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That's why Zcash, Dash, Monero, et al. are probably going to pop off. That, or become completely illegal, we'll see... not even sure if that can even be enforce

That's why Zcash, Dash, Monero, et al. are probably going to pop off. That, or become completely illegal, we'll see... not even sure if that can even be enforced beyond pushing centralized exchanges to delist the coins. Coinbase delisted Ripple a few months ago, and Ripple just 5x'd in the past month, so I'm not sure how effective one-off delisting actually is.

bouncycastle 6y ago
They've already been delisted by exchanges in Australia, although voluntarily, not by law. IMO The whole world has gone mad with the need for surveillance of everything.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  delisting doesn't really change anything. The real threat would be if exchanges started blocking accounts that received BTC deposits from known monero-BTC exchange accounts. Luckily, they can't really do that, since people would be able to poison an arbitrary BTC wallet just by sending them a quantity of BTC laundered via monero. But it'd be a pretty expensive poison pill.
  - ancientworldnow 6y ago
    The monero atomic swap feature means you can go from BTC to XMR without ever even touching an exchange or one of their wallets.
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      BTC to XMR, sure. But XMR to BTC is the value proposition -- if you've made a fortune doing something illegal, you'll want to have access to the BTC market somehow. Right now, you can probably do that without being sent to prison. It's a matter of using one of the many conversion websites to go from XMR to BTC, then depositing to your exchange and selling it. (I don't know how you'd explain it on a tax form, but maybe you can think of something clever.) But if exchanges start actively cracking down on any account that deposits BTC in response to XMR transactions (i.e. the exchange maintains a known list of wallets used by those conversion websites), they can start putting accounts on hold if those accounts have received large quantities of BTC from any of those XMR-related BTC wallets.
      - varajelle 6y ago
        The atomic swap works both ways. Also with the lightning network you can mix and change different crypto currencies, and it can be really hard to trace the provenance of the coins. Not something an exchange can do automatically. > the exchange maintains a known list of wallets used by those conversion websites Remember that new wallet can be created for each transactions. So even if they'd try to do that, it wouldn't work.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        You can certainly map clusters of BTC wallets. It doesn’t matter if you create a new wallet for that purpose, since those new wallets are contaminated by the transaction history. Basically, from the exchange’s view, they’d bucket the wallets into either “looks like mixing; hold the account” or “seems legit.” Most wallets aren’t used for any high volume transactions; most account holders at Coinbase have no need for that. So it’s certainly possible to map out the network and partition it into known good / known bad categories, and handle the middle ground manually. In other words, yes, XRP is very clever. That’s not the problem. The problem is, you’ll someday find it very hard to convert large quantities of XMR to USD without risking jail time.
        matheusmoreira 6y ago
        > So it’s certainly possible to map out the network and partition it into known good / known bad categories You can't do this sort of analysis on the XMR blockchain. Can't see who's actually sending or receiving money. Can't see the transaction amounts. Can't see how much money any given wallet contains. Can't taint coins by association with criminal activities. Without exchange metadata it's impossible to correlate transactions with any certainty. There's essentially nothing that can be done about it. Will governments become oppressive enough to jail people for the crime of using a medium of exchange they can't control? I'm not even sure that'd be enough to stop it.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Ya'll aren't thinking this through. Suppose I want to map an XMR->BTC converter. I sign up for the converter, and say "Here's some XMR. Give me BTC." At that point, some BTC wallet gives me BTC. I now know which wallet is being used by the XMR converter. And I know all the other metadata as a result.
  - Black101 6y ago
    > But it'd be a pretty expensive poison pill. 1 Satoshi is only $0.0006 USD plus the transfer fees... which is pretty low on the lightning network
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  You have exact corect purposes here: no governemint ought to be having surveilance on financial transaction. They are even atempt to removeing cash for to grow surveilance. This is horible and we must have stopping it.
- bruce343434 6y ago
  australia is such a cuckolded nation when it comes to privacy and technology
bawolff 6y ago
Are they really any better? Zcash has performance issues resulting in fewer people using the private features (privacy is about blending into a crowd. Hard to do that if the crowd is small), dash sounds like a fancier version of normal bitcoin coin laundry. Monero is probably the best but still doesn't provide any math based garuntees, so it's hard to know what it really gives. Then again, they dont need to provide privacy, just the preception thereof. (I stopped paying attention to cryptocurrencies a while ago. My opinions may be outdated)
- ianmiers 6y ago
  In terms of protocols, not specific coins, privacy is clearly technically viable. Take Zcash: for its underlying protocol, known as sapling, the performance issues went away. It's about 2.5 seconds to make a fully private transaction on a pixel 3 and you could get it down to 1 second with some optimizations to the underlying circuit. As a coin, Zcash still has privacy adoption problems, but the roots of that aren't some fundamental technical issue: Zcash isn't focusing on usability, leading to the usage problems. That may change. Also, there are a number of projects coming on line using the same privacy tech. Good privacy is feasible, we have the technical protocols. But product-market-fit niche isn't entirely there yet: the problem is few people grasp then need for on chain privacy yet.
  - baby 6y ago
    There’s still the issue that you need to sync to the full history and look at all the outputs to see if they’re yours right? That’s a real challenge as a light client (which most people are).
    - ianmiers 6y ago
      For zcash currently, yes. But for the underling tech, no. You scan the blockchain in Zcash to be notified of a payment. But the sender could just as easily send you an out of band message with everything you need to know to spend the money and find the payment. There's even a draft spec for doing it for Zcash. https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/420/files#diff-635022fa4a51619d899746b1d35f47790cbee665059c85d22cc12b64fd77c750 https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/420/files#diff-635022fa4a...
dominostars 6y ago
MobileCoin is notable here as well, as they’re promising privacy and being integrated into signal
- sschueller 6y ago
  What is notable is that the government has an easy target to monitor or get rid of mobile coin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation
csomar 6y ago
Decentralized Exchanges are a matter of time. The best the current establishment can do is provide a superior UX for a DEX or on-off ramps to the traditional markets.
- withinboredom 6y ago
  I don’t think we will ever see this. The incentive to modify the code and make it do “evil” things is too high.
  - zelly 6y ago
    We do see it though. There's Uniswap and Bancor on ETH. The trading volumes are in the billions of United States dollars per day. There is also Bisq as a decentralized fiat onramp for BTC and XMR (and soon on-chain atomic swaps). Today it is possible to completely interact with the crypto ecosystem without centralized exchanges. If you're worried about the code changing, you can run e.g. ETH nodes yourself, download the DEX frontends, and run the DEX locally.
    - intotheabyss 6y ago
      Or you can visit uniswap.eth if you have metamask installed since it resolves ENS domains.
    - randomopining 6y ago
      Except how do you go from crypto to USD on a decentralized exchange lol... You don't
      - andxor 6y ago
        https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
  - andxor 6y ago
    Uniswap has more daily volume than Coinbase.
WinstonSmith84 6y ago
Probably Coinbase is going to relist XRP. That was probably to be beyond conform in regard to their IPO and the SEC investigation in Ripple, now settled ... As for Zcash and Monero, yes, these are sensibly some more anonymous cryptos, still nothing as anonymous as some simple bank notes .. :-) Btw, when I see the amount of people thinking that Bitcoin is used (nowadays) for illegal activities, and commenting about it on HN (which has theoretically a more educated audience), this is mind-blowing how little Bitcoin is understood at the moment. It feels like our governments have made a really good job of disinformation
- Laforet 6y ago
  Once upon a time you could actually buy goods and services like pizza and games with BTC, nowadays the most likely reason for an average person to buy bitcoin is to pay the ransom for their locked up computer. Without a legitimate use case (selling your nintendo switch to somebody in venezuela does not count) BTC will be forever associated with the small scale crime scene.
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    This is definitely not true. The most likely reason for someone to buy BTC is speculation. Darknet markets and ransomware volume is tiny in comparison.
  - xur17 6y ago
    You can still buy pizza and games with BTC. If anything, I'd argue that the market for this has increased.
  - WinstonSmith84 6y ago
    BTC was never meant to be used to purchase groceries (transaction fees + limitation on the number of tx/s). There are other cryptos which (could) do that very well, however. But large bank transfer may be convenient with Bitcoin: have you ever purchased a used car, not for $500USD, but for $10k+? Arguably, it's a legal, but definitely an edge case. Just giving an example :-) Speculation is one thing, but BTC is going nowhere and in a world hit by an incoming significant inflation, many have understood that Bitcoin is simply an easy place where to safeguard your wealth if the outlook is at least +5 years, not days / months. That's why people buy Bitcoins at the moment.
MrMan 6y ago
I think it is good for criminals to have a separate system like monero. Then law enforcement and intelligence can attack it without worries about disrupting the legitimate system.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Out of all privacy coins, Monero is the only one with a future.
- capableweb 6y ago
  One-liner with no arguments for why you believe so, great comment! Why don't you tell us why this is a "one-takes-it-all" market and why specifically Monero?
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    Because Monero's the only coin that can't actually be traced or tainted. Looks like even government agencies haven't been able to break it yet. It's also actually useful as currency due to low transaction fees.

bouncycastle 6y ago

They've already been delisted by exchanges in Australia, although voluntarily, not by law. IMO The whole world has gone mad with the need for surveillance of everything.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
delisting doesn't really change anything. The real threat would be if exchanges started blocking accounts that received BTC deposits from known monero-BTC exchange accounts. Luckily, they can't really do that, since people would be able to poison an arbitrary BTC wallet just by sending them a quantity of BTC laundered via monero. But it'd be a pretty expensive poison pill.
- ancientworldnow 6y ago
  The monero atomic swap feature means you can go from BTC to XMR without ever even touching an exchange or one of their wallets.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    BTC to XMR, sure. But XMR to BTC is the value proposition -- if you've made a fortune doing something illegal, you'll want to have access to the BTC market somehow. Right now, you can probably do that without being sent to prison. It's a matter of using one of the many conversion websites to go from XMR to BTC, then depositing to your exchange and selling it. (I don't know how you'd explain it on a tax form, but maybe you can think of something clever.) But if exchanges start actively cracking down on any account that deposits BTC in response to XMR transactions (i.e. the exchange maintains a known list of wallets used by those conversion websites), they can start putting accounts on hold if those accounts have received large quantities of BTC from any of those XMR-related BTC wallets.
    - varajelle 6y ago
      The atomic swap works both ways. Also with the lightning network you can mix and change different crypto currencies, and it can be really hard to trace the provenance of the coins. Not something an exchange can do automatically. > the exchange maintains a known list of wallets used by those conversion websites Remember that new wallet can be created for each transactions. So even if they'd try to do that, it wouldn't work.
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        You can certainly map clusters of BTC wallets. It doesn’t matter if you create a new wallet for that purpose, since those new wallets are contaminated by the transaction history. Basically, from the exchange’s view, they’d bucket the wallets into either “looks like mixing; hold the account” or “seems legit.” Most wallets aren’t used for any high volume transactions; most account holders at Coinbase have no need for that. So it’s certainly possible to map out the network and partition it into known good / known bad categories, and handle the middle ground manually. In other words, yes, XRP is very clever. That’s not the problem. The problem is, you’ll someday find it very hard to convert large quantities of XMR to USD without risking jail time.
        matheusmoreira 6y ago
        > So it’s certainly possible to map out the network and partition it into known good / known bad categories You can't do this sort of analysis on the XMR blockchain. Can't see who's actually sending or receiving money. Can't see the transaction amounts. Can't see how much money any given wallet contains. Can't taint coins by association with criminal activities. Without exchange metadata it's impossible to correlate transactions with any certainty. There's essentially nothing that can be done about it. Will governments become oppressive enough to jail people for the crime of using a medium of exchange they can't control? I'm not even sure that'd be enough to stop it.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Ya'll aren't thinking this through. Suppose I want to map an XMR->BTC converter. I sign up for the converter, and say "Here's some XMR. Give me BTC." At that point, some BTC wallet gives me BTC. I now know which wallet is being used by the XMR converter. And I know all the other metadata as a result.
- Black101 6y ago
  > But it'd be a pretty expensive poison pill. 1 Satoshi is only $0.0006 USD plus the transfer fees... which is pretty low on the lightning network
da_big_ghey 6y ago
You have exact corect purposes here: no governemint ought to be having surveilance on financial transaction. They are even atempt to removeing cash for to grow surveilance. This is horible and we must have stopping it.
bruce343434 6y ago
australia is such a cuckolded nation when it comes to privacy and technology

bawolff 6y ago

Are they really any better? Zcash has performance issues resulting in fewer people using the private features (privacy is about blending into a crowd. Hard to do that if the crowd is small), dash sounds like a fancier version of normal bitcoin coin laundry. Monero is probably the best but still doesn't provide any math based garuntees, so it's hard to know what it really gives. Then again, they dont need to provide privacy, just the preception thereof. (I stopped paying attention to cryptocurrencies a while ago. My opinions may be outdated)

ianmiers 6y ago
In terms of protocols, not specific coins, privacy is clearly technically viable. Take Zcash: for its underlying protocol, known as sapling, the performance issues went away. It's about 2.5 seconds to make a fully private transaction on a pixel 3 and you could get it down to 1 second with some optimizations to the underlying circuit. As a coin, Zcash still has privacy adoption problems, but the roots of that aren't some fundamental technical issue: Zcash isn't focusing on usability, leading to the usage problems. That may change. Also, there are a number of projects coming on line using the same privacy tech. Good privacy is feasible, we have the technical protocols. But product-market-fit niche isn't entirely there yet: the problem is few people grasp then need for on chain privacy yet.
- baby 6y ago
  There’s still the issue that you need to sync to the full history and look at all the outputs to see if they’re yours right? That’s a real challenge as a light client (which most people are).
  - ianmiers 6y ago
    For zcash currently, yes. But for the underling tech, no. You scan the blockchain in Zcash to be notified of a payment. But the sender could just as easily send you an out of band message with everything you need to know to spend the money and find the payment. There's even a draft spec for doing it for Zcash. https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/420/files#diff-635022fa4a51619d899746b1d35f47790cbee665059c85d22cc12b64fd77c750 https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/420/files#diff-635022fa4a...

dominostars 6y ago

MobileCoin is notable here as well, as they’re promising privacy and being integrated into signal

sschueller 6y ago
What is notable is that the government has an easy target to monitor or get rid of mobile coin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation

csomar 6y ago

Decentralized Exchanges are a matter of time. The best the current establishment can do is provide a superior UX for a DEX or on-off ramps to the traditional markets.

withinboredom 6y ago
I don’t think we will ever see this. The incentive to modify the code and make it do “evil” things is too high.
- zelly 6y ago
  We do see it though. There's Uniswap and Bancor on ETH. The trading volumes are in the billions of United States dollars per day. There is also Bisq as a decentralized fiat onramp for BTC and XMR (and soon on-chain atomic swaps). Today it is possible to completely interact with the crypto ecosystem without centralized exchanges. If you're worried about the code changing, you can run e.g. ETH nodes yourself, download the DEX frontends, and run the DEX locally.
  - intotheabyss 6y ago
    Or you can visit uniswap.eth if you have metamask installed since it resolves ENS domains.
  - randomopining 6y ago
    Except how do you go from crypto to USD on a decentralized exchange lol... You don't
    - andxor 6y ago
      https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
- andxor 6y ago
  Uniswap has more daily volume than Coinbase.

WinstonSmith84 6y ago

Probably Coinbase is going to relist XRP. That was probably to be beyond conform in regard to their IPO and the SEC investigation in Ripple, now settled ... As for Zcash and Monero, yes, these are sensibly some more anonymous cryptos, still nothing as anonymous as some simple bank notes .. :-) Btw, when I see the amount of people thinking that Bitcoin is used (nowadays) for illegal activities, and commenting about it on HN (which has theoretically a more educated audience), this is mind-blowing how little Bitcoin is understood at the moment. It feels like our governments have made a really good job of disinformation

Laforet 6y ago
Once upon a time you could actually buy goods and services like pizza and games with BTC, nowadays the most likely reason for an average person to buy bitcoin is to pay the ransom for their locked up computer. Without a legitimate use case (selling your nintendo switch to somebody in venezuela does not count) BTC will be forever associated with the small scale crime scene.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  This is definitely not true. The most likely reason for someone to buy BTC is speculation. Darknet markets and ransomware volume is tiny in comparison.
- xur17 6y ago
  You can still buy pizza and games with BTC. If anything, I'd argue that the market for this has increased.
- WinstonSmith84 6y ago
  BTC was never meant to be used to purchase groceries (transaction fees + limitation on the number of tx/s). There are other cryptos which (could) do that very well, however. But large bank transfer may be convenient with Bitcoin: have you ever purchased a used car, not for $500USD, but for $10k+? Arguably, it's a legal, but definitely an edge case. Just giving an example :-) Speculation is one thing, but BTC is going nowhere and in a world hit by an incoming significant inflation, many have understood that Bitcoin is simply an easy place where to safeguard your wealth if the outlook is at least +5 years, not days / months. That's why people buy Bitcoins at the moment.

MrMan 6y ago

I think it is good for criminals to have a separate system like monero. Then law enforcement and intelligence can attack it without worries about disrupting the legitimate system.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Out of all privacy coins, Monero is the only one with a future.

capableweb 6y ago
One-liner with no arguments for why you believe so, great comment! Why don't you tell us why this is a "one-takes-it-all" market and why specifically Monero?
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Because Monero's the only coin that can't actually be traced or tainted. Looks like even government agencies haven't been able to break it yet. It's also actually useful as currency due to low transaction fees.