Crap, i forgot about last week. Time for another Skepticism Sunday!
Stay on topic:
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This thread is only for comments discussing the uncertainties, shortcomings, and concerns some may have about Monero.
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NOT the positive aspects of it.
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Discussion can relate to the technology itself or its economics.
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Talk about community and price is not wanted, but some discussion about it maybe allowed if it relates well.
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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:
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Post your concerns about Monero in reply to this thread.
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If you can address these concerns, or add further details to them – reply to that comment. This will make it easily sort-able.
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Upvote the comments that are the most valid criticisms of it that have few or no real honest solutions/answers to them.
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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.
Monero will never succeed. Monero only serves as an illegal tool to facilitate crime online until it will be regulated by our governments (hopefully this happens soon).
I will provide FOUR irrefutable arguments against Monero below.
Monero is supposed to be a cryptocurrency. As they say in the community, “Monero means money”. However, Monero does not even satisfy the criteria of money. Money is defined with the following properties: medium of exchange (widely accepted), unit of account (measure of trade for goods and services), and store of value (self-explanatory). Monero fails to be a medium of exchange that is widely accepted, except for crime and extremely niche cases that will eventually be regulated to oblivion. Neither is Monero a store of value. As proved by past price history, its extreme volatility and reliance on the price movements of BTC/fraudulent cryptocurrencies means that when they eventually fall, Monero will follow. No one on this planet would save or transact in a currency with extreme volatility that could mean losing half the fiat value of your money over night.
Monero has a tainted reputation. Governments are trying their best to delist Monero from CEXes to reduce its usage - for a good reason! Chain analysis companies have proved that almost all of Monero’s usage is crime-related darknet activity. Ransomware, drugs, CP, and all the worse things you can imagine are used strictly with Monero in mind.
A common counterargument to Monero being used mostly for crime by their many fanboys is: muh banks and muh fiat currency has crime usage too
Indeed, the US dollar is used in criminal activities due to its status as a global reserve currency. Unlike Monero, the USD serves as a medium of exchange, a fundamental property of money. The prevalence of crime associated with the USD is not a reflection of inherent evil within the currency itself, but rather a reflection of human behavior. In contrast, Monero is designed with a primary focus on privacy and anonymity, making it attractive for illicit activities. The majority of its usage is related to such activities, with only niche cases that the community often highlights as an exception.
Let us assume that Monero is not built for crime and used for good intentions. Let us assume cryptocurrency is not a ponzi and Monero will actually be used worldwide. Even in this best case, Monero can’t even serve as a global currency with serious use! It uses old blockchain architecture that only allows one block every 2 minutes with limited transactions that can barely handle the transaction throughput of Visa or Paypal. Adding on, Monero is confusing for average people to use. You have to sync the blockchain worth hundreds of gigabytes, which is continuing to grow infinitely, to run your own node. In the future, normal people won’t even be able to run any node as the size of the Monero blockchain grows extremely large. It will rely on data centers and centralized entities like Bitcoin making the network vulnerable to attacks. Also, unlike Bitcoin or other transparent blockchains, you have to scan the entire history of Monero that can take hours if you have unluckily stored your money in it long ago. Imagine waiting hours at the cashier register waiting for the blockchain to sync so it can register that $5 of Monero that you stored years ago!
Monero is centralized, as development and the community-funded initiatives (known as CCS in the Monero community), are vetted by a small group of people who have a complete say in what will or will not be allowed to be hard-forked. If Monero ever gets big, it will face the same problem as Bitcoin, where the community can’t decided unilaterally on what they want on the network leading to technical stagnation. If Monero develops a centralized entity, like making a foundation, as seen in Ethereum, to oversee development, this can be solved. But this can never happen because of legal reasons!
When considering these arguments, which are rarely mentioned in this delusional echo chamber, one begins to realize the absurdity of Monero. Apart from its association with illicit activities, the community often justifies its existence by conjuring up a CBDC boogeyman that governments are supposedly planning to release. The persistent fear of a CBDC’s arrival has been used for years without any tangible results. I was going to release a documentary on Monero, but I chose not to as Monero is the same as every other scam cryptocurrency, except instead of financial crime, Monero enables all crime.
Well, that’s provably false :) I pay for hosting and domain of my instance with Monero, quite sure this is legal. You can prove yourself wrong by paying for something legal with Monero, if you want.
They already try to do that, don’t they? I wish them to have as much success as they had (and have) with banning drugs. They can’t really stop Monero (unless they force people into whitelisted internet, or find a critical bug in the software).
This is not a valid argument… There’s no “medium of exchange” that is accepted everywhere (even US dollar). Zimbabwean dollar is also not widely accepted, yet I suspect you would call it a currency. You can argue (and you would be correct) that it is not widely accepted, but you can’t say that it’s not a currency because of that.
This is an even more invalid argument… How many fiat currencies have failed, how many had hyper-inflation? And yet again I suspect you would call them currencies. And people transacted and saved in them.
I guess in some sense it’s true. But that’s part of a bigger problem. People need to understand that just because some government labels person a criminal, does not mean that they have actually done anything bad or are a bad person. My country considers me, and many more people like me, criminals - because we don’t want to go to a war and die for a Nazi regime… They freeze our bank accounts for that as well (and yes, Monero fixes that). I’m sure you consider me a bad person for that and would rather see me dead or at least my money confiscated, but oh well - I don’t.
This is being worked on, right now stress test is conducted on stagenet and results are being used to improve scalability :)
There’s always an option to introduce L2s, if they will ever be needed, etc. It’s just not a priority right now because in the current state the network can handle order(s) of magnitude more transactions than it has now.
You can sync a pruned node, which take around 70GBs now, that’s less than some modern games. If that ever becomes a problem, a pruned node can sync an even smaller percentage of total blockchain to make it viable for more people to self-host.
With FCMPs we will have a new type of private key, that you can share with a remote node to scan the blockchain for your transactions, without a significant loss of privacy :)
Well, I guess this argument is valid (just as much as it is valid with other cryptocurrencies). But you can always fork. People didn’t like where BTC was going, BCH was forked. If people won’t like where XMR is going, XCH (or whatever) can be forked :)
Dunno, seems quite refutable to me 🤷