Amen.

Absolutely not.  I don't know what is the strange reasoning that leads you to posit that.  In as much as this comparison is viable, and it isn't, I would rather say, the opposite.  There is something that is common to all of crypto, transparent or not, and that is that a secret key can provide a proof of right to spend.  This is just as well the case on the bitcoin block chain, as on monero, as in zerocash.  You can provide a proof of right/power to spend using your secret key.

That is exactly the same as someone showing you a genuine piece of gold.  Him holding that piece of gold in his hand, means he has the "right/power to spend" that piece of gold, by physically handing it over to you.

This is the only thing that matters: it is real gold, and he clearly can give it to you, and then he won't have it any more.

At no point, you verify that this gold was gotten from Joe, who got it from Jack, who got it from Alice, who got it from Mary, who dug it up.  This last thing is the way of bitcoin to verify that the gold was OK, and that it was not double spend.  It would be a way to verify that gold is all right.  But that's not what you do when you receive gold.  You only check that it is real gold.  Not where it comes from, to prove that it is real gold.

So providing someone with a cryptographic proof that he has the right to spend monero is just as good, as someone showing you a piece of gold of which you can chemically verify that it is genuine gold.  The proof is there.  You cannot "see the gold atoms" nor can you "see the history of how it got there", but you rely on perfectly valid chemical proof that the gold is real, and that's good enough.


You cannot visually inspect the bit coin block chain either.  It is 90 GB or something.  In order to verify it, you should verify VISUALLY all hashes of all blocks, and all transactions (maybe hundreds of thousands) that have led from the different minings of the different shards of bitcoin up to the transaction you want to verify, and you want to verify that because it is bitcoin's way to say that a transaction is valid.

A cryptographic proof, such as in monero, or such as in zcash, is just as good.


Absolutely not.  You know that the cryptographic proof certifies that if you get the coins, then the payer has lost the coins.  So if the crypto proof is right, you know that the transaction was correct, and that there was no double spend.  Because the math proves it.  In a more sophisticated way than just showing the accounts, but just as valid.

In the same way that chemically verifying that the gold is real, is just as good (even if you can't see the gold atoms "visually") than verifying the whole transaction history since 1000 year of that piece of gold in order to prove that the gold is real.

If you trust chemistry to prove that the gold is real, you can trust mathematics and cryptography to show that the coins are real.  I fail to see the difference in principle.


Absolutely not.  In crypto, NOTHING carries any value as such.  People BELIEVE that these tokens are accepted against value, and that is what gives them value.  The system has to be such that one can verify that the tokens are obeying a "right/power to spend" in agreement with agreed-upon rules, of which of course "accepted creation" and "no double spending" are part, and that's it.  What carries value, is your proof of power/right to spend and the belief that this carries value.  Nothing more, nothing less.

I'm not (at all!) in the monero development team.  And apparently (and happily) I was wrong on the RPC function to be enabled by default, which makes this vulnerability much, much less severe.

RPC is actually allowing instructions over the network, a bit like if you were "in the application interface".  Now, the "network" can be limited to the "local machine".  This is strange at first sight, but it means that certain applications on the local machine can do "network calls" to the other application that has RPC.  The local network has IP address 127.0.0.0.  It is not accessible from outside.  So you would think that RPC calls ON THE LOCAL MACHINE to itself, are no problem.

The vulnerability is that a browser executing code in a web page, IS on the local machine, and CAN do local network calls.  So the web page can contain network call instructions to the local machine and hence, push instructions to every RPC application that listens to them.

Usually, you can protect network access with a password, but sometimes people don't do this on the local machine, as they - erroneously - consider that the local machine is safe.  The point with web browsers is that they execute code from a foreign web page on the local machine, and that's the loophole that is exploited here.

So you are in danger if:
1) you have activated the RPC function in your wallet without password
2) you have opened your wallet
3) you use a web browser on the same machine while having opened your wallet visiting a page that contains these instructions

You are still repeating this, aren't you. 


Cash isn't a "credit paradigm", not more than "a piece of gold" would be a credit paradigm.  The aspect of cash that is used here, is the fact that 1) you can see that it is genuine  2) you can see that the other one is holding it, and is now transferring it to you  3) you can verify that after this transfer, it is now yours and not his any more IS ALL THAT IS NEEDED.

In other words, 'cash' or 'piece of gold' physical transfer comes down to proving a right to spend, and verify that that right to spend is uniquely transferred to you.

You don't need to have the whole history of the transactions of that dollar bill, or of that piece of gold.  You don't even have to know when it was printed, or when it was dug up as real gold.  You only need to have SOME WAY to know it is GENUINE, and that it is now yours and not the spenders' any more. 

THAT is the idea of cash.  With cash, or with gold, the laws of nature (Fermi's exclusion principle, deep down) is taking care of that.

With electronic coins, that's harder, because making perfect copies is possible.  So one needs A MECHANISM to prove the right to spend.  The most naive one is the open ledger.  But it is not the only one.  A cryptographic proof of right to spend is just as good.

You could say: "hey, before I accept this piece of gold, PROVE ME that it has been dug up in a true gold mine, and prove me that this piece of gold hasn't been double spend (I don't believe in the laws of nature).  Show me all transactions of that piece of gold since it was dug up."  That's the "I want an open block chain".
Or you could say: "I believe in the laws of nature, and I analyse this, and it is true gold, so yes, this is good enough".  That's the cryptographic proof.

Another "open block chain paradigm" is: show me where this dollar bill has been made, and show me all intermediate transactions that dollar bill underwent.  Once I verify the veracity of this, I will accept the dollar bill as real.  Or you could verify that it is a genuine dollar bill, and leave it at that.


You are right that by limiting transactions to "single input/single output" and using each address only once, you could almost achieve the same.  That would essentially mean that if I pay you 3 bitcoin, I would have to submit 300 000 000 transactions, to 300 000 000 addresses of yours, from 300 000 000 addresses of mine.    After about 100 000 blocks on the bitcoin block chain, only for this simple transaction, I would have achieved that

So what ?  Money has nothing to do with gold.  Even M0 money is not related to gold.  M0 money is just as fictional as bitcoin is: just a number of tokens, with that difference that the central bank can mine as many of these tokens as she likes (not entirely, there have to be given a kind of debt IOU).  There is NO "basis value" in the fiat system, not more than there is in bitcoin.  And that's a good thing.  Money is imaginary.


Of course.  Fractional banking was invented with gold already.  There's no difficulty doing fractional banking on top of bitcoin, not more than on top of gold, or on top of M0 imaginary central bank tokens.

So *there's no point* in using bitcoin as "base money" because you can build a very similar fiat system on top of it as ours.  
You could do like in the 1930ies: forbid people to do "exchange token withdrawals".  You can still transmit "bitcoin" from exchange to exchange, but it is forbidden to withdraw them.  In the 1930ies, the US forbade people to exchange their dollars for real gold, although dollars were supposed to be backed by gold at that time.

In fact, you could just require much higher "withdrawal fees" (say, 50% of the value) than "exchange transmission fees" (only 0.5% of the value, when on chain bitcoin transactions will be, because of block size limitations, already 10% of the transaction value of an average user transaction).  Then, most people will use MOSTLY exchange IOU "bitcoins", and exchanges can do fractional bitcoin banking with a ratio of 20 - 1.
Exchanges can do this, because they do only a few settlements per day as they have direct lightning-like micropayment channels between them.

I think you have some misconception about the fiat system, and about "power".  Carl in Somalia will always work for $0.1 per hour.  With, or without crypto.  That's in the nature of power.  The Egyptians didn't have sophisticated monetary systems, but Carl did work for peanuts too, and the Pharaoh was rich, and his aristocracy too.  This is in the nature of human hierarchical organization. It is not the result of the financial system, but the result of hierarchical power.
The financial system, of any nature, ends up serving the purposes of hierarchical power, but the financial system is not the CAUSE of that power, nor of that wealth.  It is just one of the means.

Strange as it seems, our financial fiat system doesn't work so badly.  What makes rich, is not so much the financial system in itself, but rather two classes of unfair property rights: intellectual property rights, and the rights to natural resources.  These are the two lever arms that make big fortunes.  Think Bill Gates, think oil.  Think Virgin, think Monsanto.  The evil is in these concepts of ownership: the right to forbid people from thinking and imitating (which is the nature of our species) and punish them if they do, and the right to own part of nature, on which we depend.  This is today's lever of power and wealth.  It is guaranteed by hierarchical power, itself framed on military violence and propaganda. 

The villain in the fiat system is the seigniorage.  But here, the good old US of A did a master job in handling the world's resources in their currency, and making their currency the "reserve currency" (a totally fake idea that finds its roots in the gold bugs, not understanding the abstract nature of money).  Having one's money as a world reserve currency actually means that you're the only one able to buy the world with a printer.  That's what the USA did, and their "external debt" is in fact nothing else but the measure of how much they bought the world with reserve paper.  As moreover natural resources such as petrol are denominated also in $$, they can also buy up all the resources of the world with a printer.
No other issuer of fiat can do this, because the printer would cause inflation.  But not if what you print, is stored abroad as "reserve currency".  This was an utmost brilliant move after WWII, to buy up the whole world.  This is why the US of A will do anything, including bombing the shit out of you, if ever you try to make another currency the world reserve currency.  The ironic part is that if you get their bombs on your head, most probably you were the one making them to sell them to them, or you have been giving them other resources to do so.

But if you want to see a rather well working fiat system, look at the Euro.  It is a private money, owned by a banking consortium, that has been adopted as state money by several EU states.  It kills them, because states never had the discipline to do correct bookkeeping. 

Crypto would not work much in a different way than the Euro.  Of course, crypto is not a debt-based system and doesn't have the same elasticity, but grossly, states adopting a crypto would be somewhat similar to the introduction of the Euro in several EU countries: the state loses its privilege to create money.  That doesn't stop states from squeezing out taxes out of every little bit of value you produce or hold.

You are right that M2 money are numbers in a computer.  But so is M1 money.  M1 money is numbers in the central bank computer ; M2 is numbers in a commercial bank computer.  They have parity in value, because commercial banks arrange that if you want to, you can always exchange limited amounts of M2 into M1.  And they use M1 amongst them to do their accountancy, because of course bank B2 doesn't accept bank B1's money, but only M1 money.  So if a customer Joe of B1 sends M2 money from B1 to Jack, customer of B2, what actually happens, is that B1 must send the same amount of M1 money from B1 to B2.  At that point, B1 destroys the equivalent amount of M2 money in Joe's account is destroyed by B1, and B2 creates the same amount of B2 money in Jack's account.

This is like on an exchange:
If you've sent 10 bitcoin to Coinbase, then Coinbase has now 10 bitcoin, and creates, out of nothing, 10 "bitcoin IOU" on its website for you.

There could be a system that you send those "10 bitcoin IOU" on Coinbase to Jack, who is on Kraken.  This function doesn't exist, but it could very well exist one day.  What would happen is that if you do an order of 10 bitcoin from your "coinbase account" to Jack's Kraken account, coinbase destroys your IOU on its website, and sends 10 real bitcoin to Kraken.  Kraken now gives 10 website bitcoin IOU in Jack's Kraken account. 

This is how the fiat system more or less works.

The fiat system has more to it.  If you go to a bank, and you want to borrow money to buy a house, then:
- the bank INVENTS NEW bank money for you, and gives you bank money IOU (a bank account)
- takes your guaranteed promise to pay back, with the mortgage on newly bought your house

The new bank money will go somewhere else when you buy your house with the borrowed money.  So the bank will have to transfer M1 money to the other bank.  However, in as much as the other bank also has a customer that borrowed money, and sent that money to your bank, both banks are "in equilibrium".

So Coinbase and Kraken could do the same.  You could go and borrow bitcoin IOU at coinbase.  Against your mortgage, coinbase could INVENT NEW bitcoin IOU in your account.  If you transfer them to the guy form whom you buy the house, and who has a Kraken account, you would send your bitcoin IOU from your borrowing, to his Kraken account.  Coinbase would have to send real bitcoin doing so.  But maybe a Kraken customer did the same, and bought a house from a Coinbase customer.  So in the end, Coinbase and Kraken have been handling "website bitcoin IOU" like banks handle bank account money.

They can permit to have much more bitcoin IOU than there are bitcoin on the chain.  Like banks having about 20 times more bank money than there is central bank money.

It would be very similar.  And the system doesn't work so badly.

Uh.  Of course I can buy that house with a bank account.  That's how most houses are bought.  And no, $ 300 000 in a bank account "ain't worth shit", get real.  Of course it is worth a lot.  You can buy a lot of goods and services with it.   I suppose you're thinking of "if ever the state decides, they can whipe it out".  True, but they can also bomb your house.  In reality, today, and here, $300 000 on a bank account can buy a lot of valuable stuff.  And that's the only thing that measures value, together with the direct usage value of the thing.


But my whole question is: why on earth would average Joe want to use crypto, and not his bank account ?  What PURPOSE does this crypto serve ?  You run around that question, but you never answer it.  It seems that your goal is "crypto adoption".  But to obtain what ?



Fungibility has a very precise definition.  You can look up wiki if you want.  It is not "acceptability" or "liquidity".  These are different concepts.

My whole point is that, apart from a ripping-off zero sum game, crypto has ONLY a meaning as a free currency, to do those trades that cannot easily be done with fiat.  I can't see any other useful meaning in crypto.


I have essentially unlimited state-funded resources to waste my time here.  Unfair competition, I know

No, that's not it.  Of course there is a difference.  Like there is a difference between $300 000 on a bank account, and owning a house worth $300 000.  This is a fundamental economic concept: liquidity.


"investing" in crypto is a zero-sum game.  USING crypto to exchange goods and services, isn't.  "investing" in crypto simply means "trying to buy crypto low, and holding it, to sell it high".  Now, I hope you agree with me, that, given that crypto in itself is a monetary asset, and hence of no intrinsic value (you cannot eat it, you cannot fuck it, you cannot enjoy it in any other way but to transact it), and *doesn't finance any means of production*, that it are tokens that do the accountancy of a zero-sum game.  At the end of the day, when the cryptocurrency is dead, and worth nothing any more (say, 3 years from now, or 1 million years from now), the only thing that has happened, is that the total value that people put into it, came also out of it.  The ONLY thing you do by "investing" in crypto, is to hope that you will be on the side of people who got more out of it, and that must of course be compensated by exactly the same amount other people got LESS out of it than they put in.  Zero-sum.

It is different if you use crypto as an intermediate store of value between selling goods/services against, say, bitcoin, to use bitcoin somewhat later, to buy other goods and services of ABOUT THE SAME VALUE.  Here, crypto had some actual USE, namely to introduce liquidity in an operation that was going to be difficult otherwise.

Investing in crypto being a zero sum game, this is NOT COMPARABLE to investing in the stock market.  If you invest in the stock market, you permit the buying of capital production goods, that will PRODUCE CONSUMER GOODS, and hence augment economic wealth.  Products that can be enjoyed, didn't exist, and now exist because they have been produced.  There has been ADDED VALUE.  The gains you can make on the stock market are related to this dividend of ADDED VALUE, made possible because you invested in production capital.  This is NOT a ZERO SUM game.  The stock market takes part of the freshly created added value of newly created products, to reward those that bought the production capital.  In a certain way, "everybody can win" on the stock market.  There is an influx of fresh value.  Not so in crypto.  Nothing of value is made because you augment the market cap of a coin by buying and holding it ; contrary to you buying shares in a new company, that will buy production capital with it, making new products, and creating value (in principle).



No, the "early bitcoin adopter" A is exactly the same.  He didn't contribute ANYTHING with his buying 1000 coins for 10 dollars and hodling.  When he sells them for 600 000 dollars, he is ripping off the buyers (B).   This 600 000 dollars of worth did flow into bitcoin, to go in the pockets of the early adopter that only put 10 dollars in it, without there having been the slightest bit of value creation by the early adopter.

Of course, those putting $600 000 in it, still hope to be early adopters, to rip off those that will pay $ 6000 for a coin.  At that moment, these new buyers (C) will pay $ 6 000 000 for those same 1000 coins, and the B guys will pocket $ 5 400 000.  In other words, A and B got value for nothing from the C guys: the A guy got $ 600 000, and the B guys got $ 5 400 000 and the C guys put $ 6 000 000 in it.

When bitcoin will have lost all value at a still later date (in 3 years, or in 100 years or in 1 million years), A, B and if they got rid of it, C, will all have gotten value for nothing from the last guys.  This is "greater fool theory" at its best.


But the "early bitcoin investor and hodler" is exactly the same.  It is just different time scales.  It is nothing else but a "greater fool theory" system.

This is totally different if MOST of bitcoin were used as a currency.  Then you don't even mind bitcoins to lose value, and you don't want them to gain in value specially: the SERVICE of fluidity is a product that has value in itself, and for which you are willing to offer some value.  But the "investing" is nothing else but ripping off the greater fool.

This is why I can trust the trusted setup if I'm part of it, and if I can verify that I'm part of it.

If I cannot be part of it, as to "certainty that a certain group is not going to collude 100%", I would start to trust that, from the moment the group contains several 1000 people of totally different backgrounds, on different continents, and if I can verify at least of a few hundred different persons that they did so (in other words, that there haven't been really 5 participants, and 5000 sybils).

Also, the people doing it can be "honest" but the software can have a back door to retrieve the pieces of golden key.  Again, if I'm part of the trusted setup, I can have my ways to make sure that my shard of golden key wasn't delivered, but it should be quite draconian:  I should take the source code on an airgapped computer, compile it there with a method of my choice, generate the random numbers airgapped with a method of my choice, type it in, read the public parts from the screen and write them to paper, and then physically destroy the computer before it could ever connect to a network.

If a few thousand people actually did this, I could start to trust a trusted setup.

We don't care about the average Joe.  We care about the people wanting to use a free money, to do the trades that they want to do.


Adoption only matters if it serves a purpose.  Otherwise it is just another thing to rip off people in a zero sum game.

Nope.  It means that there is no distinction between the different units of a single monetary asset.  That THIS dollar bill, or THAT dollar bill, are equivalent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility


Indeed, that's why I call them "bank Euros", and not central bank Euros (M0/M1).



It is not only a matter of crime.  You could also have boycotts.  Because on a transparent chain, every single coin takes with it its particular history, no coin is indistinguishable from another one, so  they are not fungible.



If the goal of "crypto" is just to sell yet another financial product, then you can do that, but I fail to see the purpose.  Of course some can get rich with it, as with every financial product.  But I'm not interested in financial products for the sake of having a financial product.  I want it to serve a purpose, and I fail to see what it might be, apart from aspiration to freedom and (hence) a form of anarchy.


My question is again: why do cryptocurrencies need to increase their user base ?  What GOAL does that serve ?  What purpose ?


That's what I'm doing.  I'm trying to explain that the only sensible purpose of crypto is freedom and anarchy, and that in that case, you should of course expect aggression from states, and anonymity is a good thing.  It will of course "hinder adoption" but that's not a problem because the only adoption you would lose that way, wouldn't be adoption in the name of liberty and anarchy, and hence not something that is to be looked for.

So even if you divide the market cap by 100 by introducing anon, that's still a good thing, because the other 99% you're losing, wasn't having any reason to use crypto, apart ripping one another off in a zero-sum game (in other words, "adoption of a financial product").

To put it otherwise: suppose that crypto is "selling plastic guns", and anon is "making them fire real bullets".  Now, as the goal of the plastic guns would be to defend yourself, clearly, making them able to fire real bullets would for sure improve them in what they are made for.  The argument "we shouldn't implement anon, because it will be forbidden" is the same argument as "we should not allow the plastic guns to fire real bullets".  But then, they miss their reason of existence: to defend yourself.  You cannot defend yourself with a gun that cannot shoot real bullets.
If we should follow the reasoning "we need our guns to be plastic, and not have them fire real bullets, because we want more adoption of our plastic guns" ; yes, sure, but there's no point in having more adoption of guns that do not allow people to defend themselves.
My point is rather: if these guns have to have any purpose, they should be able to fire real bullets.  If not, there's no point in selling those plastic guns.  So if "making them fire real bullets" divides the market by 100, that's still better, because at least some people can defend themselves, than having much more adoption of a toy gun that serves no purpose apart from making the seller rich.

Eh, fungibility doesn't mean that your coin is universally accepted.  Fungibility means that if I give you a dollar bill, you don't care WHAT EXACT dollar bill (from the moment it is a "real" one), nor "who held it previously".  That if I do a bank transfer of Euros to your account, you do not care exactly "what Euros" (that doesn't even make sense for bank Euros) or "who owned which Euro before me".

With bitcoin (and litecoin, and ethereum, and ...) that IS the difficulty: you DO care whether this coin was once on Silk Road, or owned by the DAO hacker, or ...


Is that what all this mess is about ?  Concerning security and speed, VISA is way, way better.  So in the end, people will adopt currencies because of a logo ?

Bitcoin almost neither.  A little bit, such as for VPN, or VPS.  That's what I'm using it for.
But it is not much.

But who wants that ?  Nobody wants transparency for himself.  At best, you would like to have transparency for TPTB, but you will never get it.  So the only thing that remains, is that TPTB will remain just as opaque, but that YOU, simple citizen, will be entirely delivered to total transparency.   Who the hell would want such a thing, apart from TPTB ?

This is actually also what crossed my mind when I read about the vulnerability: this can only happen when you have opened your wallet on the same computer you're at the same moment looking at, say, some porn.  That said, the activation of the RPC function should not be default while I think it is atm.

Why is that needed ?  Why do we need cryptocurrencies, and if you have a good reason for that, why would they need to be widely accepted as money ?  What good brings crypto, that fiat doesn't have, and is better at it ?


But transparent block chains are WAY WAY WAY less private than fiat.  

This sounds like "I think that strong crypto will be targeted by the authorities at a certain point, so let us all use backdoored crypto".  Or "I think that free, secure operating systems are going to be targeted by authorities at a certain point, so let us all use win10 or OsX".  Or ...

You can list many things.  If you are afraid of using your freedom, because those wanting you to be their slave will be after you, then you've already lost your freedom.  If you do not stand behind your freedom, one will not give it to you.

So, yes of course, anon coins will be targeted.  So what ?  Non-anon coins will be institutionalized, and lose their purpose.

It all depends on what "adoption" means to you.   I have the impression that you are, like so many, a crypto "investor", that is to say, someone that is gambling in a zero-sum game with the hope of getting more out of it than he put into it, which comes down to ripping off others (that's the nature of a zero sum game, and getting out more).

As such, for you, the demand for "adoption" is understandable: adoption = influx of greater fools.  You don't want them to do anything with those coins except generating demand for it, and have them pay high prices for it, so that you can "make money" at their expense.

If that is the case, then I perfectly understand why:
1) you don't want any smear in its name
2) you want it perfectly compliant so that you can legally use the money you ripped out of the pockets of others
3) you are probably even wanting to pay taxes on that money, if there are sufficient others and the gains are big enough

But this is nothing else but "greater fool theory".  People "invest" in bitcoin, because they think that "adoption" will lead to "more and greater fools".

But let us assume that bitcoin has reached maturity.  That in 2025, the bitcoin price is still $600.  Would you be happy ?  

After all, for most of the "adopters", that's what they will experience: maybe they bought bitcoin at $100 000, but 10 years later, the price of bitcoin is still $100 000.  Sooner or later, "adoption" will reach maturity, and prices will not increase any more.

So what is the advantage of having, say, 5 bitcoin, over having a bank account with $ 500 000 on it ?

(don't come in about taxes and so on, it will all be perfectly legal, known, and regulated as you like it).

What's the f*cking use of bitcoin, if it is just to hold money like a bank account, but with all the hassle and the fear of having your keys stolen ?  Why not have it on a bloody bank account ?  What's the difference ?


We don't care about "investor" adoption, do we ?


It is not "vulnerable" as in "cracking", it is vulnerable in as "tax agencies may find out and your buying history may be uncovered rather easily by law enforcement".


THERE, we agree perfectly, and my point is that crypto has NO USE in the first case, fiat is better.  Apart for the "greater fool game" of "crypto investors", which sooner or later will come to an end, when "maturity" is reached.


My god.  I have trackmenot running, which searches for those evil words every minute.  At my office and at home


Then what are you doing here ?  Ripping legally off newcomers ?

Because using non-anon coins on dark markets will not be targeted ?  That's silly.


As far as I know, Bin Laden didn't do anything on Silk Road... Dark markets are for small fish.  Really big guys do it in the back rooms of government itself.  The government is not interested in taking out small fish, except if it is to scare away too much small fish.  Dark markets are the little people wanting some freedom, nothing more.  That pisses off governments all right, but not like Bin Laden.

And again, the essence is distributed systems.  Silk Road was a centralized system with a single point of failure.  A distributed dark market is much, much harder to take down.


Because bitcoin mixing is already simple to take down.   The easiest way is to put a honeypot mixer node at the FBI, and you gently mixing your bitcoins on the FBI computers.  The second point is that mixing is far and in between, and only adds somewhat more burden to the chain analysis.  Also, about ALL people involved in mixing are worth hunting, as they have something to hide AND TAKE RISKS TO DO SO.

No, mixing is actually worse than not mixing on the bitcoin chain concerning privacy and "staying under the radar".


Mixing on top of monero would actually BREAK anonymity more than add to it.  Because you have to leak much more information about you doing so, than not doing so, and trust the mixer to forget about you.


No.


There's a difference between "hacking" and "breaking crypto".   If the crypto is good, it cannot be hacked.  DES has never been hacked.  It has been brute-forced, but that was to be foreseen and no "hack".  56 bits is now searchable.


Logic.  What makes crypto hard, clumsy, unpractical and a pain, is the need for distributed trustlessness.  That can only have one intention that makes sense: anarchy.  If you have a state or any other centralized body that is to be trusted (because it is trustworthy, or because it has the biggest guns and you are afraid of it), then EVERYTHING is much easier to do with a centralized trusted agent.  All the hassle of crypto is unnecessary then.  It simply doesn't make sense to go through all that difficulty, if you can trust a central agent.  And a state cannot have it that you don't trust it.  So crypto and state don't go together.  At best, one can tolerate the other up to a point.  If you give in to the centralized trusted entity which requires it, you obtain fiat, which is WAY WAY more practical than all that mess with block chains, proof of work, huge files, confirmation times, and irreversible transactions.

The ONLY sensible reason to go for crypto is anarchy.  And that's why I'm interested in crypto, and only for that reason.

Crypto can also be a zero-sum betting casino, but *you don't even need block chains for that*.  You can just as well bet on exchange "fiat" coins.


I already told you that I don't trade crypto.  I think that is retarded, to play in a zero-sum scamming casino.



If the goal of crypto is not to go underground, hiding from these governements, or outright trying to destroy them, crypto has no reason to exist, anon or not.  But believe me, in that case it is better to try anon.

So essentially, these are just projects and dreams, but there's not much REAL STUFF going on.  The market cap of ethereum doesn't come from the demand for ether to use these things.   Most of the transactions are not related to these things.  In other words, at this point in time, there's not much ether used in DAPPs.

I looked at Akasha's web site: blog.akasha.world.
Latest news from 18 July,.  http://blog.akasha.world/2016/07/18/moving-forward-on-all-fronts/

Digix: really ?  Essentially you have to believe that these tokens represent gold you can redeem ?  That gold is somewhere, no ?  So this is essentially a centralized "central bank" and the day that this centralized gold safe is gone, you still have your tokens.  One has to be outright crazy to think that tokens on a block chain, with no legal contractual binding at all, will be redeemed against physical gold.  The person holding the gold can run off any day and you will only know when you try to redeem your DGX. 

Many others on your list are ponzi, lottery or gambling contracts. 

That flight delay DAPP has, holy jesus, 353 ether in it, for 177 transactions.  Wow.
Block 2291471: "warning, an error occured during contract execution".

Yes, ethereum is really running huge contracts, with huge real-world implications, and a serious part of the ethereum market cap and transactions are involved in DAPPS....