Do you what to know the best part about xmr? You can kick and scream and bitch about me using it, but you can’t do jack shit about it. Maybe you can lobby at the side of paypal for more regulations, until the enshittification eventually catches up with you. glhf

If you are a company and run a webstore, it could be mandatory that all funds must go through a wallet where the tax authorities have a view key. This would be trivial to enforce with penalties whenever for publicly using addresses that point to other wallets. Peer to peer transactions (for eg. used goods or produce from your garden) are already except from taxes in my jurisdiction, so these transactions can be private.

people willing to exchange it for goods and services Never happened.

This is literally what you do every day. You exchange something for goods and services. This something is money based on it’s functional role, not some obscure definitions. To be money, it must be used as money. To be used as money, a group of people must agree that the item is worth exchanging for. This something does need to fulfill additional properties to be useful, notably it must be fungible, durable, portable, recognizable, divisible and have a stable supply. Gold does fit this description, but so does fiat.

What you are describing is a government issued currency, which has some overlap with money, but is not the same thing. Maybe you should research on this stuff.

The idea that money is tied to the state is silly. Many things have been used as money, way before the concept of a “state” existed. Undeniably the money that lasted best across the passage of time is gold. Up until very recently it was the standard to settle cross country currency exchanges with. The value does not come from the state, but from people willing to exchange it for goods and services. Todays fiat money is created at will by a few select people that are not democratically elected. They get to decide how much they debase your savings for the “greater good”, while the ones that profit the most are those who control the source.

Most people do not care about their open source, privacy and digital rights, so they only hear and care about crypto when the price jumps or when it is used for crime. Everything else is simply not newsworthy. So you end up with a bunch of “investors” looking to make a quick buck and people who believe to solve crime with more laws (requesting ransoms is already illegal, has existed before crypto and currently gift cards are scammers favorite form of payment).

I never mentioned the price nor suggested investing, because quite frankly, I don’t care. What I do care about is giving the few big companies that control the internet as little data and influence as possible, and not processing payments through them is a really important step. So I keep about as much crypto as I keep cash in my wallet, and use it preferably when buying or selling.

I prefer free software not for its price, but for the freedom it gives me. Naturally I donate to these causes roughly what I’d have spend on a commercial one. They however do not need to know who I am, so I exclusively use crypto for that. I made one exception for an organization using paypal, and promptly they pulled address and name from that, gave it to a 3rd party which then send a postcard to me. You could see it as a nice gesture, but I think it’s just rude to use data in ways I did not explicitly consented to. Just take your money and leave me in peace.

In a similar manner I like to use it to pay for email, vpn, hosting and other online stuff. In fact this lemmy instance is 100% paid for by microdonations from its users, and because the provider accepts it directly no conversion was needed.

Crypto is not anonymous. Even monero, the most private cryptocurrency, has a feature called “view only wallets”, so 3rd party auditing is possible, if not easier then auditing today. Will individuals use it to avoid some taxes? Sure, it gets easier for them. Will corporations avoid more taxes then they already do? Doubtful.

Well their can not be uncapped fractional lending as it is right now. The bank could offer a credit card equivalent, but it would need an equal amount of deposits. The current system works by essentially crediting the merchant an IOU, whose value does not have to be real. With crypto merchants get to choose, would they rather have native crypto, or an IOU with strings and contracts attached? Obviously the latter is more risky, and therefor the seller has to factor it into the price/ transaction fee.

Maybe that can be somehow circumvented too. But it certainly is more difficult then the meddling that happens right now.

I don’t use AI to copy other peoples work. I use AI as a better search engine for obscure topics where I don’t know the right keywords. Describe your issue in cleartext, and out comes enough info to migrate to a better search. I’ve also used AI to modify my own works, ie. “blur out the background of this image” or “remove object from image”.

When people argue in favor of traditional banking because they are more “environmental friendly”, I really have to ask who is arguing ion bad faith. Aren’t credit cards a thing because banks know that given the chance people will consume more then they can afford? They are the one complicit in our consumerist culture, which arguably places a much higher burden on the environment. But the calculation is much broader then comparing the power consumption of ATMs with crypto networks, so it’s easy to sweep that part under the rug.

AI has the potential to become a tool which strongly favors and benefits the ruling class. Us peasants get the locked down version, while government agencies get to use the full power for cyber warfare and disinformation campaigns, and large corpos get to manipulate (“advertise”) to you in most manipulative way to act in their best interest.

The way I see it good people shy away form using AI, leaving only the assholes wielding their new would powers. Those with ill intentions will find ways to use it, no matter how many laws you put up to prevent it. To defend yourself the best approach would be to learn how to use AI yourself, so that you can detect and react when AI is used against your best interests.

Does this make me pro or con AI? I honestly don’t know. Maybe complex things are never that black and white to begin with.

In my experience it works extremely well for everything online and digital content. The instance I’m on? 100% crowd funded with microdonations and the hoster directly accepts it without conversion back to fiat. I pay my email and VPN also like this, and on mullvad you even get a 10% discount.

But yes, for everything physical it’s a long way ahead to become widely accepted.

I think it’s funny how most lemmy users are pro open source, pro privacy, pro digital rights; but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.

Yes, the current state of crypto is a mess. People are attracted by the promise of the big payout, rather then seeking an alternative payment system, making them ripe for scammers that promise the world, but in the end only rug “investors”. Even “functional” cryptos are often highly centralized, making them as bad as banks in terms of reliability. Almost none implement any privacy features, and if they do, its typically a tacked on afterthought.

But this does not make the original idea invalid. Will it ever live up to the promise of alternative money? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell if the issues that exist right now will be fixed.

The per person metric is great! ~If you are a large corporation and need to shift blame that is.~

Yes, extraordinary personal consumption can make things way worse, but lowering your standards can only improve things so much until you hit the limit. imho the solution lies in using the resources we have more efficiently, so that people can sustain and improve their living conditions, while greatly reducing the ecological burden. If you demand that people shall lower their standards for the greater good, it will work about as good as telling them to wear a mask during a respiratory pandemic.

The goal is to create attractive market conditions. Positioning yourself between the historic store of value and the minimum to avoid deflation seems like a good target.

The more the better for security, the upper practical limit is golds inflation rate, the lower practical limit is the percentage of coins that become lost or inaccessible. That puts the viable range to 1.5-0.2%, roughly. To be clear, I’m not worried about bitcoins current rate, but rather that it will drop further and further.

You are clearly knowledgeable about the things you’re talking and made a conscious decision. It seems like we agree that there is some risk, but you consider it insignificant while I it’s quite substantial. Only time will tell whose right.

Monero’s inflation is not a percentage, but rather a fixed 0.6XMR per block. This mean as the supply grows, the inflation percentage will slowly go down, so there’s no exponential losses like with fiat inflation. Currently the 0.6XMR/block work out to 0.9% of the mcap, in the year 2100 it will be down to 0.5%: https://moneroj.net/tail_emission/ (<- great site btw, it has a few BTC diagrams as well). The tail emission was chosen so that it works out to be less inflation then gold, but high enough to have a decent security budget.

Bitcoins current budget is sufficient at about 1.6% (= 8B USD) annually. After next halfing it will be about 0.8%, similar to Monero’s budget. In 2032 it will be about 0.2%. If Bitcoins price doesn’t increase, the budget would only be 1B USD; if it does increase, a 4T mcap would be secured by still only secured by 8B. Either way, the more time passes, the easier Bitcoin becomes to attack. How much longer do you think bitcoin will last?

The (original) selling point of crypto is that it can’t be manipulated, even by nations with practically unlimited power and funds. Side chains sacrifice some of the immutability for other aspects and are a at best workaround instead of solution. So far there is little evidence to show that transaction fees will one day make up for the loss in block rewards.

The primary competitor to Monero is not Bitcoin, but gold, whose inflation sits at about 1.5%. Proponents of tail emission have long left bitcoin, and rather contribute to a project which aligns with their views. The remaining crowd will therefore be biased, don’t take their word as gospel.

The security budget is total fiat denominated miner reward of the entire network. The higher it is, the the more resistant bitcoin becomes to 51% attacks.

As you know, each halfing decreases the block reward, which is currently the largest part of the total miner reward. In order keep a steady security budget, the price and market cap has to double each time as well. But remember, the security budget stays constant, so an ever increasing amount is secured by a relatively lower share.

Transaction fees make up the remaining tiny share, and I honestly don’t see it growing much. Because the higher this fee becomes, the more people will find ways to avoid it, and just keep it on exchanges, custodial solution or lightning. This reduces the decentralization , the primary feature of bitcoin, and thereby reduces it value proposition.

All this can be side-stepped by having holders pay a small, program-ably guaranteed fee proportional to their holdings, which is then paid out to miners. Yes, this is similar to inflation, but as long as it is lower than fiat inflation I can be worth the trade off. Considering how cult like bitcoin holder are, I don’t think this is a change they are willing to make, at least not before it’s too late.

I didn’t talk about features, but specifically about the security budget.

Tell me again which one is the best place to store value?

I don’t think you are ready to hear this yet, but it’s monero :P All jokes aside, bitcoin ain’t terrible, especially compared to the dollar, but I worry that botcoin’s security model will crumble more with each halfing. Transaction fees are already unusable in some cases, yet they barely contribute to the miner rewards. The math doesn’t seem to work out.

Simple answer: Because they can, because it’s lucrative, and because it’s not as obvious as raising taxes. Imagine you could legally print money, and when anyones asks about it, you can just dismiss it with: “I’m stimulating the economy”