Pretend I am a millionaire and want to invest in Monero.
Please answer me the following:
a) Who made Monero and why? What was their vision?
b) What had the Monero team done for privacy, before copying the Bytecoin code?
c) Are they really interested in anonymity, or did they try to cash out in the wake of DRK? Why did they make an anonymous coin in May - when DRK was already making a splash? If they were really interested in anonymity, why not earlier?
d) Can Monero scale?
e) Is Monero's PoW futureproof, for providing almost 90% of its coins in just 4 years? Why would someone invest in such a curve?
f) Why would I put my money on something with 2% daily inflation? As a currency, does it fulfill one of the basic criteria - that being an adequate store of value?
g) What is the cost to render the blockchain DOA for someone who wants to kill Monero, in terms of Bitcoins? Can a kid, a hacker, a government spend 10 BTCs and make the blockchain so bloated that it doesn't even load the wallet - killing my multi-million investment?
h) Is Monero anonymous in itself, or does it also need IP obfuscation to achieve anonymity? If it is the later, how exactly is it so anonymous, and how can you vouch for the IP obfuscation network that it will be using? Is there an IP obfuscation network that is 100% reliable for anonymity purposes? As far as I am aware, there is none.
i) Why should I pick Monero instead of Boolberry? The specs of Boolberry are superior and the dev is seemingly doing more work on his own than the Monero devs. Remember I am a buyer and I don't care about who mines what so I don't care about CPU and GPU miners.
k) What happens if the Bytecoin guys (who made the code) discover a flaw, patch it in their own coin and then kill the clones by exploiting the flaw? If they are really underground hackers that hate the Monero copycats, isn't that a real possibility?
l) What is the advancement potential given that Monero is a clone and Bytecoin is the original?
m) What assurances do I have that the codebase is solid? For all I know it's totally untested in public use, being public for 2 or 3 months. Even the boolberry dev openly declares it to be untested.
n) Is it usable by average joe?
o) Is it usable by companies and businesses?
I can ask you questions about Monero all day long if you are so inclined to advertise Monero in the DRK thread.
This one gets bookmarked.
The best pieces are actually all around the BCN and MRO threads with all the unbelieveable problems people encounter every day. If I made a list of these perls, we'd be laughing all the way to the DRKbank - but at least they are trying... heh...
For example, a while ago Mintpal added Monero and ...money isn't moving around in the chain:
Saturation... "Please wait for your tx"... Yep... That will scale well for prime-time use...
Darkota are you still with us?
I decided to answer most of the "questions" AlexGR had, we can ask the same for Darkcoin and get a Very very different answer..but I won't get into that.
Is Monero futureproof? Yes, it is realistic in the sense that the coins will have been mined in a decent sized timeframe, after all 4-5 years is quite some time in the "Crypto World"(Look at 2010 to 2014) and a lot can happen between then, whether it be innovation, new/better algorithms, PoS, who knows, but it's sure better than Bitcoin's 100 year+ timeframe..which is frankly very unrealistic
Is Monero anonymous in itself, or does it also need IP obfuscation to achieve anonymity? Monero is anonymous itself through the use of Ring Signatures, with Ring Signatures you don't need a 2nd party to obscure your transactions through mixing like Darkcoin's coinjoin for ex. I'm not sure what AlexGR means or if he's just trolling with this question...but IP obfuscation is relatively I2P, of which the Monero Devs have already begun working on creating a C++ version for Monero. Monero with Ring Signatures alone offers the best anonymity for a crypto coin, I2P would be an extra boost of anonymity.
Why should I pick Monero instead of Boolberry? Boolberry has had an instamine, where at one point, people were making 7,000 Boolberry per day per person, now that's been reduced to 1,000-2,000 Boolberry per day, person since the difficulty increases. Boolberry uses Wild Keccak algorithm(which has a private gpu miner) instead Cryptonote(Monero's algorithm) .
What is the advancement potential given that Monero is a clone and Bytecoin is the original? Monero's codebase has been changed & improved drastically from Bytecoin's, along with improvements in mining and pool software to stop dust transactions etc etc
Is it usable by average joe? Monero atm is not usable by the average joe because of its command line style wallet, and it lacks a GUI wallet atm.
Are they really interested in anonymity, or did they try to cash out in the wake of DRK? Why did they make an anonymous coin in May - when DRK was already making a splash? If they were really interested in anonymity, why not earlier? Bytecoin was found out and made open by a Bitcointalk user in March of 2014, Bitmonero was forked from Bytecoin's codebase after, then it's name was changed to Monero and the dev team was also changed. It's a pure coincidence that Bytecoin was found & Bitmonero/Monero made when Darkcoin started making it's "appearance"
What is the advancement potential given that Monero is a clone and Bytecoin is the original? Bytecoin was first released in 2012 and has been mined steadily by a group of users since then, amounting to over 85% of the coin being mined by that group of users, before it was made public on Bitcointalk. Therefore, that can be considered a 85% premine. Monero has had no instamine as only 7% of it's total coin supply has been mined to date or premine as it was released on Bitcointalk freely, and no hard forks were made to change or reduce block rewards like we've seen in other coins...
It is usable by companies and businesses? Monero is usable by companies and businesses, many things have been and are being improved, such as dust transactions to stop Blockchain bloating, optimized miners, and many other fixes(See the Monero Missives in the Announcement Thread). As many know, large amounts of private companies refuse to use Bitcoin because of it's overly extreme transparency where everything is recorded in the Blockchain forever. They may favor Monero simply because it has the ability to send Both anonymous and regular transactions through the use of Ring Signatures, making it the ideal currency for Private Companies/those who value privacy.