Skepticism Sunday #1 -- Jul 21, 2024

Stay on topic:

This thread is only for comments discussing the uncertainties, shortcomings, and concerns some may have about Monero.
NOT the positive aspects of it.
Discussion can relate to the technology itself or its economics.
Talk about community and price is not wanted, but some discussion about it maybe allowed if it relates well.
Be as respectful and nice as possible. This discussion has potential to be more emotionally charged as it may bring up issues that are extremely upsetting: many people are not only financially but emotionally invested in the ideas and tools around Monero.

How it works:

Post your concerns about Monero in reply to this thread.
If you can address these concerns, or add further details to them -- reply to that comment. This will make it easily sort-able.
Upvote the comments that are the most valid criticisms of it that have few or no real honest solutions/answers to them.
The comment that mentions the biggest problems of Monero should have the most karma.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman

15 comments

Thanks for making this thread. I don't have any real criticism, just hoping for FCMPs and Serai to work out smoothly. Both of them are absolutely vital for Moneros future.

I find myself limited to purchasing non-essential items because the marketplaces that accept Monero primarily offer goods that aren't necessary for survival. Essential services and products like fuel, property tax, internet service providers, electricity, insurance, phone service, and food are currently inaccessible through Monero transactions. For Monero to facilitate a successful circular economy, there must be significant progress in making these essential items available for purchase using XMR, whether through direct or indirect payment methods.
- What about the Monero community working with the manufacturers on PoS terminals, providing coding assistance to embed nodes and wallets into them and provide the training to retailers willing to participate in pilot programs? I admit I don't understand the new US laws on crypto and if this might presently be illegal.
  Another idea is to create a legal fund to defend those prosecuted by any of these crypto related regulations. Establish precedence in the courts, making it more difficult to prosecute the free exercise of trade thru crypto and furthering privacy protections for private transactions.
- You can top up your digital Visa card with crypto. However, you would need to convert a small portion of your Monero into SCRT and send it to your digital NON-KYC Fina card before paying. https://fina.cash
- there's clear potential, for monero adoption, to target small businesses that attend to basic needs like nutrition, transport, and shelters, to accept monero to be frank. Farmers, Bakeries, Cabs are all potentially monero adopters imho
- Essential consumer goods have huge markets, and have few differentiating factors. Both of these things are beneficial for mass production, which lowers the cost so much that small business are driven out of the market. And the small business that remain often only resell mass produced goods. Even though WE want essential goods available for Monero, I think it offers buisiness too little advantage in a highly competitive market and the effort required plus legal uncertainty may even drag them down.
  If you want Monero adoption, ask yourself: Why would you want to receive XMR instead of cold hard cash for your work and/or goods? The obvious answer should be: Because you can use it for things you can not use cash for! Yeah people of course thing "duh we got the darkweb" and while that's true the market is way beyond early adopter stage and does not really require our attention. I do like to market for internet services (email, vpn, vps, sms verification etc) because it's such an obvious yet still niche use case. It's also a low value way to spend donated money on your foss projects or whatever you do.
  Personally I think good markets would be anything that is not illegal, but people still don't want anyone else to know about. If you could pay for tax consultants, lawyers, psychiatrists and similar professions anonymously, I'd bet some people would be willing to pay extra and go out of their way to acquire XMR. And once you can't trade for fiat anymore, the best way to get some would be to earn by offering more generic things.
  Yes, in the end it's a hen and egg problem. But I really do believe the least uphill battle is going the "exclusive for XMR" route.

Despite how bullish i am for monero in general, i have a major concern. Picture the following:
The monero community starts to move heavily into adoption (see what xmrbazaar.com is trying to achieve) and it starts to become widespread, BUT it's still not officially allowed by governments. In fact, imagine that governments start to realize how bad monero is for their own economics and centralized control, and they start to explicitely ban it and enforce penalties for just using it (like any controlled substance). what about then ?
What about that one random farmer (small business, selling products attending to people's basic needs to survive), who wants to accept monero to sell his vegetables, he's going to get bothered by authorities for publicly accepting monero, after getting enough fines, i'm sure he'd actually give up trying to use monero officially.
Going even further down that road, as this would be an attack on the currency itself, what about that one fed guy buying monero (wherever, right, haveno, or whatever CEX) just to find out who's selling monero, to literally prosecute them for just having monero?
Would Monero always remain a way to transact secretely ? rather than existing it as a way to transact publicly ?
This technology is not even meant to conform to any law, nor any governmental concern to assert their control over the populations, in fact, it is a direct threat to their existing control.
Now for me, Monero adoption must be a Bottom-UP process you go from individuals, to small businesses (farmers, bakeries, etc) and try to make monero getting adopted further up into bigger and bigger companies, which is (currently at least) increasingly less likely to get adopted due to financial regulations the higher up you go. Picture the day when those same financial regulations trinkle down all the way to the bottom of the pyramid onto small businesses and individuals, this'll be a very tedious environment just to transact monero
- If the farmer accepts XMR over the darknet (I'm really hoping that XMR adoption will lead to widespread use of I2P over TOR), the government is going to have a fairly hard time of it without active 0-days.
  He needs to use the darknet and keep his mouth shut, and things will fine unless he's a kingpin of sorts
  
  yea tor and monero go hand in hand, but even over tor. take mr fed going to that farmer store over tor paying in monero, at some point he has to get his vegetables physically, where he can identify who the farmer is (cant just send food by mail i guess ?)
  if the farmer has to retain his anonymity, he needs a way to send his vegetables anonymously to the buyer
- BTW, are you the nihilist? The one with the guides we see around those parts?
  
  yup its me :)
- There are plenty of tradesmen working on weekends without reporting it to tax authorities. Common in cities, practically the norm in rural areas. Time spend working doesn't leave a paper trail and whoever hired them can buy all the materials for "personal use". Farmers do need to buy supplies, but unless they have John Deer equipment, the harvest amount will not be automatically counted, and it's trivial to sell some part of it on non-official markets.
  I think it all hinges on how fast people get used to using monero "for real" and not only to buy some merch or for other meme purposes. When regulations come down, the people who will be hit the hardest are those bridging between fiat and xmr, because their banking activity can be moderately easy controlled.

My only concerns are Monero devs, what measures are devs taking to avoid something like the highjacking of Bitcoin?.
- @gunnm @k4r4b3y its Jon of the comunity to keep the devs in check.... that being said I think it's much harder to hijack monero.... monero has a clear goal, an unstopable mean of exchange value in a private and fungible way, in bitcoin there is not an unique narrative and the narratives that it have have been changing over time

15 comments