Yes, but you see, you put the cart before the horse.  I agree with you that crypto adoption would be great, but that is because I think that crypto is defending a cause: getting back economic and financial freedom.  If it isn't for that, I don't see the reason to switch from fiat to crypto.  Fiat is very good.  It works.  Of course, it has "problems" but these problems are exactly the lack of economic and financial freedom.  Why does it take some hassle to get money to another country ?  Why does it take some steps to send money to someone ?  Exactly because of compliance with all the laws that take away your economic and financial freedom.  So if you think that it is all right that these laws are there, and you want to comply, then you can hardly do better than fiat.    In that case, crypto is clumsy, will always give compliance problems (exactly what you're shouting about as OP) and SHOULDN'T BE ADOPTED.  People can only get troubles with it.  It is more difficult to use, it has a lot of technical issues, it will, in the end, cost more, there's a much bigger risk, and eventually, it will be extremely difficult to comply to the law with that stuff, while with fiat, all that is a piece of cake.

But, yes, I want crypto adoption, because I don't want to comply to all those liberty stealing laws.  But then you shouldn't whine about that.  If adoption is not possible because of that, then so be it.  But killing the only raison d'être of crypto *in order for it to hope to get it adopted* is ridiculous.  Crypto, without the fight for freedom, is silly, and shouldn't be adopted.  If adoption is not possible with its fight for freedom, then it should (and will) disappear.  


... and serve exactly no purpose.  Fiat is better at that.


But that's the sole raison for crypto to exist.  Hell, if you want an "exchange" that collects your ID, that is fully compliant, why don't you use a bank ?  It is much safer, it is much more practical, it works much better.

I don't want crypto to be "adopted by the general public and the financial world".  I want crypto to be the currency that is used by an underground economy that grows, and that eats away at the "official" economy until that last one collapses, as all its forces end up being drawn towards the underground economy, and only parasites remain.  That collapse should than also induce the fall of states.  However, that underground economy must be protected from the greedy state which will not allow it.  Dark markets are an essential part of it.  I see it more like the "resistance" in Europe during WWII, which had its underground network of activities and so on, but it will be more difficult now, with the prying eyes of the evil state looking everywhere.


Well, because it helps when the economic circle is not closed and fiat-in and fiat-out is at a certain point still needed.  At least, monero has the advantage that Polo can't track it.   It must not be so very illegal, if a compliant exchange allows you to buy some, no ?  


Before you desire adoption, there must be a reason to want adoption.  This is what you seem to forget.  There's no point for crypto to get adoption, if it is to be compliant.  That's the whole point.


A fight will of course make casualties.  If you don't want to fight, don't come to the war (and don't adopt crypto).
You are essentially saying that there's no point for crypto.  So why do you want crypto adoption if that's your stance ?

Thank you.  You explained it extremely well.  I put in bold what was the essence of what I was trying to say, but you put it much better in words.

I agree that making the point that "non-mining full nodes" don't matter is somewhat abstract, because in most cases, there's a link between those full nodes and the users, as you correctly point out.  But the very act of setting up a non-mining full node doesn't PROTECT in any way, and certainly doesn't coerce in any way, the "rules".  It only INFORMS all people looking at that full node about the block chain being in agreement with 'the rules' or not, but it can't, as you very well put, do anything about it beyond *informing* people.

Non-mining full nodes are important if someone would simply like to "sneak in a bad block" (for instance, one that doesn't even has enough PoW).  Full nodes will see it.

But I put myself in the somewhat abstract gedanken experiment where users and mining nodes on one hand, agreed upon another set of rules between themselves, and a "huge cloud of non mining nodes" on the other hand, wanting to maintain the "original rules" as "guardians of compliance", to illustrate the futility of the non-mining full nodes by themselves explicitly.  If users agree with miners and their (few) full nodes on a new set of rules, then no matter how many non-mining full nodes scream that this is not a correct block chain, this doesn't matter.  Users will  then connect to the few full nodes that DO have the new rules (the miner nodes), miners will mine according to those rules, and that's it.  The big crowd of full nodes that shouts that no such block is valid, simply come to a grinding halt, and never accept a block, and nobody cares.

But as you point out, that's a very artificial situation.  Most of the time, users set up their full nodes, and they do that to verify the block chain according to the rules that THEY want (the new ones, or the old ones, depending).  And indeed, users are important, because they determine, after all, the market value of the coin.  Miners will in fact mine according to the most profitable situation, which is strongly influenced by the market value set by the users.  The ETH/ETC split was a brilliant example of exactly how that went. 

So for you, crypto is simply a greater-fool game where you hope to rip off others.  At least that's honest, finally.  Good ponzi, then.
With people like you, there's indeed absolutely no reason to want greater crypto adoption.  Greater crypto adoption simply means more people getting ripped off.  I understand now also perfectly well why you like state and law, which is also a big rip off.    The point is, for your ponzi game, you don't even need crypto.  You only need an exchange with a web site, keeping track of everybody's "tokens".  From the moment that exchanges are fully state-controlled like banks, they cannot cheat, and there's no need any more for a block chain.  Exchange tokens are then just another fiat, with or without block chain.

Now, if you are here essentially to rip off latecomers, why would latecomers join to make you rich (which you call "adoption") ?  What good does that adoption do to people, apart from them pumping money (fiat, that is) into your hands because you were earlier ?  How do you think that this pyramid game will end ?


There isn't any other reason.  I don't know why you call me a contrarian, while I'm a libertarian.


Yes, I mined about 6 of them, as I told you.  And I lost another wallet containing about 10 of them.  Although I think that I must still have a backup somewhere.  As for the moment, I cannot spend them on anything, there's no reason to get more of them, no ?


I enjoy everything that can bring down state and law.  And I do like cryptography.  That's good enough, no ?
I thought that cryptocurrencies were a great tool to help doing so.  But it got spoiled by people like you.  It's going nowhere.

I have no ROI, I don't even have an account on Polo and I don't speculate or trade.  Your insinuating this all the time is getting ridiculous.  In my opinion, crypto is NOT to rip off others in a zero-sum ponzi game, but is a tool to take back freedom.  You are insinuating me having an agenda because probably it is YOURS, and you don't want to admit it.  This is why you don't answer my question of why are you interested in crypto, I suppose.


And why would you want that ?  Fiat is already adopted and used.  Why go through the hassle of crypto ?   What does it bring you more, if you want to "abide by the law and respect the state's wishes " ?

You see, the very foundation of crypto is decentralisation and trustlessness, because no authority is accepted and everything is based upon consensus.  The fundamental cornerstone of the state is that it is the final authority that decides about anything (even if that decision making process has some democratic elements build into it in some states) and will use coercion and violence to make you follow its rules.  These two things don't go together.  

There is absolutely no reason to go through all the hassle and difficulty of trustlessness and decentralisation, if you have a final authority that can and will decide.  As such, if you *accept* the final authority of the state, there simply isn't any reason to invent crypto.  If you don't understand this, you have missed the whole point of crypto.

The entire reason of crypto is to have financial and economic freedom from any central authority (including of course the state).    Now, crypto isn't necessarily something that is *against* the state, but it is independent of it. In as much as the laws of the state comply to the way crypto works, the state is not the enemy of crypto.  And not the other way around.  It is the laws that have to comply to crypto, and not crypto that has to comply to the laws, because crypto is fundamentally an element of freedom.

It turns out that the state doesn't want you to have financial and economic freedom.  AML laws are exactly that.  Tax laws are exactly that: the denial of your financial and economic freedom.  The whole fiat system is set up and is manoeuvered in order to do away with your *possibility* to obtain your financial and economic freedom.
As such crypto has something to offer, it is a way to fight the laws that take away your financial and economic freedom.  It is the only thing it has to offer.  So if you want to make crypto comply to the freedom-killing laws on the financial and economic level, then crypto has nothing left that you didn't already have with fiat.


Why do you want people to adopt it ? What do you think they will gain from it ?


But my question to you is: why on earth would you want people to use crypto, if it is to abide by the same laws as they already do with fiat  Why would YOU want to use crypto and not fiat ?  What's wrong with fiat, *apart from the fact that using fiat doesn't allow you to enjoy your economic and financial freedoms, which are against the laws taking those freedoms away* ?


What result do you want to obtain ?  Adoption ?  But again, why would you want crypto to "get adopted" ?  What good does it bring to the world, if it has to sacrifice its only utility, namely giving freedom back to people that was taken away from them ?


That's the kind of freedom that has been taken away, and you can perfectly comply to those laws with fiat.  Why does one need crypto if it is to do the same as with fiat ?

So my question stands: why would you want crypto to get adopted, and why are YOU interested in crypto ?

I can only think of one single reason: because you want to reap in the value increase you hope to obtain, in other words, you hope to find greater fools that will pay more for your crypto than you paid for it.  You want to rip off later users of crypto who will pay more for a coin than you did.  The point is, that this is in fact the MAIN MOTIVATION of people in crypto, but if that's the main motivation, it is simply a greater-fool game, which will end the day you run out of greater fools.   You call that greater fool game "investment".

Once most people on earth have paid their million dollars for their milli bitcoin, what are they going to do with it ?  Once you have "full adoption" of bitcoin, and now the state knows, even much more that with fiat, where every satoshi is hiding, what are people going to do with it ?  There's no hope for "investment" and ROI any more: everyone has now his milli bitcoin.  The blocks on the chain are full.  It costs a fortune to do a transaction.  Your "goal" has been reached: full adoption.  Now what ?  What did this bring to the world that fiat didn't do ?  How are you going to convince the last non-adopter to buy his milli bitcoin ?  What can he hope to achieve with that ?  

You have no conceptual justification of why people should prefer crypto over fiat *if the goal is to be totally law abiding to laws that take away your financial and economic freedom*.   You are probably perfectly OK with the fact that you will pay your due taxes on the money you reap off future adopters of crypto because there's still enough room for greater fools, but you forget to tell them that what they have is entirely useless, if it can't do anything about the liberticide laws they undergo already with fiat, and the stuff they have is much much more difficult and risky to use than good old fiat.

If I don't mind the state to know all about my financial doings, if I abide by the law, if I want to pay all my taxes, and I'm happy that way, I really, really don't see the point of crypto (apart as a ripping-off tool in a zero-sum game where you don't even need true crypto, as IOU on exchanges are good enough).

The only true value proposition of crypto is to have a tool to take one's financial and economic liberty back.  And given the violence by which states don't like you to have this liberty, it better be a tool that makes those free acts totally opaque.
THAT's crypto.

You see, it is as if you live in a country where it is against the law to go freely somewhere.  There are a lot of places where you aren't allowed to go.  The state wants you to only go at certain places at certain times.  However, the state puts at your disposal busses, trains, and boats, which go where you are allowed to go.  This system works quite smoothly.

And now, people invent bicycles.  Bicycles can travel where you want, when you want.  In fact, the fundamental reason to have a bicycle, is that you aren't obliged any more to use the state's transportation, and you gain your liberty of going where you want, when you want.  It is much less practical: you have to pedal, it doesn't go fast, but at least, you win your freedom of travelling.

And now you come and say: "hey, those free bicycles are against the law !  They are invented to go against the law !  Do you think people will start using bicycles if they can go just anywhere ?  Nobody will use bicycles that way !  You should invent bicycles that can only run on the rails of the state trains, that only go where you are allowed to go !"

My question is: if one should limit the kinds of bicycles to those that can only go where the state trains already brought you, what's the point in using such a bicycle ?  Why not continue to use the state train ?  At least, you don't have to pedal !
Why would you want to have adoption of bicycles that don't bring your freedom back ?

That looks funny.  Your "child accounts" act in fact like a kind of second token, of which you need PoS to mint the first (base) token of the chain and also to "mint" child accounts (the second token), and there's an opposite PoS relationship in that you need some base tokens to "fill" the child account (second token).    Aren't you afraid of a serious divergence of PoS of child accounts in the hands of a few ?  I see your system as a kind of "double PoS" with feedback between the two, for two different tokens: base tokens (the "currency") and mint tokens (the "child accounts").

Monero has such a thing, the block size reward penalty.

http://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/1067/block-reward-penalties-and-dynamic-block-size

I find it a bit clumsy, but at least it is there.

Ah, thanks !  I didn't know that !  Right, that was "pegged"

Well, and we simply will not care.  That's a civil duty.  One cannot stop you from doing maths on a computer with your own free software, can one.

I wouldn't even know what you mean by that.  I have a very logical stance, and of course, anything going against that logic in a discussion will be challenged by me.  If you call that "contrarian", that only means you are logically challenged (which is somehow starting to occur with me).

The logical contradiction I see is that you are clearly a fan of crypto (otherwise, "why are you here ?"), but you seem to be obfuscated by the very nature of crypto (namely, doing away with central power = state and hence central law).  I'm just extremely curious how you can keep up with that dichotomy.  Maybe I'm missing something, and I'd like to find out how you can escape that visible contradiction.  That's all.


If you call "stretching things", going to the full logical extend of a certain position, then I will take that as a compliment.  I fail to see how people cannot go to the full logical extend of their positions (unless they are con artists).

Now, concerning my "agenda", I think I'm quite clear about that: I think I follow the "agenda" of crypto, that is, do away with centralized power (a.k.a. the state).  There's nothing "hidden" about that, is there ? 


It depends what you call "an agenda".  If you mean by that, some hidden motivations to lure someone into something that is in his disadvantage, then for sure I don't have an agenda.  If you mean by that, having a clear position, then I don't know how to be much clearer about my position.   

But it is very strange that you think that *I* am accusing others to have an agenda, while YOU are the guy not wanting to tell why he's here (in clear contradiction with what one might think are the main reasons to be here).  YOU are the guy insinuating that I have other accounts, that I'm pumping my "investments" and so on.  So the one accusing others of having an agenda, while not being clear himself, is YOU, not me.


The *I* there was of course an abstract I, used in a gedanken experiment.  More and more elements seem to point to you being logically challenged.


Uh, yes, because you were making silly claims there.  I totally debunked your statement of "danger" there.  You couldn't come up with a decent scenario where the "central exchange wanting your ID" was the culprit of someone getting in jail because of using monero on a freedom market.  You had to resort to scenarios where the use of monero wasn't relevant, or where we had to do with a terrorist and large amounts of money.


Not only.  But for sure, I already said that it is a good thing to circumvent AML laws.  Those are bad laws, threading on the economic liberty of people.  Those are like those anti-homosexuals laws of the UK.  And that's the goal of crypto in general.  So what's wrong with that ?

Actually, bitcoin is much more of a "criminal coin" in your definition than monero for the moment.  Because in your statist view of things, dark markets are criminal I suppose.  And in that other thread, you even gave an example of such "illegal activity" with BITCOIN to "demonstrate" the "illegality" of monero.

Nevertheless, it seems that there are many people into crypto which don't seem to understand that fighting law and state is one of the two sensible reasons to support crypto (the other valid reason is ripping off one's pairs in a zero-sum game before its ponzi crashes).

Probably the best studied fiat is the US dollar.  You can start here:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_data.htm

and
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/24

A conceptual difficulty with fiat, but it starts out with crypto too, is the actual amount in circulation.  You might think that there are about 16 million bitcoin, but that's equivalent to the number of US coins and paper bills that the FED has put in circulation.  Every exchange IOU is also a bitcoin, and counts as an inflationary pressure, if the exchange applies "fractional reserve banking".  Whatever bitcoin IOU will act as a "bank account dollar" (which is nothing else but a bank IOU of a FED dollar).

There is also an ambiguity between velocity and monetary amount.  Concerning dollars, the monetary base is equivalent to the block chain bitcoins.

Sure.  None.  I have only one account here on BCT.
(or did you mean that I hacked other people's accounts ?  No, I haven't)

I have a few points to make, though.  
1) if you get identical questions, that doesn't necessarily mean that the people asking those questions are the same.  It is maybe your behaviour that triggers those questions.  If you didn't change your behaviour, it is maybe logical that you trigger the same questions.

2) I'm not a monero shill, if that's what you intend.  I do like monero, because it tries to solve a big problem with bitcoin: its privacy failure, and it has other properties I like.  Before that, I liked Darkcoin.  But monero is technically simply superior.  But I'm not tied to monero (apart from the fact that because I like it, I studied its system, and I'm still studying it, so my investment in time may colour now somewhat my preferences).  I actually think that ZCASH has even more fascinating crypto than monero, but unfortunately, zcash was extremely badly put into music, so I consider it a failure wrt to privacy, and it also has other technical and monetary problems.

3) I do not trade or speculate.

4) apart from having heard the word bitcoin before without paying attention, I only learned about crypto in spring 2014.

I think you're using the word "pegged" incorrectly.  Pegged means that there's a mechanism keeping it that way. 

To peg a value of an asset to the value of another one, there needs to be a liquid way to exchange them 1-1.  That's the only way.

There are also some monetary misunderstandings.  Bitcoin's price is NOT pegged to the cost of electricity.  It is not the cost of mining that makes the bitcoin price.  It is the bitcoin price that makes the cost of mining (also called the difficulty).

It is not because you have produced a bitcoin with mining equipment that has cost you $5000,- that you will find an imbecile buying it at that price.   It is because you find an imbecile that buys it at that price, that you are willing to spend up to $5000,- to compete and mine coins.

Second, the high volatility of bitcoin and other crypto, as compared to the volatility of fiat, mainly comes from the fundamentals.  A big fiat currency's price is determined mainly by Fisher's formula, that is, by the fact that it is used to buy goods and services (paying salaries, buying groceries).  The "stickyness of prices" makes that this activity and the demand that comes from it, has large inertia.  Most salaries are more or less constant amounts from one month to the other.  The grocery prices do not fluctuate much from one day to another.  So the USAGE of the fiat currency, which determines its price through Fisher's formula, is more or less constant.  This fundamental is what determines the fiat currency's price (at least, if the central bank doesn't change its offer drastically).

Crypto is mainly pure speculation, and has only a very small "usage" market cap.  As such, there's in fact no fundamental that keeps its price constant.  It is whatever people think it will be.  That's highly volatile.

Nope, you didn't.  You gave reasons why you aren't here.  Not why you are here.  I would like to know what motivates you to be interested in crypto, if it is not to defy laws and state.   The very fact that you are screaming about "anon coins are illegal" indicates that you're not here to defy law and state, so again, what ELSE could motivate you to be interested in crypto, if it is NOT "defy law and state" ?


Nope.  I'm interested in everything that can defy law and state.  And I do like cryptography on the technological side.  I'm not interested in "ROI on Poloniex", I already told you a million times that I think that the huge speculative part of crypto is bad, exactly because it will render crypto less efficient to defy state and law.


Your comments are not diabolical at all.  They are incomprehensible if you have any interest in defying state and law.


Because dark markets are important in the act of defying law and state, no.  Dark markets are not criminal.  They are maybe illegal, but not criminal.  They illustrate a fundamental freedom that has been baffled by the law, that's all.  Dark markets are exactly the kind of battle that crypto helps fighting.  So yes, I'm delighted by that.  And no, it is not criminal.  It is maybe illegal, like homosexuality was 70 years ago in the UK.  And like being an atheist is in Saoudi Arabia.  And like possessing a computer is in North Korea.

Again, if you are NOT interested in that kind of battle, what are you doing in crypto ?  What other reason can there be ?

Amen.

I buy regularly small amounts of bitcoin, whatever the price.  (ok, I admit having skipped when I saw it booming over $1000, because it was too obvious it would come down again, no point in buying it that high).  With those bitcoins, I buy stuff on the internet.  I never convert them back to fiat.  I don't see it as an "investment", but of course any value increase makes the stuff I buy on the internet cheaper.  I refuse to "trade".  I think that's killing crypto.
As I don't buy much stuff on the internet, I don't need much bitcoins.  The day I can buy that stuff with something like monero, I will convert most of my bitcoins to monero or whatever good anon coin is usable to buy stuff.  And the day that one can buy more stuff on the internet with bitcoin, I'll buy more bitcoin.  But for the moment, I don't see that happening.  Unfortunately.  So I can't do much with large amounts of bitcoin.

This.  You say it better than I do, but it is what I intended to say.  The slightest bit of motivation in one way or another can make the outcome flip.  For instance, there is not the slightest "punishment" for excluding users you might not like.  Now, if miners decide to boycott a user, they pay a price (the fees that user wants to pay).  If there's nothing to win, the smallest intend can be applied at no cost.

BTW, block size limits are a bad idea in all cases in my opinion.  Making big blocks more expensive in one way or another, is a good idea because they use resources, but the market should determine that price, and no "hard limit".  Bitcoin is wrong on this one.


Yes.  But I think there is a perfect "parameter settter": the market.  In fact, mining a bigger block HAS a price, because it takes some extra computing to do so, it takes extra network traffic, and hence, it makes a miner's chances to get a big block through somewhat lower. 

I think that Monero's fixed block size vs price cost is misguided in this respect.  It is better than the stupid hard limit in bitcoin, but it still imposes a fixed price and doesn't let the market decide.



Ah, ok.  I thought you meant long times, like weeks or months.  Agreed.


Well, I haven't studied that in detail, but I don't see how it can be anything much different than a fee.  You have two aspects:
1) to avoid what we discussed in the beginning of this message, there should be a (small) incentive for the miner to include a transaction, or "boycotting a user" is too easy.
2) to avoid chain spamming, there should be a (small) cost to the person wanting to do a transaction.

I find it quite logical that 2) compensates 1).  And that's a fee.

That fee should be free, in the sense that if there is an intention to boycott a specific user, then that user can "up" his fees to bribe at least one miner to accept his transactions, making the boycotters lose out.  Of course, it becomes harder to boycott users if the system is anonymous, so maybe this is not really a concern.


I don't see how you can ever do that, without requiring real-world identities.  Of course, you could make the creation of an account a PoW thing, so that one is limited by the cost of its creation. 
But me thinks that it is a bad idea to limit the number of accounts: that will kill all anonymity in the long run.

1) How are you to decide what are the *intentions* of a cryptosystem ?  It is the user that has an intention.  But, when you read Satoshi's paper, it seems to me that the anonymity of the user WAS one of his concerns.  He thought that the pseudonymous system was sufficient.  So Satoshi's *intentions* in as much as he had some on that point, were exactly the same as the intentions of the authors of anon coins, except that Satoshi's mechanism was too weak and ended up failing against chain analysis.  (no blame to Satoshi, if you're the first one, of course not everything works out as intended, it is easy to criticise with hindsight).

2) Don't you want to fight AML ?  They are a denial of a fundamental right, no ?  So the more you can circumvent them, the better.  AML are to economic freedom what the obligation to record all your conversations is to the freedom of speech.

You are claiming here that the intend of "condoms for homosexuals" is to do illegal homosexual acts.  Yes, so ?

In fact, the REAL reason of existence of anon coins is not so much to be "entirely anonymous", but rather to plug a hole in bitcoin, which is a privacy nightmare all together, much worse than fiat.  In doing so, it is also a perfect tool to fight bad laws such as AML laws, and to fight for economic liberty (which was probably one of Satoshi's intentions, but which failed bitterly with the total traceability of coins and hence the danger in using this as a means to fight the oppression).  That on top of that, it is also a useful tool for people wanting to do outright criminal stuff, is normal: every freedom tool is also a tool for the bad guys.  If you can't stand people using their freedom to do bad things, then you're against freedom all together.  But then you have no reason to be here.  Hence, the relevance of my question: why are you here ?

It is absolutely relevant in this thread.  You seem to be warning people that "anon coins may be illegal" and you come with an example to illustrate this where a trade with *bitcoin* got someone into legal trouble.   Hence, what is, according to your demonstration, illegal, is to do things with non-legal tender, all crypto hence.

Now, crypto is a tool to take back freedoms that were stolen from us by state and law.  So in a way the fact that it is illegal shouldn't bother, and be rather a positive point.  But you seem to make it into something that is supposed to have a negative shade on crypto.  So I honestly would like to know what brings you to a club of freedom fighters, if you're afraid of illegal stuff ?   Is it to warn them that those they fight against don't like it ?  Is this to tell Nelson Mandela supporters that he might be in trouble with the law in South Africa ?

But of course, the fight shouldn't be *criminal*.  There's a difference between illegal and criminal, in the sense that illegal (as you think - erroneously - that crypto is) is simply maybe pointing to wrong laws, while "criminal" is usually generally accepted by the people as "to be avoided because bad".    For instance, publicly stating that I'm an atheist is illegal in certain countries, but I don't think that most people consider it criminal.  I think that it is perfectly my right to state that I'm an atheist, and if a law forbids me, then the law is wrong, and not me.   It is by stating NEVERTHELESS that I'm an atheist (and yes, risking to get trouble with law enforcement), that I can hope to put pressure on the law to change it, and the risk I run to do so is what I consider a civil duty.   70 years ago, homosexuality was against the law in the UK.  Nevertheless, courageous homosexuals continued to do what they wanted, some got into prison for that, but in the end, their desire for liberty vindicated and the laws were changed.  

Your rant here is similar to accusing users of condoms for homosexuals, that this is illegal stuff, because homosexuality is illegal.  What are you then interested in discussing, making, trading condoms for homosexuals ?  And what could it bother to true users of those condoms, that they are "illegal" ?

I think that the free and private economic interaction is a freedom that has been taken away from us since the dawn of states.  Crypto can help put those evil laws under pressure.  And yes, there's a risk of course.  But it is our civil duty to run that risk.  So, if ever anon coins are "illegal", then the law is wrong, and that shouldn't stop us from using them, on the contrary.

But that's not your stance.  So again, what are you doing here ?

Now, your argument could be that crypto is NOT about freedom fighters.  My point is then that crypto is meaningless.  It goes to too much trouble to do away with central authority, if you accept, in the end, central authority.  If you accept central authority in monetary matters, that authority can issue currency, and that's WAY WAY WAY easier to use than crypto.

There is only one, but very reliable technique for doing so.   You need to possess the same amount of real $ as there will be coins (in the end).   You allow everyone to come and exchange coins against an equal amount of dollars you send them.  You also allow them to pay in dollars, and you will send them an equal amount of coins.

That's it.

This is how central banks do the pegging of currencies.  This is how "paper gold" is pegged to physical gold.  If you want to peg an asset to another one, you have to be able to set up an exchange that will exchange one for the other at 1-1 rate, and hence you have to have sufficient reserve to guarantee that.  If you don't, you do what's called fractional reserve banking.

So, if you want, say, to issue 500 million coins, each pegged to the dollar, you need ideally to be ready to put 500 million dollar on the table.  If you can't, you cannot peg that coin.  Simple as that.

Isn't it much easier to create a new (local) wallet, and then to do a transfer to the address of that new wallet ?  (of course for doing that, you must at least once be able to get into your MyMonero wallet....)

I don't like web wallets.  It is somehow in contradiction with the very notion of a crypto currency, no ?