I have one question for goldbugs. Have you ever tested your theory that there will always be a physical blackmarket? I mean have ever really tried to sell some of your gold not at a dealer.
France has already cracked down on gold, cash, and crypto. Eventually the governments can force all the dealers to report all transactions and expropriate there.
So where do you sell your gold?
And if we are in a severe economic collapse meaning most of the people are suffering economically, selling some gold to someone who is not an established dealer will risk:
1. It is a setup to mug you.
2. It is a government sting to entrap you.
3. Gossip spreads you have gold and marks you as a man/household to mug frequently.
Fantasizing about barter is loony. The youth will grab crypto and their smartphone before contemplating inefficient barter. Currency is a convenience (over barter). People only move to barter if there is no other choice. Ferfal confirms this from experience in Argentina's collapse.
The powers that be are going to leave Bitcoin pretty much open to nefarious activities until it is already adopted as the alternative to barter during this era of financial repression. Once it is too well established as the only crypto that is widely accepted by merchants, then they can start to use the public ledger to expropriate without fear that we nerds can leave en masse. At that point they can close the loopholes we currently use to obtain anonymity on Bitcoin, such as eliminating all unregistered connections to the internet, e.g. no more unregistered WiFi connections and no more unregistered 3G USB dongles. I have been observing the moves they are making to eliminate these options. For example here in the Philippines where we do have unregistered 3G USB dongles, there is a proposed law to make that illegal and also one of the 3 telcom networks (Globe) recently stopped selling simcards with a preset #. Now you have to registered the sim to get a # (so far the registration is over the wire and no name required yet I see this as preparatory step).
If we are going to develop an alternative to Bitcoin which can be anonymous in spite of anything the authorities can do, then we need to do it now because we have to build use value in that coin before it is too late to.
Monero has onchain mixing which is one aspect of anonymity we need. But it doesn't have IP obfuscation and I assert Tor/I2P are compromised because they are low-latency designs, limited number of onion layer hops, and because they have exit nodes (and some other reasons especially around hidden services). The authorities were able to unmask 100s of Tor hidden services. So once the authorities close the loopholes I mentioned above, then we no longer have a way to propagate data anonymously. This must be fixed pronto. Tor needs to be replaced with something that is more suited to the absolute anonymity we need. All crypto-coins will benefit. Also I relayed to smooth and others that I am concerned about combinatorial attack on the ring sigs in Monero, because the mixing is not adequately structured. I have not followed all issues since relaying that, so I can't make any definitive statement now (perhaps I raise a non-issue and I have no desire to propagate FUD against Monero so pleeeassseee), but I will dig back into that aspect eventually.
Also afaics (correct me if I am wrong) Monero's primary use case at this time is (as always speculation in an altcoin and) as a decentralized mixer and then back to Bitcoin again. I don't think it has any widespread adoption as a currency.
If we are going to get any use as currency for an altcoin that is not Bitcoin, then it needs to have a compelling currency use case that Bitcoin can't do. I have an idea. I already wrote about it publicly on this forum under one of my other user names. I am not going to mention it again, because I might be moving into implementation mode and I'd prefer it to be somewhat dubious (plausible deniability) as to what if any thing I was a developer on.
I am interested to consider the tradeoffs of working with Monero but afaik their business model was not to retain any coins to incentivize developers. Their business model appears to me be Communist. They wanted in their marketing to state that it is the most fair coin because there is no premine nor any ongoing minting to pay developers. So I assume the devs either bought the coin out of their own savings (and suffered for it so far) or they had the early dibs on mining (for example I've read that the guy who optimized the PoW hash code apparently netted himself $100,000 due to having an advantage on mining for a short period of time?). How does someone work with Monero and earn a good ROI?
I'd prefer to be upfront and transparent about the funding of the creators and ongoing development, than leave people wondering. I understand there is an unofficial Monero foundation of sorts formed where donations could be aggregated and parceled out for funding development, marketing, etc.. Who wants to be at the mercy of donations? Not me. That is politics, ripe for corruption, political cat fighting, the need to compromise leadership to least common denominator of groupthink, etc..
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