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As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen cred

As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment. With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app" for crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They seem to be the only ones who consistently work towards adding capabilities to the core technology. Edit: I realize I haven't commented on the article at all. This sentence stood out to me: > Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly. And so we should go out and do it. Clearly, this is an important step. But the two examples he provides as a beacon of what's possible (Daimo and Farcaster) don't inspire a lot of enthusiasm. Daimo is just a decentralized version of Venmo and Farcaster is a protocol to build social networks on the blockchain, which is yet another tool and not an application. I do still like reading Vitaliks thoughts. He's a pretty good writer, and it's evident that he spends a lot of time actually thinking about the topics he writes about.

rglullis 3y ago
One of the things that made me less skeptical of Ethereum was that Vitalik has consistently argued based on his view of "Ether as digital oil to power the blockchain", which is to say that the point is not to just hodl, but to create a core technology that can enable different applications. I still think that we should not forget the "I need a censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story, but mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as an immediate need.
- pavlov 3y ago
  > “Ether as digital oil to power the blockchain” This has made you less skeptical of what he’s peddling? That slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He could be selling actual snake oil.
  - pazimzadeh 3y ago
    Actual snake oil has actual benefits. It's fake snake oil you want to avoid. Effect of Erabu Sea Snake (Laticauda semifasciata) Lipids on the Swimming Endurance of Mice https://karger.com/anm/article-abstract/51/3/281/41756/Effect-of-Erabu-Sea-Snake-Laticauda-semifasciata?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://karger.com/anm/article-abstract/51/3/281/41756/Effec...
    - bloppe 3y ago
      This is an all-time HN comment
    - arcticbull 3y ago
      The origin story of the snake oil trope is kinda cool. Apparently the concept was brought over to the US by Chinese railroad workers. It was made from the oil of the Chinese water snake which is high in omega-3's that actually do reduce inflammation. Unfortunately there were no Chinese water snakes in America, and the American hucksters started juicing rattlesnakes. And then... other even cheaper substitutes like beef tallow, mineral oil and turpentine. [1] I suspect the Erabu sea snake is the Chinese water snake that was originally juiced? I don't think rattlesnake oil would have the same effect :) [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377/a-history-of-snake-oil-salesmen https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - maxcoder4 3y ago
    I'll rephrase a bit for the HN crowd: "The Ethereum currency (Ether) value proposition is that it is used to pay for decentralized apps on the Ethereum Blockchain. The more application and users are there, the more Ether is needed and hence it's value goes up". At least that's how I understand it. OPs point is that most cryptocurrency advocates go for "but my token and hold, it is sure to grow 10x in a few months" and I (like probably OP) consider it misleading baseless hope at best, fraud usually.
- PKop 3y ago
  >the point is not to just hodl, but to create a core technology that can enable different applications This is has been said about every coin since the beginning of crypto.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Absolutely not. Bitcoin's initial narrative was "digital cash", i.e, digital payments and microtransactions. Given that transaction costs became prohibitive, it switched to "digital gold", or store of value, meaning that Bitcoiners defend the idea that Bitcoin's reason d'être is just to hold it. I've never seen Vitalik or any of the core Ethereum developers talking about the value of Ether being a fundamental metric of any kind. The incentives are made in a way to maximize utility of the blockchain, not the value of its base currency.
    - PKop 3y ago
      You gave 2 examples supporting exactly what I just said. And there are 1000s of other ones that encompass "crypto".
      - rglullis 3y ago
        I'm really failing to understand you here. The "beginning of crypto" was with Bitcoin, can we agree to that? Can we agree that Bitcoin was not claiming to "be a general platform to power distributed applications"? If you disagree, refer to the whitepaper that says "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Can we agree that before Ethereum each chain was just a fork of Bitcoin, and that the token (aka "the currency") was "sold" to others as something that would have its value determined by supply and demand, but that the blockchain had no use that was not connected to transactions related to the token? As in: fundamentally speaking, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash... are the same? Can we agree that Ethereum (the blockchain) enables distributed applications where people do not care at all about the price of Ether? E.g, I can host files on Storj and pay with credit card, the people hosting data are being paid in Storj's token, and everyone involved in this economy is directly using the Ethereum blockchain, but don't need to hold any Ether at all?
- willmadden 3y ago
  That's what Bitcoin used to be about, before its development team was taken over and it was crippled.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Bitcoin original plan was about "digital cash", it was fully focused on permissionless payments, but that's about it.
    - willmadden 3y ago
      The whitepaper's plan wasn't, but that's not true at all for Bitcoin itself. Satoshi included OP_RETURN which allowed smart contracts - mastercoin being the first L2 (on Bitcoin). He also wanted to increase the blocksize to allow scaling. Vitalik started Ethereum because the "core devs" (bank incumbent funded usurpers) refused to cooperate. This is also the reason the original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        > original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins. So what developments in Bitcoin Cash have been made in that direction? Why is is that all of the "ideological" forks of Bitcoin do nothing but tweak some parameter size in the network settings and do not go beyond that?
        willmadden 3y ago
        The development roadmap for these cryptocurrencies are documented and available with an internet search...
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - midmagico 3y ago
        This is all pretty much boring, tired lies that altcoin profiteers like to trot out apparently assuming nobody is still around who is interested in contradicting them. The purpose of OP_RETURN was to end the script. It was not designed for rando garbage overlays that are worthless; Satoshi's views on scaling were ambiguous—rather than say it "should" he was instead correcting people who thought you could break consensus by simply setting the value higher. There was absolutely zero communication between Vitalik and anybody about his "plans" to dump an overlay into Bitcoin, and his current story about 80-to-40 bytes is a pure, often debunked lie. There isn't a single communication that Vitalik himself can point to anywhere which shows he was interested in "cooperating" and then core turned him down. His typical lie was that he was interested in stuffing data into Bitcoin, but then core devs "stopped that" by reducing the amount he could stuff into Bitcoin by half—from 80 to 40 bytes—but when he says that he also never points at any discussion, and in any event the direct history contradicts this—no versions of Bitcoin from back then ever reduced anything. It was only ever an increase: from 0, to 40, to 80 in released versions. There no evidence these people ever give which shows some lack of cooperation with Vitalik is the reason why Hearn and Andresen "split off" to make an altcoin, which itself is quite the absurdity, and if true just means they would have been ethereum pumpers anyway.. so..
- wslh 3y ago
  The problem is that this gospel has been said for almost a decade now and despite, literally, billion dollars of assets that Vitalik has, and others flowing this is not happening. Not saying that this could not happen as an hypotheses but cryptocurrency foundations are far far from business execution basic practices. As an insider I can say that most money flows to a very small group of people and the governance is not really decentralized. For example, very few people can decide on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol changes, and these people cannot be changed...
  - skybrian 3y ago
    It does seem slow, but they did manage the proof-of-stake transition pretty smoothly despite delays and widespread skepticism, so I give them some credit for that. I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?
    - wslh 3y ago
      He was talking about proof-of-stake since the beginning and every year was talking about the next year. Not blaming Vitalik himself but the whole thing, it is bad to give false expectations. Another thing, no pun intended, is that the proof-of-stake upgrade maintains prohibitive the network fees for transactions while other technologies have low fees. > I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you? The funding of projects is through the foundation but if I remember well the original people and contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        > proof-of-stake upgrade maintains prohibitive Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction fees. > while other technologies have low fees. Any "Ethereum killer" that showed up turned out to have the same if not worse problems as Ethereum in the moment they started dealing with minimal real-world traction. > contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now. First: source? Second: "50% of total ETH until now" is doing a lot of work here. How much was during the pre-mine and how much was due to the sale? The pre-mine sale raised < 20 million USD. Are you counting the people who bought ETH in the pre-mine as "original contributors"?
486sx33 3y ago
+1 for monero
gehwartzen 3y ago
>As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment. This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero and it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to shop on amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than trying to find something locally. The speculative nature of crypto is therefore more of an annoyance as it causes the price to fluctuate too much between paying, shipping, and fund-release.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  So you pay with monero but you still need to give them an address to ship to which some probably store somewhere where the police might eventually find it ? I guess depending on the local police the chances of that leading to any trouble are lower than getting stabbed by a tweaker when you go out into the community to purchase your stuff
  - arandomusername 3y ago
    Would probably be a lot harder for police to do anything since you could argue someone else did it in an attempt to get you in trouble or whatever.
    - Semionilo 3y ago
      Yes you can argue like this and I thought about it when I got a letter. The issue is that if it's too much they will still raid your place even if the evidence might not be that clear and they might ignore politicians. Good luck defending this, it will still be annoying as fuck If your PC is gone for month
      - arandomusername 3y ago
        You got a letter warning you? If they had proof you paid you would probably be in jail. Can still be painful, but way better than if they had proof you bought it. (Also, if any of your drugs dont arrive or were opened, never order any more)
grigio 3y ago
yep, Monero is the CBDC cure, what Bitcoin wanted to be in the origin
shuntress 3y ago
The "Killer App" for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it as a currency.
- maxcoder4 3y ago
  As the OP said, the cryptocurrency you're looking for is Monero.
  - shuntress 3y ago
    "Bitcoin but its anonymous" does not make Monero a real currency. I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable. But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a store, buy something, then pay with Monero which is obviously disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to that, if I want to give a friend some Monero I would have to walk them through making a new account with some new app which they won't do because it's pointless anyways.
    - 486sx33 3y ago
      Shopify for monero is an idea being kicked around, there are also monero marketplaces for non- illegal things Monero could be used in a store and some stores do take monero! Its quick, with low fees
      - shuntress 3y ago
        It's maybe quick with low fees now while no one is using it. It has the exact same practical problems every other distributed cryptocurrency has preventing it from being useful as an actual currency. If Monero ever started seeing adoption as an actual currency it would fall apart just like Bitcoin.
      - tayo42 3y ago
        Is moner just quick for now but as it scales it'll be slow like bitcoin? Or is there something unique about monero that makes it fast?
medellin 3y ago
I mean i have been using bitcoin for the past 6 years to send money to people outside the country with little issue. I know it’s hard to imagine for the west but places exist where working around the local financial system is a huge benefit.
- sfjailbird 3y ago
  And lots of people pay for lots of things with bitcoin, today. It works fine, even if the confirmation takes 15-20 minutes and it costs five bucks. For some things where you prefer discretion, it's fine. For privacy, just use a coinjoining wallet. It's a solved problem for a long time. Commenters here are sour over bitcoin, for a variety of reasons, and ignorant at the same time.
  - kemotep 3y ago
    In your opinion is it possible for someone to be sour on cryptocurrency without being ignorant about how it works?
golergka 3y ago
> As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. In the last two weeks I've paid to people who cleaned my air conditioning, my girlfriend's nails, our lawyer, for delivery of some goods from US, for food delivery, for a sightseeing tour, and for exchange to local currency (delivered to my home) — all in USDT. I've also got USDT from a friend for booking Airbnb for him (he couldn't do it on his own account because of reasons). At this point, most of services in local community are advertised with payment in USDT first: via binance and bybit internal transfer, or just on trc-20.
- Solvency 3y ago
  Yeah where do you live, Izhevsk Russia or something?
  - golergka 3y ago
    Buenos Aires, and yes — community of (mostly political) Russian immigrants. I don't think USDT gets much use in Izhevsk though, Russian local financial services are pretty good, especially compared to Europe or US.
    - throw-the-towel 3y ago
      Even the local businesses in Argentina sometimes accept crypto. I've seen a clothes shop in Jujuy that had a sign claiming to accept Bitcoin.
wslh 3y ago
And Zcash and others doing the same?
- qweqwe14 3y ago
  They aren't. Zcash has opt-in privacy, which I think we've established doesn't work. By this logic BTC also has opt-in privacy – just use a mixer. Well, except that your BTC will be tainted if you do it, which effectively makes BTC non-fungible for all intents and purposes. The only way to have a private, fungible cryptocurrency is to make privacy mandatory and not "something you enable because you are a drug dealer". Does this mean that everyone using Monero is automatically a drug dealer? Even if it does, it's waaay better to have consistency vs having a cryptocurrency partitioned into "normal coins" and "darknet market coins"
  - wslh 3y ago
    Grin's Mimblewimble?
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I think it's more useful to think of ZCash's featureset not as privacy defaulting to on or off, but as giving you the option to have pseudonyms. If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that division between transparent and opaque. As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack. Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a space where they can do that, and then you as a user can privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other exchange. Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy properties with different use cases. Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's fantastic.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > Zcash has opt-in privacy You could just as accurately say Zcash has opt-out privacy too. And the privacy is much more than a mixer since you got ZKPs. Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability, which is why you can find it on coinbase. Not that you should need deniability, since no one has any business knowing what you're doing with your money.
SergeAx 3y ago
Does moving funds between compartmentalized economies count as "currency" use? I know quite a few cases of using it to move money from Russia or China.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  I think thats only a subset of people offshoring money. Many more who might have more means and therefore more pressure to offshore that means would probably opt to offshore that money by buying a vancouver condo they will never see.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
A "solution" looking for a problem.
halfcat 3y ago
Is running an app on ethereum still over 100x the cost to run it on, say, AWS? I hear CEOs talk about how this will revolutionize the world, but realistically no one needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger to validate that someone is the true owner of concert tickets or whatever. I do wonder, if the only real-world application that needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger, is cryptocurrency.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  And the only real-world, non-criminal users of cryptocurrency are cryptocurrency speculators. To an approximation, anyway.
mteam88 3y ago
Farcaster is not a tool for building social applications. It is a social network with 70k+ DAU [1] You can use it through multiple frontends, the officially developed one is Warpcast [2] [1] https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1774490997789241709 https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1774490997789241709 [2] https://www.farcaster.xyz/ https://www.farcaster.xyz/

rglullis 3y ago

One of the things that made me less skeptical of Ethereum was that Vitalik has consistently argued based on his view of "Ether as digital oil to power the blockchain", which is to say that the point is not to just hodl, but to create a core technology that can enable different applications. I still think that we should not forget the "I need a censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story, but mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as an immediate need.

pavlov 3y ago
> “Ether as digital oil to power the blockchain” This has made you less skeptical of what he’s peddling? That slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He could be selling actual snake oil.
- pazimzadeh 3y ago
  Actual snake oil has actual benefits. It's fake snake oil you want to avoid. Effect of Erabu Sea Snake (Laticauda semifasciata) Lipids on the Swimming Endurance of Mice https://karger.com/anm/article-abstract/51/3/281/41756/Effect-of-Erabu-Sea-Snake-Laticauda-semifasciata?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://karger.com/anm/article-abstract/51/3/281/41756/Effec...
  - bloppe 3y ago
    This is an all-time HN comment
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    The origin story of the snake oil trope is kinda cool. Apparently the concept was brought over to the US by Chinese railroad workers. It was made from the oil of the Chinese water snake which is high in omega-3's that actually do reduce inflammation. Unfortunately there were no Chinese water snakes in America, and the American hucksters started juicing rattlesnakes. And then... other even cheaper substitutes like beef tallow, mineral oil and turpentine. [1] I suspect the Erabu sea snake is the Chinese water snake that was originally juiced? I don't think rattlesnake oil would have the same effect :) [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377/a-history-of-snake-oil-salesmen https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- maxcoder4 3y ago
  I'll rephrase a bit for the HN crowd: "The Ethereum currency (Ether) value proposition is that it is used to pay for decentralized apps on the Ethereum Blockchain. The more application and users are there, the more Ether is needed and hence it's value goes up". At least that's how I understand it. OPs point is that most cryptocurrency advocates go for "but my token and hold, it is sure to grow 10x in a few months" and I (like probably OP) consider it misleading baseless hope at best, fraud usually.
PKop 3y ago
>the point is not to just hodl, but to create a core technology that can enable different applications This is has been said about every coin since the beginning of crypto.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Absolutely not. Bitcoin's initial narrative was "digital cash", i.e, digital payments and microtransactions. Given that transaction costs became prohibitive, it switched to "digital gold", or store of value, meaning that Bitcoiners defend the idea that Bitcoin's reason d'être is just to hold it. I've never seen Vitalik or any of the core Ethereum developers talking about the value of Ether being a fundamental metric of any kind. The incentives are made in a way to maximize utility of the blockchain, not the value of its base currency.
  - PKop 3y ago
    You gave 2 examples supporting exactly what I just said. And there are 1000s of other ones that encompass "crypto".
    - rglullis 3y ago
      I'm really failing to understand you here. The "beginning of crypto" was with Bitcoin, can we agree to that? Can we agree that Bitcoin was not claiming to "be a general platform to power distributed applications"? If you disagree, refer to the whitepaper that says "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Can we agree that before Ethereum each chain was just a fork of Bitcoin, and that the token (aka "the currency") was "sold" to others as something that would have its value determined by supply and demand, but that the blockchain had no use that was not connected to transactions related to the token? As in: fundamentally speaking, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash... are the same? Can we agree that Ethereum (the blockchain) enables distributed applications where people do not care at all about the price of Ether? E.g, I can host files on Storj and pay with credit card, the people hosting data are being paid in Storj's token, and everyone involved in this economy is directly using the Ethereum blockchain, but don't need to hold any Ether at all?
willmadden 3y ago
That's what Bitcoin used to be about, before its development team was taken over and it was crippled.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Bitcoin original plan was about "digital cash", it was fully focused on permissionless payments, but that's about it.
  - willmadden 3y ago
    The whitepaper's plan wasn't, but that's not true at all for Bitcoin itself. Satoshi included OP_RETURN which allowed smart contracts - mastercoin being the first L2 (on Bitcoin). He also wanted to increase the blocksize to allow scaling. Vitalik started Ethereum because the "core devs" (bank incumbent funded usurpers) refused to cooperate. This is also the reason the original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      > original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins. So what developments in Bitcoin Cash have been made in that direction? Why is is that all of the "ideological" forks of Bitcoin do nothing but tweak some parameter size in the network settings and do not go beyond that?
      - willmadden 3y ago
        The development roadmap for these cryptocurrencies are documented and available with an internet search...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - midmagico 3y ago
      This is all pretty much boring, tired lies that altcoin profiteers like to trot out apparently assuming nobody is still around who is interested in contradicting them. The purpose of OP_RETURN was to end the script. It was not designed for rando garbage overlays that are worthless; Satoshi's views on scaling were ambiguous—rather than say it "should" he was instead correcting people who thought you could break consensus by simply setting the value higher. There was absolutely zero communication between Vitalik and anybody about his "plans" to dump an overlay into Bitcoin, and his current story about 80-to-40 bytes is a pure, often debunked lie. There isn't a single communication that Vitalik himself can point to anywhere which shows he was interested in "cooperating" and then core turned him down. His typical lie was that he was interested in stuffing data into Bitcoin, but then core devs "stopped that" by reducing the amount he could stuff into Bitcoin by half—from 80 to 40 bytes—but when he says that he also never points at any discussion, and in any event the direct history contradicts this—no versions of Bitcoin from back then ever reduced anything. It was only ever an increase: from 0, to 40, to 80 in released versions. There no evidence these people ever give which shows some lack of cooperation with Vitalik is the reason why Hearn and Andresen "split off" to make an altcoin, which itself is quite the absurdity, and if true just means they would have been ethereum pumpers anyway.. so..
wslh 3y ago
The problem is that this gospel has been said for almost a decade now and despite, literally, billion dollars of assets that Vitalik has, and others flowing this is not happening. Not saying that this could not happen as an hypotheses but cryptocurrency foundations are far far from business execution basic practices. As an insider I can say that most money flows to a very small group of people and the governance is not really decentralized. For example, very few people can decide on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol changes, and these people cannot be changed...
- skybrian 3y ago
  It does seem slow, but they did manage the proof-of-stake transition pretty smoothly despite delays and widespread skepticism, so I give them some credit for that. I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?
  - wslh 3y ago
    He was talking about proof-of-stake since the beginning and every year was talking about the next year. Not blaming Vitalik himself but the whole thing, it is bad to give false expectations. Another thing, no pun intended, is that the proof-of-stake upgrade maintains prohibitive the network fees for transactions while other technologies have low fees. > I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you? The funding of projects is through the foundation but if I remember well the original people and contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      > proof-of-stake upgrade maintains prohibitive Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction fees. > while other technologies have low fees. Any "Ethereum killer" that showed up turned out to have the same if not worse problems as Ethereum in the moment they started dealing with minimal real-world traction. > contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now. First: source? Second: "50% of total ETH until now" is doing a lot of work here. How much was during the pre-mine and how much was due to the sale? The pre-mine sale raised < 20 million USD. Are you counting the people who bought ETH in the pre-mine as "original contributors"?

486sx33 3y ago

+1 for monero

gehwartzen 3y ago

>As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment. This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero and it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to shop on amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than trying to find something locally. The speculative nature of crypto is therefore more of an annoyance as it causes the price to fluctuate too much between paying, shipping, and fund-release.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
So you pay with monero but you still need to give them an address to ship to which some probably store somewhere where the police might eventually find it ? I guess depending on the local police the chances of that leading to any trouble are lower than getting stabbed by a tweaker when you go out into the community to purchase your stuff
- arandomusername 3y ago
  Would probably be a lot harder for police to do anything since you could argue someone else did it in an attempt to get you in trouble or whatever.
  - Semionilo 3y ago
    Yes you can argue like this and I thought about it when I got a letter. The issue is that if it's too much they will still raid your place even if the evidence might not be that clear and they might ignore politicians. Good luck defending this, it will still be annoying as fuck If your PC is gone for month
    - arandomusername 3y ago
      You got a letter warning you? If they had proof you paid you would probably be in jail. Can still be painful, but way better than if they had proof you bought it. (Also, if any of your drugs dont arrive or were opened, never order any more)

grigio 3y ago

yep, Monero is the CBDC cure, what Bitcoin wanted to be in the origin

shuntress 3y ago

The "Killer App" for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it as a currency.

maxcoder4 3y ago
As the OP said, the cryptocurrency you're looking for is Monero.
- shuntress 3y ago
  "Bitcoin but its anonymous" does not make Monero a real currency. I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable. But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a store, buy something, then pay with Monero which is obviously disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to that, if I want to give a friend some Monero I would have to walk them through making a new account with some new app which they won't do because it's pointless anyways.
  - 486sx33 3y ago
    Shopify for monero is an idea being kicked around, there are also monero marketplaces for non- illegal things Monero could be used in a store and some stores do take monero! Its quick, with low fees
    - shuntress 3y ago
      It's maybe quick with low fees now while no one is using it. It has the exact same practical problems every other distributed cryptocurrency has preventing it from being useful as an actual currency. If Monero ever started seeing adoption as an actual currency it would fall apart just like Bitcoin.
    - tayo42 3y ago
      Is moner just quick for now but as it scales it'll be slow like bitcoin? Or is there something unique about monero that makes it fast?

medellin 3y ago

I mean i have been using bitcoin for the past 6 years to send money to people outside the country with little issue. I know it’s hard to imagine for the west but places exist where working around the local financial system is a huge benefit.

sfjailbird 3y ago
And lots of people pay for lots of things with bitcoin, today. It works fine, even if the confirmation takes 15-20 minutes and it costs five bucks. For some things where you prefer discretion, it's fine. For privacy, just use a coinjoining wallet. It's a solved problem for a long time. Commenters here are sour over bitcoin, for a variety of reasons, and ignorant at the same time.
- kemotep 3y ago
  In your opinion is it possible for someone to be sour on cryptocurrency without being ignorant about how it works?

golergka 3y ago

> As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. In the last two weeks I've paid to people who cleaned my air conditioning, my girlfriend's nails, our lawyer, for delivery of some goods from US, for food delivery, for a sightseeing tour, and for exchange to local currency (delivered to my home) — all in USDT. I've also got USDT from a friend for booking Airbnb for him (he couldn't do it on his own account because of reasons). At this point, most of services in local community are advertised with payment in USDT first: via binance and bybit internal transfer, or just on trc-20.

Solvency 3y ago
Yeah where do you live, Izhevsk Russia or something?
- golergka 3y ago
  Buenos Aires, and yes — community of (mostly political) Russian immigrants. I don't think USDT gets much use in Izhevsk though, Russian local financial services are pretty good, especially compared to Europe or US.
  - throw-the-towel 3y ago
    Even the local businesses in Argentina sometimes accept crypto. I've seen a clothes shop in Jujuy that had a sign claiming to accept Bitcoin.

wslh 3y ago

And Zcash and others doing the same?

qweqwe14 3y ago
They aren't. Zcash has opt-in privacy, which I think we've established doesn't work. By this logic BTC also has opt-in privacy – just use a mixer. Well, except that your BTC will be tainted if you do it, which effectively makes BTC non-fungible for all intents and purposes. The only way to have a private, fungible cryptocurrency is to make privacy mandatory and not "something you enable because you are a drug dealer". Does this mean that everyone using Monero is automatically a drug dealer? Even if it does, it's waaay better to have consistency vs having a cryptocurrency partitioned into "normal coins" and "darknet market coins"
- wslh 3y ago
  Grin's Mimblewimble?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I think it's more useful to think of ZCash's featureset not as privacy defaulting to on or off, but as giving you the option to have pseudonyms. If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that division between transparent and opaque. As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack. Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a space where they can do that, and then you as a user can privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other exchange. Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy properties with different use cases. Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's fantastic.
- godelski 3y ago
  > Zcash has opt-in privacy You could just as accurately say Zcash has opt-out privacy too. And the privacy is much more than a mixer since you got ZKPs. Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability, which is why you can find it on coinbase. Not that you should need deniability, since no one has any business knowing what you're doing with your money.

SergeAx 3y ago

Does moving funds between compartmentalized economies count as "currency" use? I know quite a few cases of using it to move money from Russia or China.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
I think thats only a subset of people offshoring money. Many more who might have more means and therefore more pressure to offshore that means would probably opt to offshore that money by buying a vancouver condo they will never see.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

A "solution" looking for a problem.

halfcat 3y ago

Is running an app on ethereum still over 100x the cost to run it on, say, AWS? I hear CEOs talk about how this will revolutionize the world, but realistically no one needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger to validate that someone is the true owner of concert tickets or whatever. I do wonder, if the only real-world application that needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger, is cryptocurrency.

shermantanktop 3y ago
And the only real-world, non-criminal users of cryptocurrency are cryptocurrency speculators. To an approximation, anyway.

mteam88 3y ago

Farcaster is not a tool for building social applications. It is a social network with 70k+ DAU [1] You can use it through multiple frontends, the officially developed one is Warpcast [2] [1] https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1774490997789241709 https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1774490997789241709 [2] https://www.farcaster.xyz/ https://www.farcaster.xyz/