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They're still a decade ahead of most people. It seems only now that people are becoming aware of privacy coins. I go to a lot of crypto meetups and every time I
by snthpy 11mo ago
They're still a decade ahead of most people. It seems only now that people are becoming aware of privacy coins. I go to a lot of crypto meetups and every time I bring up that bitcoins aren't fungible (because they carry full provenance and you might not be able to cash out tainted coins) I just get blank stares. FATF Travel Rule is turning up the heat on this.
I haven't kept up with developments though. What are best privacy coins these days. ZCash seems to be the institutional favourite while Monero hasn't moved much.
- charcircuit 11mo ago>tainted coins All you have to do is make a single transaction using all of them. You will receive a freshly minted UTXO. Each bitcoin block involves burning a set of UTXO and then minting a new set of clean UTXO.
- wmf 11mo agoNope, taint flows through transactions. If the input(s) are tainted so will be the outputs.
- charcircuit 11mo agoBy that definition everyone in the same block is tainted. Maybe the bitcoins from your output came from someone else's input. And you tainted input may have entirely gone to the miner as their reward UTXO. You can't really trace an individual bitcoin / satoshi because in reality it's just a bunch UTXOs constantly being created and destroyed. Maybe you can distribute a percentage of the taint among all the outputs, but at that points its like most US dollars have traces of cocaine on them.
- wmf 11mo agoThat isn't how Bitcoin works at all. All the transactions in a block are not CoinJoined together.
- charcircuit 11mo agoMaybe this example will help. Let's say a user has 1 bitcoin UTXO that is tainted and then 1 bitcoin UTXO that is not tainted. They create a transaction that takes both UTXO as an input and as an output creates 2 UTXO of 0.5 bitcoin. In this scenario, is the first output UTXO of the transaction tainted? The second? The miner's reward UTXO? Someone else's output UTXO?
- walletdrainer 11mo agoBoth, not the block reward.
- OutOfHere 11mo agoZcash is not a privacy coin in the same way that Litecoin isn't. In both cases, their privacy is optional, which is to say that when you need to swap it, your recipient will likely not accept the private version. Monero is a privacy coin with default privacy. Institutional pumps and dumps are exactly the thing to steer clear of, and Monero is fortunate to not have become a huge victim of them. Monero has seen more organic growth.
- godelski 11mo agoMonero also isn't tradable on coinbase and is much harder to obtain or spend. Zcash has been pushing Zashi which will reconvert coins to shielded ones. They seem to be trying to take the issue seriously and help make this trivial for those who actually want to use coins as cash. Not sure it really matters for those who are just holding on coinbase or daytrading, as traders don't care about privacy and if you have a custodial wallet the custodian already has access to the sending and receiving addresses, significantly reducing privacy. I'm with you, but it also seems like they have a better roadmap than Monero. If Silicon Valley can get monopoly status by selling things cheap and then jacking up the price after they have their network effect, why not get the coin embedded into the financial system first and then hard fork into private transactions only? Maybe it's not the right play, but at least we have people trying different things.
- beeflet 11mo agoThe development of zcash is entirely controlled by Electric coin company, and they use this to control the zcash supply by taking a fraction of the coinbase outputs. Even if zcash is technologicially superior, why not just fork it exactly and start over from genesis? Zcash is not the next bitcoin, but the next bytecoin. Cryptocurrency needs to be a community-led project like bitcoin or monero.
- OutOfHere 11mo agoMonero is hard to obtain and spend if one doesn't know how. If one has an app like Cake Wallet, it's easy. Monero has a strong culture of self-custody, competitive DEX swappers, and P2P swappers, although a few service providers occasionally are scammy. Centralized exchanges are scammy too though in that they have a habit of going offline during a crash. I am not opposed to the existence of more privacy coins and features. Anything that loosens the grip of surveillance is good. Besides default privacy, one other thing that Monero has is constant emissions, making it sustainable for transactions in the long term beyond the next century. To my understanding, both Bitcoin and Zcash will in contrast shift toward pretty high transaction fees, keeping them relevant as a store of value, but irrelevant for small transactions. Bitcoin will survive via an efficient layer 2, e.g. Lightning, but will Zcash? Switching to PoS and other such gimmicks won't fix the core issue.
- pertsix 11mo agoWhy would Bitcoin purists care about off ramping onto fiat? This seems awkwardly unnecessary for a technology that has only prioritized deflationary economics and economic sovereignty through private key encryption.
- wmf 11mo agoThere are virtually no actual purists. And criminals are generally more opportunistic than ideological.
- cperciva 11mo agoSerious answer: Because they have to eat. Being a purist doesn't mean they can afford to ignore the world they live in; even if they believe that USD is fundamentally worthless and keep all their wealth in Bitcoin, they still need to occasionally pay bills to people who don't take Bitcoin.
- red-iron-pine 11mo ago95% of the world is still on fiat. outside of a few san fran tech bros, how many people you know ever bought a house with BTC? you gonna gift your mom monero for x-mas?
- Gud 11mo agoI don’t know about best, but when buying drugs, Monero is the preferred choice. Or so I’ve heard.
- ta12653421 11mo agoThis is not what "fungibility" means in terms of accounting & balancing: In fact, Bitcoin are fungible from a regulatory perspective: As every one USD is worth as another USD, every Bitcoin has same value as another Bitcoin and they are fully intechangeable without any change of value on both sides of the transaction. Thats the reason why there are NFT - these are not fungible in that sense, as they are not interchangeable one by one, since one 1 NFT may have another value than the next NFT.
- vasco 11mo agoThey go to crypto meetups, they know all of this. Their point being that when provenance comes into play they are not fungible anymore because you may be able to spend a bitcoin but not another. So they are not all worth the same. You just repeated wikipedia, they were making a new point.
- ta12653421 11mo agoI work in the field on the side of an institution, I know very well what people on "Crypto Meetups" are telling :-D
- fasbiner 11mo ago[flagged]
- ta12653421 11mo agoThanks for coming here and thanks for your contribution. And no, English is not my native language, as a lot of people in here. Sorry if you dont like that. Nontheless, impressive how you could assume my professional experience does not exist. Great.
- fasbiner 11mo agoI did not say anything about your professional experience nor make any implicit assumption. You would benefit from using translation tools in order to participate more effectively with less frustration. This is not a personal attack, it is a factual statement about your level of English writing and reading proficiency. That you would interpret as such may not be a purely linguistic issue, but I am trying to be charitable and helpful.
- Ferret7446 11mo agoThat's not fungibility, that's just an association issue. If someone denies doing business with you because you bought (or sold) a Trump hat, that doesn't make cash non-fungible. (Incidentally, banknotes all have unique serial numbers and can be traced to criminal transactions by either the serial or by more mundane taints/markings)
- walletdrainer 11mo agoFungibility is the term that has been used in this space for more than a decade, it’s a bit late for you to try to change that.
- bawolff 11mo agoFungability as a term goes back hundreds of years. I get that specialized communities use specialized jargon, but it seems like it would be less confusing to use the word "tracable" here.
- walletdrainer 11mo agoFungibility accurately describes the main problem here, right now some bitcoins are worth significantly less than others because they’re tied to hacks and you can’t send them to any normal exchange without immediately getting your account frozen. You will have to spend more than 1 “dirty” bitcoin to get 1 “clean” bitcoin. Almost nobody will accept the dirty bitcoin, whereas basically everyone will accept a bank note no matter the history of said bank note (cops might show up at your door later, yeah). But sure, eliminating traceability inherently solves this issue too.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo agoIf you want to buy something and the guy says "I'd love to sell that to you, but your $100 was stolen in a bank robbery two years ago and it's on a list with its serial number"... well, that $100 isn't fungible, is it? Has little to do with the association, it's not you, it's the money itself. That said, my example is one that proves this happens for cash too. Extreme corner cases are funny like that.
- akimbostrawman 11mo agoMonero is vastly superior and desirable compared to zcash with its weak optional privacy, centralization and corporate/government ties.
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago> Monero hasn't moved much. If something works very well, I'd rather it doesn't move much.
- DANmode 11mo agoIt’s the lack of speculative interest that keeps it stable, simply tracking relative value of other assets up and down. Crazy how that works!
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo agoI actually thought the person I was talking meant in terms of the technology changing.
- stef25 11mo agoTrading privacy coins is set to banned in the EU as from 2027. Not sure how easy it will be to circumvent this rule. https://bitcoinblog.de/2025/05/05/eu-to-ban-trading-of-privacy-coins-from-2027/ https://bitcoinblog.de/2025/05/05/eu-to-ban-trading-of-priva...
- sph 11mo agoThis will initially go the same way as the porn ban that's being enacted all over Europe — VPN usage will skyrocket, people will still do whatever they want. Then they will have to resort to the only other alternative: require a government ID and static IP allocation to access to the internet, for complete surveillance and traceability. You know it's coming.
- mothballed 11mo agoA lot of people have bought real, legal, government IDs from places like Palau[] which sell them for like $300 and no crime is committed by doing so. [] https://rns.id/app/palauidinfo https://rns.id/app/palauidinfo
- csomar 11mo agoI guess what the parent is saying is that every user will be issued a private/public key pair to be able to access the internet. You can, maybe, buy one. But it’ll be easy for the gov. to ban it.
- torlok 11mo ago"All over Europe" meaning UK, France, and Italy.
- sph 11mo agoIf you think it’s gonna be limited to those three you haven’t been paying attention.
- epolanski 11mo ago
- rtkwe 11mo agoYou're probably getting weird looks if you're phrasing it that way because there's not actually tracking of coins at an individual level, it's all balances that are fungible but the nature of the ledger allows tracking of interactions with 'tainted' wallets. NFT's were partially named non-fungible tokens because that was part of their main difference from other items/coins on the blockchain at the time.
- nkrisc 11mo agoAll US bills have a unique serial number, so the same applies. Coins, however, do not. But their weight makes them impractical for use with large amounts, much more so than notes.