Cash isn't a "credit paradigm", not more than "a piece of gold" would be a credit paradigm.
I wasn't calling cash a credit paradigm. I was saying that obscured blockchains use bank accounts as their primary archetype rather than an anonymous commodity like gold by virtue of the fact that they ascribe blockchain addresses to people in the way a bank account does and gold doesn't.
Absolutely not. I don't know what is the strange reasoning that leads you to posit that. In as much as this comparison is viable, and it isn't, I would rather say, the opposite. There is something that is common to all of crypto, transparent or not, and that is that a secret key can provide a proof of right to spend. This is just as well the case on the bitcoin block chain, as on monero, as in zerocash. You can provide a proof of right/power to spend using your secret key.
That is exactly the same as someone showing you a genuine piece of gold. Him holding that piece of gold in his hand, means he has the "right/power to spend" that piece of gold, by physically handing it over to you.
This is the only thing that matters: it is real gold, and he clearly can give it to you, and then he won't have it any more.
At no point, you verify that this gold was gotten from Joe, who got it from Jack, who got it from Alice, who got it from Mary, who dug it up. This last thing is the way of bitcoin to verify that the gold was OK, and that it was not double spend. It would be a way to verify that gold is all right. But that's not what you do when you receive gold. You only check that it is real gold. Not where it comes from, to prove that it is real gold.
So providing someone with a cryptographic proof that he has the right to spend monero is just as good, as someone showing you a piece of gold of which you can chemically verify that it is genuine gold. The proof is there. You cannot "see the gold atoms" nor can you "see the history of how it got there", but you rely on perfectly valid chemical proof that the gold is real, and that's good enough.
That is folly because you then have to live with a whole load of conflicting priorities. For example, have you ever tried verifying a transaction in Monero ? You can't, because verification (by visual inspection - not by some meaningless transaction number) means observing 2 balances, not 1.
You cannot visually inspect the bit coin block chain either. It is 90 GB or something. In order to verify it, you should verify VISUALLY all hashes of all blocks, and all transactions (maybe hundreds of thousands) that have led from the different minings of the different shards of bitcoin up to the transaction you want to verify, and you want to verify that because it is bitcoin's way to say that a transaction is valid.
A cryptographic proof, such as in monero, or such as in zcash, is just as good.
It means verifying that the balance at one address moved in one direction and the balance at the other address moved in the other direction by the same amount. Monero only makes 1 of those balances visible because it throws every other priority out of the window for the sake of supporting this one flawed archetypal characteristic of bank accounts - obscurity.
Absolutely not. You know that the cryptographic proof certifies that if you get the coins, then the payer has lost the coins. So if the crypto proof is right, you know that the transaction was correct, and that there was no double spend. Because the math proves it. In a more sophisticated way than just showing the accounts, but just as valid.
In the same way that chemically verifying that the gold is real, is just as good (even if you can't see the gold atoms "visually") than verifying the whole transaction history since 1000 year of that piece of gold in order to prove that the gold is real.
If you trust chemistry to prove that the gold is real, you can trust mathematics and cryptography to show that the coins are real. I fail to see the difference in principle.
It's also the reason why its proponents bang on about 'privacy' to the exclusion of everything else - they have no choice. Hence the heavy use personal pronouns that always characterises their dialog when discussing blockchain addresses which is nonsense because an address no more represents a person than a peice of gold does. The fact that some off-chain information may lead to knowledge of who controlled a particular address at a particular time doesn't fundamentally change that fact because blockchains are not carrying "your money", they derive their value from the fact of being a public resource that you may have some control over.
Absolutely not. In crypto, NOTHING carries any value as such. People BELIEVE that these tokens are accepted against value, and that is what gives them value. The system has to be such that one can verify that the tokens are obeying a "right/power to spend" in agreement with agreed-upon rules, of which of course "accepted creation" and "no double spending" are part, and that's it. What carries value, is your proof of power/right to spend and the belief that this carries value. Nothing more, nothing less.
