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This is something that leaves me perplexed. The whole point of crypto is to undo government and governement law, I would think. Otherwise there's no point, except as a funny toy for speculators. Now, to be able to undo government and governement law, the only way is to do it anonymously, no ? If you use a tool to undo a mighty powerful enemy (the state and state law), you must be crazy to do so in the open, no ? The whole point of crypto is to be able to do financial transactions that are "against the law", otherwise why not use the government system (= banking) ? The whole point is to be able to finance what is forbidden, and not to be stolen by taxes where the law imposes taxation, no ? If not, and if law abiding, what good is crypto ?
Bitcoin was a very good idea, but was essentially lacking the technology to do so. The thing that comes closest is coinjoin which breaks trustlessness. DASH is the best possible implementation of that.
Cryptonote solved the issue with ring signatures, a technology lacking in bitcoin. It is far superior to the coinjoin technology which is a patch.
That said, most of crypto, and most of its market cap, seems to consist of "law abiding citizens". I fail to see the interest of that. If you are law abiding, what are you doing in crypto, which had as a goal the failure of state and law ?
This is something that leaves me perplexed. The whole point of crypto is to undo government and governement law, I would think. Otherwise there's no point, except as a funny toy for speculators. Now, to be able to undo government and governement law, the only way is to do it anonymously, no ? If you use a tool to undo a mighty powerful enemy (the state and state law), you must be crazy to do so in the open, no ? The whole point of crypto is to be able to do financial transactions that are "against the law", otherwise why not use the government system (= banking) ? The whole point is to be able to finance what is forbidden, and not to be stolen by taxes where the law imposes taxation, no ? If not, and if law abiding, what good is crypto ?
Bitcoin was a very good idea, but was essentially lacking the technology to do so. The thing that comes closest is coinjoin which breaks trustlessness. DASH is the best possible implementation of that.
Cryptonote solved the issue with ring signatures, a technology lacking in bitcoin. It is far superior to the coinjoin technology which is a patch.
That said, most of crypto, and most of its market cap, seems to consist of "law abiding citizens". I fail to see the interest of that. If you are law abiding, what are you doing in crypto, which had as a goal the failure of state and law ?
When I see posts like this it becomes clear how much many in the crypto currency communities have deviated from Statoshi's original ideal after close to 8 years. A good place to start is to read the introduction to Statoshi's paper. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. The whole point crypto is to provide a digital payment method that behaves the same as cash, and can be used over the Internet. This is all about cutting out the corporate middlemen and has little to do with Governments. It is about making electronic payments to individuals, especially individuals who may be very poor. In person one can use good old cash, but online one is forced to use proprietary payment methods whose primary design objective is to transfer wealth to the wealthiest 0.000001%. This critical design flaw in proprietary digital payment methods means that they fail miserably when the payee has a net worth below that of middle class or the payer has a net worth at or below that of poverty. Furthermore "middle class" and "poverty" are defined by the standards of a wealthy developed first world country.
My take is that as far as government power is concerned the impact of crypto may well be neutral.
If we look at Bitcoin, there are two very important critical characteristics of money that Bitcoin lacks:
The first is that Bitcoin can only be used by a very minuscule proportion of the worlds population. This is of course the 1 MB blocksize limit in the Bitcoin protocol. Dash does not address this at all since 4x minuscule is still minuscule. Monero does because it has an adaptive blocksize limit.
The second is that Bitcoin in reality is not fungible and is subject to coin taint and possibly even reversibility of transactions. Furthermore there is no privacy on the Bitcoin blockchain, in particular from the payer. The recent events in Ethereum have demonstrated that a decentralized proof of work blockchain is not enough to prevent reversibility of transactions one also needs anonymity, fungibitly and privacy.
Dash addressees anonymity, fungibility and privacy by implementing Coinjoin on a second tier masternode network. There are serious shortcomings with this approach. Mixing on the Dash masternode network can take hours or even days, and has to be completed before a transaction, and then again after a transaction with the change. Furthermore the Dash masternode network is actually very centralized. There are for example over 4x the number of Banks and Credit Unions in the United States alone that there are Dash masternodes. By this token alone the US banking system is actually more decentralized than the Dash network.
Monero addressees anonymity, fungibility and privacy by using ring signatures. Mixing is seamless and part of the transaction. Sending Monero is essentially the same as sending Bitcoin, with no distinct mixing step. Furthermore in Monero all transactions are mixed. Monero's approach avoids the need for second tier network with all the centralization and regulatory risks this entails, while at the same time providing a much superior anonymity, fungibility and privacy solution.
Dash does have an interesting technology in Instant X that Monero does not have. In fact Monero has moved in the opposite direction by moving from a 1 min block time to a 2 min block time. My take on Instant X is that for online payments it is irrelevant, Where it is relevant is for in person transactions, yet this is precisely where crypto is the least needed. It is also the area where crypto will face fierce competition from cash and pre paid value apart from proprietary payment methods. Still it is possible this could be a niche opportunity for Dash.
