Skepticism Sunday #3 — August 11, 2024 (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/monero@monero.town

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Crap, i forgot about last week. Time for another Skepticism Sunday!

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

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[-] bobr@lemmy.libertarianfellowship.org 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Monero only serves as an illegal tool to facilitate crime online

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.

until it will be regulated by our governments (hopefully this happens soon).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Monero has a tainted reputation

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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 :)

Monero is centralized

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 :)