is here to stay, xmr (bought in half a year ago) has nice features...
Does ethereum fit in here?I feel it could become something sweet.
Any random thoughts?

ps nice topic

what kind of money is this?
is this like 0.784$usd and 0.34$usd?

Monero will go to 78,4$ according to MACD then back to 34$ and stabilize around 47,3$ if bitcoin stays above 290$

I agree with you, but that might present a certain difficulty in re speed of adoption. We like to use "disruptive" as a buzzword, but like most buzzwords it does a fine job of obfuscating too. Truly disruptive innovations take a long time before they become mainstreamed simply because the culture needs time to catch up with them.

Case in point: the video phone. The first vidphone didn't come from Skype: it came from AT&T's Bell Labs. A phone with a 7" CRT (in colour, too), it was ready-to-be-introduced as of the late 1960s. But it wasn't, because it was too ahead of its time - not technologically, but culturally.

On the consumer side, the prime client base for yakkin' on the phone was the housewife circuit - and that's where the cultural difficulties started. We're used to the casual and rumpled look, but that "cultural innovation" came via the Internet. During the dotcom bubble, a techy guy appearing unshaven and unkempt meant a workaholic: someone who got right on the Internet and started working in the then-new 24/7 cyberspace world. He looked the way he looked because he was so hard-working, he forgot to shower and groom himself. The same thing went for the female of the species, unkempt-wise.

People dressed down at home earlier, but they didn't show it in public. Back in the pre-Internet days, it was largely expected to groom yourself and see to your appearance before appearing in public. In the privacy of your home, it was okay to lounge around in a dirty undershirt or a housecoat. But in public, it was not: even taking out the garbage in your bathrobe or housecoat was iffy.

Note how the audiophone meshed well with this private/public grooming divide. And note how AT&T's vidphone clashed with it.

On the business side, the use case was: "Think of the advantages you'll have once you're able to see the fellow on the other end of the line! In the old days, you could only take his measure through his tone. But with this new vidphone, you can read his body language too! All from your good old chair! It's just like an insta-meeting that takes place right in your own office! All with AT&T's new marvel of high technology, the living-colour video phone!"

That little come-on was laconically shot down by this catch-22: "If it's important enough for me to gauge a man, I'd better see him in person. If it's not, why would I pay [a lot] extra for this whiz-bang gizmo?"

So...bye-bye videophone. Technologically, America was ready for it back in the Mad Men days. But culturally, it was in no way ready. That's why the innovation-ribbon went to Skype and not AT&T. It's an excellent case study on the fate of a truly disruptive innovation: one that disrupts our good old habits.

"The hell of it is", Monero adoption into the Joe-Average world would be a lot less difficult in the culture that shot down AT&T's vidphone. You could present the advantages of Monero simply by allegorizing the current fiat system as a gaggle of Peeping Toms. That would get the use-case through pretty durn swiftly.

But not in this culture. The sad part is, your prime adoption demographic has grown up in a post-9/11 and post-Internet-Bubble world. It's not going to be easy for them to get comfortable with the lost right of financial privacy, not in days when it's so easy to bad-guy someone like that. We really are living in a "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide" culture. Who wants to be compared to a pedophile, a drug dealer or a corporate fraudster?

But there is a way out: through history. Back in the 1920s, when bootleggers and illegal alcohol were the talk of many towns, the U.S. government issued $1000 bills - including $1000 gold certificates:


Five of these babies, and you had the price of a nice house in your wallet without any wallet bulge. You could buy a pretty fine homestead on the spot, and the worst that would happen is that you'd "cause talk." You could do it all on a whim, and every bank in the known universe would be completely cut out of the transaction. You could buy a house, a car, jewelry, all from money in your billfold and there was no need to let anyone know about anything. You could say "I don't trust banks!" and mean it. You could live your affluent life "unbanked" without any inconvenience. All you'd have to do is declare your income and fork over the taxes: if you declared and paid an amount that more-or-less squared with your lifestyle, a "reasonable" amount, you'd never, ever get audited.

Monero should appeal to the folks who find those long-ago times exotic and intriguing... 

Simply check your own signature. You're singing the praises of a record keeping system - not of a form of "money".

They have very different characteristics, very different priorities. To liken a public blockchain address to a fiat bank account is to liken a shipload of coal to a delivery line.

Cryptonote uses the fiat bank account as its metaphorical template i.e. a record keeping system that places the highest priority on concealment of financial records. Bitcoin uses gold as its metaphorical template - a form of base monetary media that exhibits a high conformance to accepted monetary properties.

There is no way that a mere record keeping system - however private - is ever going to pass for money itself or remotely accede to its value.

another thread comparing apple and horse poop

Oh jesus tok, your back on this? How many times?

Wait, where's the guy that said cryptocurrency has nothing to do with cryptography?

That is not the "holy grail" of cryptocurrency.

The "completely private" bit destroys a cryptocurrency's viability as an unbacked monetary medium as long as it uses obfuscation as its basis.

Obfuscated privacy is the domain of financial records, not the money itself. At best, Monero/Cryptonote is a decentralised record keeping tool, not a new form of money.

It's an interesting point, but very dangerous to assume that Bitcoin offers you practical stealth through transactional chaos. In any event, privacy isn't just for criminals - it's a human need and has a powerful political energy. Being pro-privacy doesn't neccesarily equate to fear of exposure.

The amount of your assets can be determined off the blockchain as well and would likely be investigated just like with btc. The point I am trying to make is using a coin specifically intended for better privacy does place you in the camp of users who are likely interested in better privacy which may expose you to extra scrutiny.


Not a very useful currency if you cannot advertise that you accept it and don't ask to pay In it and don't discuss it openly.