In a token game where no value is produced (like in a factory say), the only way to "make money" is to rip off someone else.  Token games like crypto currencies are zero-sum games.  What A wins, B loses.  There wouldn't be winners if there weren't just as many losers.

You may say: "no, with bitcoin, many people made money !"  This is not true.  All the (fiat) money made by some people has been paid by others.  Those buying bitcoin now at these prices finance the benefits of all those that bought lower and are selling it now, and the only hope you have is to sell those same coins to people at even higher prices.
It is pretty obvious that this cannot go on for ever.  You will not be able to find greater fools forever.  One day it will have to stop growing.  At $2000, at $10 000, at $100 000, I don't know.  But one day it will be evident that it will not be able to grow any more.  The last layer of buyers had then financed about all benefit that people made, and there's no hope for them to make a single dime any more.  So what's going to happen then ?

What is going to happen to a stash of bitcoin of which you KNOW that it cannot rise ?  How many years are you going to keep it ?

I'm always baffled when I read that.  If you want to abide by AML/KYC, why not use fiat ?

My idea is that bitcoin's original design was meant to keep coins private.  If you read Satoshi's paper, he goes through some length about that.  Unfortunately, pseudonymity has turned out to be a very weak protection of privacy because of the information that propagates from one transaction to another.  So my idea is that monero is a technical improvement over bitcoin who failed to deliver technically on one of the design goals.

Governments will become the biggest holders of bitcoin, and manipulate it like they do with gold.  A central bank can buy bitcoin or gold at ANY price: they print the money for it, buy it, and consider that they have printed only that amount of money they have an underlying asset against: the coins themselves.  Exactly as they do with gold.  Bitcoin will become the central banker's pump of value from "bitcoin investors" into their hands, exactly as they do with gold.
Moreover, with bitcoin, they know exactly where the coins are and can follow all transactions.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese government is actually taking in most of the chinese exchange's wallets.  That's a big amount of bitcoin they'd offer themselves. 

I think you've misunderstood the principle of the LN.  The idea of the LN is NOT to have a "buffered" list of transactions that have to go on-chain.  If that were the case, it wouldn't have any purpose.  The danger with the LN is that "by panic" it becomes such a system at a certain point.  But normally, the LN has more or less the following principle.

Consider first a toy LN with 2 nodes, Alice and Bob.  I even think that this embryonic proposal was already in Satoshi's paper.

Alice and bob want to pay one-another several times.  They could simply do that each time on-chain.  But they could also put each of them, say, 100 coins in an escrow-type of wallet (on chain).  Now, suppose that Alice wants to pay 20 coins to Bob.  She could send a *transaction signature* to Bob that would allow Bob to obtain 20 coins from Alice's wallet ; only, the idea is that Bob doesn't broadcast that transaction, but simply keeps the signature on his disk.  If later, Bob wants to pay 20 coins to Alice, he sends HER a transaction signature, which would override the signature HE obtained from Alice IF EVER he broadcasted it.  And if Alice now pays 20 coins to Bob again, she can send HIM a transaction signature that would override Bob's signature that would have overridden Alice's first signature if ever it was broadcasted.

The whole idea is that people send one-another transaction signatures that override previously obtained transaction signatures.

In other words, if at the end of the day, those 20 coins went 50 times to Bob, and 51 times to Alice, Alice and Bob have simply exchanged signatures amongst themselves, and NOTHING HAPPENED ON THE BLOCK CHAIN.   When they both want to quit, they can opt to:
1) send eachother the final signatures to release the coins to one another in the right amounts of the final balance, if they cooperate
2) DUMP THEIR WHOLE LIST OF TRANSACTIONS on the chain, which will then result in 50 transactions from Alice to Bob, and 51 transactions from Bob to Alice, ending up doing the same.

If the LN link "finishes cleanly" with mutual cooperation, then both of them could have exchanged even 1000 signatures, at the end of the day, only one or two transactions make the final balance on chain.  The idea is that there's no way to cheat, if you try to cheat, the partner dumps the whole list of transactions and obtains in any case what was the final balance.  And you're motivated NOT to do that, because you'd have to pay 1000 transaction fees, while now, you can do with only one.

The LN blows this scale up: instead of having 2 nodes exchanging coins back and forth, a node can open such 1-1 links to several partners, making up a mesh.  Suppose that Alice is connected to Bob and Claire, and Bob is connected to Joe and Jack.  If Alice wants to pay Jack, she can send the money to Bob who can send it to Jack (with a safeguard that Bob cannot keep it).  A lot of payments can hence travel across a lot of 1-1 links without a single on-chain transaction.  A node has to go "on chain" if his balance drops to 0 of course.  Each time the partners cooperate, they can just do one or two transactions to get to the final balance ; if not, they dump ALL their transactions on chain and obtain the same result but with much more transaction fees.

Note: I simplified.  The LN is somewhat more involved.  But you get the idea.

? What ?  

Crypto is, in my eyes, supposed to be a currency, to be obtained while delivering goods and services, and to be spent when obtaining goods and services.  Crypto, in my eyes, should *NOT* be used to speculate, to "invest" and to "hope for price increase".    Hell, you didn't use your comic books as intermediate good of exchange, to get back the 25 cents you put in it.  You put them "AWAY" in the hope someone would pay more for it than you did.  That's speculating, not using a currency.
Why would a kid obtain comic books ?  To exchange it for marbles of course !  And why not use fiat right away ?  The only reason I can think of, is that it might be forbidden to use fiat money, say, in the playground or something.  Otherwise, you use fiat.  Or because you think that it is less risky to walk on the street with old comic books than with some pocket money.  Or some other reason that makes these comic books more interesting to be used as a currency than fiat.

You could have a deal with a class friend: "I give you my homework so that you can copy it, and you give me 5 comic books" ; to be followed by "I would like to obtain 40 marbles against 5 comic books".  So you traded "giving homework intellectual property" against "obtaining marbles" USING comic books as a means of exchange.

I think that's the sole use of crypto.  In those cases where you can't use fiat.  Like with the comic books.

In as much as monero is used more in that way, it rises.  As it is used somewhat on dark markets, it rose up.

Again, I think that the only meaningful use cases of crypto are those cases where you can't use fiat.  Now, you can use fiat almost for anything that is legal.  So I don't see any legal use case for crypto.  There has been a mentioning of "paying abroad to people not having bank accounts".  That is a use case, but most of the time, it is not a *strictly legal* use case.  You're, most of the time, not supposed to pay people abroad if they don't have a bank account (whether it is to buy goods, or whether it is to give stuff).  Some uses, with small amounts, are tolerated but are not strictly legal.   You most probably will not go to jail for sending 50 dollar to some poor Indian not having a bank account.  You will, if you're sending 500 000 dollar and they find out.   

So almost anything that has to do with money, and that is strictly legal, is doable with fiat.  So crypto is not needed, and doesn't bring in anything.  There's no use case.  So the only things that are left are illegal.  And then you need anon.  Up to you whether you want to do it or not, but at least, it IS a sensible use case.  The only one where crypto can live, if it has to live.

The "I buy cheap, hold it and sell it to greater fools when it is more expensive" is a story that comes down sooner or later.  If you're amongst the early ones, you can rip off the latecomers, true.  But it is just a rip-off game.   I don't see any sustainable future for crypto in that rip-off game.

Well, these assets aren't purely monetary if you ask me.  You might just as well want them "to possess them", and not for the *sole* purpose of trading them later for something else.  They can have usage value, they have non-monetary utility. 

I would say that if you buy a Picasso "as an investment", but you also put it up in your living room, then that Picasso has non-monetary utility.   If you put it away in a safe and never look at it, then it is purely monetary.

I do like monero, because it has what bitcoin is dangerously missing without the hassle that a few others playing on that topic, have: DASH is building a "state" while the whole thing of crypto is to do away with that, and is missing the right technology ; ZCASH has better technology in principle, but put it amazingly badly at work.  There are a few good anon alternatives, but for the moment, they are too small and I don't see what they bring in.  There are several other technical aspects of monero which I like (but could be improved, but they are already way way better than old bitcoin's problems), which is tail emission (no silly "sound money doctrine" bullshit) and block size flexibility.
The market cap is more than big enough now - I even don't like the fact that the price is so high now.  A few $ would have been perfect.  If it is too low, you cannot use it any more for serious deals ; if it is too big, to many gamblers are attracted to  it (this is already the case since last summer).

The actual price of a coin doesn't really matter : it simply shouldn't fluctuate too much, so that it keeps more or less its value between the moment of acquiring it (when you sell goods and services) and the moment you spend it (when you buy goods and services with it).  This is also why I'm rather indifferent to "whales" and other aspects.  The idea is not to use these things as a savings account, isn't it.  The use is to be able to do business, and sell and buy stuff, right ?  As long as the price of the thing isn't too volatile between the moment of obtaining it and the moment of spending it, the actual price level doesn't matter, does it.

So for the moment, my preference concerning anon coin (the only that matter as I explained) is monero, but that doesn't need to remain so.  

If your goal was to obtain them to trade them for other toys, and not because you wanted to play with them, yes, of course.  That's exactly what a currency is: the intermediate good you only acquire (against goods and services you provide) with the aim of trading them later against goods and services you want to obtain from others, and with the belief that they will accept that intermediate good for exactly the same reasons.

You don't need to be many for that.  You only need to have a (small or big) circle of mutual believers.  The minimum is 2.

I accept a promise from you to do stuff for you if I think that you will accept that promise later against stuff you will do for me.  That promise is then our currency.

You are visibly logically impaired.  I don't say that it is successful.  I say that if ever a crypto is to be successful, it has to be outside the law, and in order to be successful outside the law, certain aspects like anonymity are needed.   Logically, this doesn't mean that crypto is successful or that monero is successful.  It only implies that if crypto doesn't include anon tech, it cannot be successful.

(it can rise in price, but it cannot be successful as a crypto: it has to become a form of fiat in that case).


Of course not.  The price doesn't mean anything. The price of all crypto is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high.  If not more.


Yes.


Then crypto will not work, that's all I'm saying.  Crypto without anon is like guns that cannot shoot.


Of course not.  Adoption is not needed.  In principle, a crypto can work if two people use it.  Of course, adoption is nice, because it opens up the economic possibilities.  The more an economy is large, the more possibilities for economic interaction there are.  But wide adoption is optional.  If adoption implies denying the fundamentals, then adoption is not only not needed, it is even a bad idea.


The problem is that DM are only a niche, namely mostly unhealthy stuff like drugs and so.  But they are a nice test bed for the robustness of their anon systems.  The idea is to become a coin of all underground economy.  But of course not for the law abiding economy.  That would be silly.  In the law-abiding economy, you should use fiat, and nothing else.


All economic interaction that wants to be free of state interference.  


But if the law is the barrier, only fiat can work.  Only fiat can be in agreement with the law.  There's no reason for crypto within the law.  It is a silly idea.


The existing financial machine around the world will only work with fiat.  Crypto will only part of that in as much as crypto has become fiat.  There will be a period where it will seem that crypto can thrive with big finance, but sooner or later, all crypto that does so will become fiat.  Exchanges will become institutionalised, wallets will be state-owned, mining will be state-owned and protocols will be state-dictated.  Give it 10 or 20 years.


Crypto's goal is to do without that world wide financial system.  If you want to be part of it, you should use fiat.

There's no room for non-fiatized crypto.  They will do as they did with gold.  First, they let greater-fool gamblers pump their value in it, and when it is big enough, they will simply confiscate it and fiatise it.  With the Law.


And that's good, because that's not what crypto is for.  If you want to have a practical way of handling legally complying payments, use fiat.  It is much better at it.



Monero being an open source project, anybody can fork it and do with it what he/she wants.  Like with bitcoin.  Everybody can fork bitcoin.  If nobody does, that is that nobody really wants to.  In fact, what happens to monero doesn't matter, does it.  You only use it to sell goods, obtain it, and then to buy other goods with it.   The day that you don't like monero any more, you can use an alternative to do so, no ?  The day you don't like Openoffice, you can use Libreoffice, no ?


How is that ?  If tomorrow, I post my secret key of a monero address, all monero transactions would be deanonymised


How's that ?  First of all, most fire arms are probably not used as the inventor intended.  If I buy a gun to kill my mother in law, that's probably not the intention of the guy who designed the gun maybe 50 years ago.  Second, I would think that monero is used as intended, as a tool to transact tokens in a non-transparent way.


This is exactly why no crypto can ever be integrated with the law, unless the government mines it, changes its protocol at will, can confiscate any possession, can reverse any transaction and will prohibit non-governmental mining (called counterfeiting).   And hence, why legal crypto is ridiculous.


That is exactly the (sole) aim of a cryptocurrency.  Not being able to be integrated in the existing financial structure.  All the rest is called fiat.


If you cannot finance terrorism with it, it cannot be a crypto.  Because if a crypto stands for unstoppable payments, it must be possible to finance terrorism with it.  If for some reason, you can't, it means that that crypto is not living up to its sole goal of economical freedom.

This is something that I don't understand technically.  LN is quite similar to exchange IOU transactions, isn't it ?  In as much as there are systematic flows from one node to another, sooner or later, the node that "gets empty" will have to "fill up" its reserve on the chain, and the node that "boils over" will have to dump on chain, no ?  Regularly, LN nodes will have to interact with the chain to "fill up" or to "empty" I would think, unless the LN network is entirely a closed graph and all nodes have sufficient reserves in their node to accommodate for all fluctuations. 
My fear with LN is rather the opposite: that propagating "waves of panic" will overwhelm the block chain with transactions, because the amount of transactions pending on the LN network can in principle be orders of magnitude larger than what a block chain can handle (that's its main idea !).  So if a block chain can handle, say, 100 000 transactions per hour, and the LN network has 10 million transactions pending in 10 minutes, and there's a panic wave going through the network, those 10 million transactions will need to go on-chain which will create a backlog of 100 hours, often passing the safety time limit of regularisation, and huge opportunities to scam.

I would like to add something.  When I say that crypto has no meaning inside the law, I do not mean that crypto's goal or sense is exclusively in "criminal affairs".   I say this because the law is a power tool of the (deep) state, and the state's nature is extortion.  As such, the law is a tool for extortion.  Now, the basis of state extortion is to extort on every economic interaction.   They haven't succeeded in extorting individual pleasure yet, but every economic interaction is subject to extortion, which is the basis principle of the (deep) state, who lives off what it takes away from its people.  The "blood" that makes economic interaction on any significant scale possible, is money.  A state who doesn't control the money flows, loses a significant part of its ability to extort.  As such, this is something that a (deep) state cannot allow, and will have to use its laws to control it.  The only money that can be legal, is money of which the (deep) state controls the flows.  So in as much as crypto can be law abiding, it must be controlled by the (deep) state.  At any moment, the state must be able to cut its flows, to confiscate it, to re-direct its flows.  But then it is meaningless as a crypto.

Monero is one of the more successful crypto coins implementing anonymity as a core feature.  If you are going to be outside of the law, you better have some anon tech.  And if you are going to be "inside the law" and law abiding, you don't need crypto: fiat is better.  What is outright dangerous, is to be outside the law with a transparent crypto.  What is outright meaningless, is to be a law-abiding crypto.  So the only MEANINGFUL crypto is anon crypto.  Maybe "crypto outside the law" is a failure, but then ALL OF CRYPTO is a failure, because crypto has no meaning "inside the law".  It is a ridiculous concept, that is just as ridiculous as "fire arms that cannot shoot".  Maybe owning fire arms is a failure, and then fire arms as a whole are a failure.  But in any case, owning non-shooting fire arms is ridiculous.  IF you consider fire arms, they should be able to shoot.  IF you consider crypto, it should be anonymous.

That's the relationship with the subject.

We're getting off-topic, but the idea that a group of people cannot get organized and live together if there no compulsory robbery system like taxes, is nothing else but millennia-long indoctrination.  Taxes are not needed to make the state function, the state is there to make the taxes function.

There's in fact a whole other "public finance" system that is possible: pay for those "public services" that you need and want (including police protection).  And another principle could hold.  Every economy is ultimately resource-limited, and the ultimate resource is natural resources and land.  These resources shouldn't be "property".  They shouldn't be allowed to be part of "ownership".   Nature and land belongs to all of us.  Of course, one needs land and natural resources to do production (and to live somewhere), but instead of granting property rights, one could just grant leasing rights in a public offering.  All land and natural resources are leased to the most-offering, and the payment of this rent replaces taxes.  You cannot be a land owner.  You can only lease land.  You cannot own natural resources.  You can only lease them.  And the rent you pay is what finances public spending.  Ideally, this spending shouldn't go to any government, but directly to the people, as a form of base income.  There is no clogging up of resources or land, and the real estate market would converge to its utility price and not become a collectible and monetary resource which it is now, because of course, real estate gets lost from its owner when the land on which it stands, goes back into the public bin for a next leasing cycle. 

So, compulsory taxes are not a necessity. 

I think *you* don't get the intention of the law: to make the state almighty and capable of printing as much money as it desires, to take all possessions of all citizens it desires.  If the state allows money it doesn't control to exist, it loses this capacity, so sooner or later, such money will be against the law, or such money will be put under total control of the state.

So crypto will become fiat, or will be outlawed.

There's nothing really fraudulent here, and the comparison is not exact, because after all, the comfort of a trailer is not the one of a mansion.

However, the value of a monetary asset is entirely fictional and "belief".  As such, my zombiecoins can in principle take on any value, including "one bitcoin".  The initial parity through exchange is just a kick-off to get the belief going, but once it is going, and there's no bank run exposing this, the zombiecoin is an asset of his own right, and the parity can even be lifted, once the belief system is strong enough.  That's exactly what happened to the dollar, when the exchangeability with gold was lifted.  It takes some time to get the "equivalence belief" going, and there, the fractional 1-1 exchange possibility is a good way to pin the prices.  Once people get used to it, and don't use the actual exchange possibility any more, the fractional ratio can indefinitely be increased, until it can be lifted all together.

This is just another way to kick-start a monetary belief system.  It is only if the fractional ratio is raised too quickly and there's a bank run, that the system breaks down.


Because it isn't fraud.  It is a limited belief-kick off system.  Any monetary asset is nothing else but belief.

That was a naive expectation.  You can't.  Because fundamentally, "fractional reserve banking" is nothing else but the creation of a new monetary token that is only partially exchangeable for the "fundamental".  If you allow for the free creation of new monetary tokens (and if you don't, then crypto is already out of the game), then you must also allow for the inavoidable emergence of fractional reserve banking.

If tomorrow, I have 2000 bitcoin, and I give out zombiecoin, with 10 000 of them, "exchangeable 1-1 to bitcoin as far as the reserve goes", and if it catches on, and people use zombiecoin, and only rarely exchange it for bitcoins, then I simply launched a new coin, with a kick-off value of bitcoin's.  The new creation of zombiecoin is now a fractional reserve banking of bitcoin ; and one day I may declare (as Nixon did) that I give up on keeping parity by exchanging it 1-1 for bitcoin, and that's it.  Then zombiecoin exists too.  Like the dollar exists next to gold.  My zombiecoin ate away some bitcoin market cap, like any altcoin would.  It is as if I created 8000 new bitcoins out of thin air.  That's what every altcoin does.

You can't avoid that mechanism to take place, if you are against monetary monopolies.

That's more or less the practical hope: that they are simply overwhelmed, and when they try to regulate, the ghost is already out of the box.  But I wouldn't be too sure: stealing is the government's core business, and taking their control of monetary flows away is hitting them in their core.  This will be harder than the fight for freedom of speech.  Economic freedom is hurting them in there core.  They won't let that go so easily.

Well, I think you can't "stay away and adapt to their function".  If you adapt to their function, then you don't stay away.  If however, you mean, "take into account their strategies", then you're right of course.  The first rule in warfare is to know your enemy. (the second is to know yourself)

I don't think we will reach stage #6.  The Singularity will hit us first.  We are just the breading ground for the machines to take over.  They will take over the totalitarian mechanisms set in place in stage #5.

I can only applaud the clarity of that vision.


I'm not sure about whether Bitcoin was created by the deep state, but in any case, the one who did so, probably did them a service, but also opened pandora's box.  So whether or not it was someone on the payroll of deep state, doesn't, in the end, matter.

The fact that one cannot find who is Satoshi, talks for your hypothesis.  On the other hand, it could indeed be a very careful individual.  In the end, it doesn't matter.


Amen.