Could Monero replace Bitcoin soon?

[Anon136]

Cash isn't a "credit paradigm", not more than "a piece of gold" would be a credit paradigm.

Technically I think for every physical note the treasury owe's the federal reserve an equivalent debt.

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[hyc]

For example, have you ever tried verifying a transaction in Monero ? You can't, because verification (by visual inspection - not by some meaningless transaction number) means observing 2 balances, not 1. It means verifying that the balance at one address moved in one direction and the balance at the other address moved in the other direction by the same amount. Monero only makes 1 of those balances visible because it throws every other priority out of the window for the sake of supporting this one flawed archetypal characteristic of bank accounts - obscurity.

(It's also the reason why its proponents bang on about 'privacy' to the exclusion of everything else - they have no choice).

Except that nobody in real life does any such thing.

If I mail someone a check, I don't verify that one balance moved in one direction and another balance moved in another direction - that's nonsense. Money is only moving in *one* direction, not two. And I only verify that the check was debited against my account - I don't (usually) have any way to see the account of the person I sent it to.

You're way out in left field.

[toknormal]

Except that nobody in real life does any such thing.

LoL. Are you serious ?

Thousands of Bitcoin users are on blockchain.info day in day out doing exactly that. In classic finance people don't do it because a trusted third party is doing it for them, otherwise known as as a clearing bank system. There's another area where obscured blockchains subscribe to that archetype - except in crypto there is no trusted third party to endorse the value in your account. In crypto it's the public who back it, hence Bitcoin's transparent, publicly auditable blockchain.

[dinofelis]

Cash isn't a "credit paradigm", not more than "a piece of gold" would be a credit paradigm.

I wasn't calling cash a credit paradigm. I was saying that obscured blockchains use bank accounts as their primary archetype rather than an anonymous commodity like gold by virtue of the fact that they ascribe blockchain addresses to people in the way a bank account does and gold doesn't.

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.

That is folly because you then have to live with a whole load of conflicting priorities. For example, have you ever tried verifying a transaction in Monero ? You can't, because verification (by visual inspection - not by some meaningless transaction number) means observing 2 balances, not 1.

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.

It means verifying that the balance at one address moved in one direction and the balance at the other address moved in the other direction by the same amount. Monero only makes 1 of those balances visible because it throws every other priority out of the window for the sake of supporting this one flawed archetypal characteristic of bank accounts - obscurity.

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.

It's also the reason why its proponents bang on about 'privacy' to the exclusion of everything else - they have no choice. Hence the heavy use personal pronouns that always characterises their dialog when discussing blockchain addresses which is nonsense because an address no more represents a person than a peice of gold does. The fact that some off-chain information may lead to knowledge of who controlled a particular address at a particular time doesn't fundamentally change that fact because blockchains are not carrying "your money", they derive their value from the fact of being a public resource that you may have some control over.

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.

[dinofelis]

Except that nobody in real life does any such thing.

If I mail someone a check, I don't verify that one balance moved in one direction and another balance moved in another direction - that's nonsense. Money is only moving in *one* direction, not two. And I only verify that the check was debited against my account - I don't (usually) have any way to see the account of the person I sent it to.

You're way out in left field.

Amen.

[dinofelis]

Thousands of Bitcoin users are on blockchain.info day in day out doing exactly that.

Blockchain.info is not the block chain, it is a web site.  They can visually display what they want.  If you see it on the web site, what makes you think that this corresponds to something on the block chain ?  The only way to "visually look at the block chain" is with a hex editor on the downloaded files.

In classic finance people don't do it because a trusted third party is doing it for them, otherwise known as as a clearing bank system. There's another area where obscured blockchains subscribe to that archetype - except in crypto there is no trusted third party to endorse the value in your account. In crypto it's the public who back it, hence Bitcoin's transparent, publicly auditable blockchain.

The endorsement is in the cryptography.  If you don't trust cryptography, you shouldn't use crypto at all.  I have more trust in cryptography than in accountants, honestly.

[social crypto coin]

monero can replace and takeover bitcoin in position number one crypto coin
must follow requirement
1 high comuunity use monero
2 all exchanger support trade in monero with pair monero fiat money
3 high volume transaction

[toknormal]

have more trust in cryptography than in accountants, honestly.

Most people trust neither. They trust their own eyes and seeing only one side of the equation when 2 balances are involved I'm afraid doesn't "cut it".

If I mail someone a check, I don't verify that one balance moved in one direction and another balance moved in another direction - that's nonsense. Money is only moving in *one* direction, not two.

This little peice of subjective innocence sounds like a good epitaph for your beloved "privacy coin".  

[generalizethis]

have more trust in cryptography than in accountants, honestly.

Most people trust neither. They trust their own eyes and seeing only one side of the equation when 2 balances are involved I'm afraid doesn't "cut it".

If I mail someone a check, I don't verify that one balance moved in one direction and another balance moved in another direction - that's nonsense. Money is only moving in *one* direction, not two.

This little peice of subjective innocence sounds like a good epitaph for your beloved "privacy coin".  

You've been wrong with your "people need to see cryptography to believe in it" argument from the start--now you're just 10x more wrong about it. When AEON passes your marketcap, please feel free to say hi.

[dinofelis]

have more trust in cryptography than in accountants, honestly.

Most people trust neither. They trust their own eyes and seeing only one side of the equation when 2 balances are involved I'm afraid doesn't "cut it".

Why do they trust addition, then ?
Maybe addition isn't trustworthy either.
Maybe the Abelian group of addition over the integers isn't correct either, and can be cracked by a sufficiently smart hacker.

You cannot "see" the addition of two numbers that are larger than, say, about 10.

[toknormal]

Why do they trust addition, then ?

Trusting in theory is not the same thing as trusting in practice.

About the most flakey link in the whole chain of crypto are wallets - everybody knows that. The chance of your wallet showing you the right balance at any given moment is about as good as the chance of me scoring 100 out of 100 basketball set shots with one hand tied behind my back. (That isn't very high b.t.w.    ). Wallets stick, may be unsync'd, have backloged transactions - you name it. And thats just the un-hacked ones. None of this has anything to do with "trust in cryptography" or the number of PHD's you happen to have on your dev team.

Contrary to what a lot of posters in here would like people to believe, the biggest challenge for crypto isn't privacy, it's confidence.

In that regard, this is a very strong model:



...and this is a very weak one:



It isn't just weak with regard to confidence, it also drives a truck through blockchain usability & maintenance because the entire technology stack has to be over engineered to support something that is not a priority for unbacked, anonymous media at the expense of something that is. The end user therefore has to satisfy themselves with only an implicit level of auditability rather than the explicit one they get with transparent blockchains. In the long run, thats just going to lead to a growing number of confidence scams, hacks and rackets that has the potential to fatally corrode monetary integrity in the eyes of its users.

As I said earlier, it doesn't mean that fungibility can't and shouldn't be improved in blockchains. But do it the proper way - by creating blockchains that natively mitigate the distinction between one address and another. Not by burying it under a thick layer of cryptographic syrup and torpedoing the very properties that give it value in the first place.

[xuan87]

i think monero has a great future, and monero show a great development in crypto currency, however to become equal with bitcoin is still far away, bitcoin already famous and has become the pioneer for a long time, and had been through so many ups and downs, Monero still need a lot of phases before catching up with bitcoin

[Decoded]

i think monero has a great future, and monero show a great development in crypto currency, however to become equal with bitcoin is still far away, bitcoin already famous and has become the pioneer for a long time, and had been through so many ups and downs, Monero still need a lot of phases before catching up with bitcoin

Agreed. Monero has had no big problems in the past, and ever since Poloniex started accepting it, the price has shot up. My holdings are now hodlings!

[dinofelis]

Why do they trust addition, then ?

Trusting in theory is not the same thing as trusting in practice.

About the most flakey link in the whole chain of crypto are wallets - everybody knows that. The chance of your wallet showing you the right balance at any given moment is about as good as the chance of me scoring 100 out of 100 basketball set shots with one hand tied behind my back. (That isn't very high b.t.w.    ). Wallets stick, may be unsync'd, have backloged transactions - you name it. And thats just the un-hacked ones. None of this has anything to do with "trust in cryptography" or the number of PHD's you happen to have on your dev team.

Ok, so let us assume you have a broken wallet application.  We will assume this on the bitcoin, and on the monero/zcash/other anon side.

What happens ?  Your broken bitcoin wallet doesn't do the right verifications, and shows you a wrong balance.  Your broken monero wallet does the same.  So why is your broken bitcoin wallet now more to be trusted than your broken monero wallet ?

After all, and this is what I wanted to indicate to you earlier on, the bitcoin block chain is ALSO WAY TOO COMPLEX to "see visually that the transaction is right".

In order for the "transaction to be right", you have:

1) to verify the entire chaining of all block chain headers since the genesis block of Satoshi to verify that you have *A* right block chain.
2) to "hop backwards" from the transaction to be verified, to the whole TREE OF BACKWARD INPUTS, all up to their individual coinbases, and find ALL those transactions.
3) to verify the Merkle tree hash of each of the blocks where at least one such transaction occurs.

==> at this point you know that the transaction is transmitting you legit coins that have been created in a coinbase.

4) to verify all OTHER Merkle tree hashes of ALL other blocks.  (now we know that you have the full list of reliable transactions on this chain)
5) to see if NO OTHER transaction ever had one of the outputs used in your backward chain as an input

==> now we know that along the path, there has not been any double spending.

6) listen on the bitcoin network, to find out if there are no chains propagated with more PoW then the one you just analysed.

This is NOT something you can "visually inspect".  And if you leave one step out, you might:
A) not have the consensus block chain, where double spends have been left out
B) not have a valid block chain at all, where simply transactions have been left out (Merkle trees wouldn't fit, but this, you only know if you verify).
C) have double spend coins
D) have non-legit coins that don't go back to a coinbase transaction (bitcoin creation).

So ALL THIS HAS TO BE DONE before you can know that a transaction in bitcoin is legit.  This is NOT something that is simple and "visual".  Leave one step out, and you have a visual "check" that is wrong.

If you don't trust crypto, then you cannot trust this whole procedure ; if you can't trust your wallet having done this correctly, then you don't know anything about the legitimity of any transaction.

And no, you cannot do it with pen and paper.  You have to trust software doing this, or write it yourself.

In other words, you have no clue about the right balance or the legitimity of any bitcoin transaction without trusting software and crypto in any case.  So your argument that it would be simple to verify is not true.  Once you have to trust software and crypto, you can trust software and crypto in a slightly more sophisticated edition too.

You cannot simply "verify the balance of the other guy" without going through the same steps as I have indicated here.  If you have a block chain where a former spending of that balance was left out, or missed by your crappy wallet software (your hypothesis), you are as vulnerable as in any other case, believing a transaction.  And to verify that this is not the case, you have to check the whole validity of the entire chain, AND make sure you have the right chain (highest PoW).  That's a lot of crypto you have to believe.

[kanazawa]

Monero is one of the best cryptocurrencies existing today, but it is hard to predict if some coin will surpass BTC, because it involves a dynamic community acceptance and a huge media attention.

Bitcoin has a long history and ups and downtimes... Even lotta people said it will be dead or that it was already dead (even some very known persons said it).

So, honestly, I don't think it will happening.

[toknormal]

If you don't trust crypto, then you cannot trust this whole procedure ; if you can't trust your wallet having done this correctly, then you don't know anything about the legitimity of any transaction.

Have you ever heard of scientific controls ?



In this case, the independent variable is the balance in the destination address and the dependent variables are just about every aspect of the blockchain mechanics that you cite in last previous post.

Controls are everywhere. If you go to the dentist, you don’t need a degree in dentistry to know if you have toothache afterwards or not. The toothache is the “control” that allows you to test the integrity of the treatment without spending 4 years at dentist school. In bookkeeping, a trial balance acts as an aggregate “control” on the recording of individual transactions.

You say that the blockchain’s too complicated for ordinary users to understand and but that the technology is based on sound theory, programming and should therefore be trusted. This is unacceptable and would be unacceptable in any other field of industrial or administrative activity because though people may be too unskilled to understand the mechanics of the system, they are not too unskilled to understand a control.

Cryptonote and similar technologies impose an asymmetric audit on end users as its means of supporting "fungibility". This deprives them of just such a control since 2 addresses are required, not 1.

The problem with asymmetric audits is that they are cancerous to the integrity of any system - doesn’t matter if it’s financial, mechanical or chemical. They are therefore never used because they lack any kind of control that rings the alarm bell on some detailed aspect of the system which failed.



Bitcoin supports a symmetric audit at the granular (transaction) level. That’s to say, the balance movement in the sending AND destination addresses act as controls for the user on the blockchain mechanics which facilitate it. Although it’s at granular level, the aggregate effect of millions of blockchain users carrying out controlled actions on the blockchain in this way gives it immense resistance to confidence challenges. This is the MINIMUM level of transparency needed in an unbacked monetary system. As an encrypted bookkeeping technology, cryptonote is quite nice. But as a universal unbacked electronic asset, it's holed below the waterline due to this fundamental weakness - the asymmetric control for end users.

There's an interesting interview with the Monero rep(s) on Lets Talk Bitcoin from last year where halfway through they are asked the elephant in the room question as to "if it's so great, why didn't Satoshi use the Cryptonote approach". They responded that they didn't know the answer which, when you think about it is a bit alarming. If I were embarking on a challenging technology that ditched fundamental properties of the market leader such as transparency, I'd want to do a bit of due diligence and find out.

In fact the answer is staring us in the face every day we use bitcoin and every time we get back from the dentist and don't hit the roof at the first cup of coffee...  

[obit33]

extensive explanation

I admire you sir... the patience with which you try to explain this to someone who doesn't want to understand is very very admirable...

For what it's worth, I enjoy your writings very much!

best regards

[jbreher]

[toknormal] trust neither. [toknormal] trust their own eyes and seeing only one side of the equation when 2 balances are involved I'm afraid doesn't "cut it".

Perhaps you are not yet ready for cryptocurrency.

[Anon136]

too long to courteously quote

It it expansive but unfortunately it's nonsense.

You are making an apples to oranges comparison. Monero isn't attempting to be anything other than digital e-cash. It has one application and that is to mimic the process of privately handing someone a wad of cash. At that it succeeds marvelously. Almost every other application besides that is going to be better on a different blockchain probably. Maybe bitcoin but maybe something else with a better balance of
fungibility, blockchain utility and scalability. I don't know. But what ever it is, it probably wont do pure private e-cash as well as monero.

I dont think its fair to dismiss the value of the apps that will be built ontop of other blockchains but could never be built ontop of moneros any more than it is fair to dismiss the obvious utility of such a pure and elegant e-cash.

And if you are going to say this completely missed the point of what you were trying to say I did make a few assumptions because your post wouldn't have made any sense if you were actually arguing apples to apples. If we are comparing bitcoins utility as a pure digital ecash to monero's there is no comparison to be made. The only thing monero needs to be trustworthy in this specific narrow application is well reviewed cryptography and the other basic ingredients of money (durability, portability, divisibility, fungability and scarcity).

*edit* i should clarify. this is sort of an argument against the premise of this thread. when i said i think monero has a shot (at replacing bitcoin) i meant as the goto standard for digital ecash. not blockchain applications. monero will probably never be the king of this.

[dadon]

why would XMR replace BTC even BBR do more then XMR and SDC do much more then BBR The reason i dumped MNR so long ago and never looked back was because development was slow and unimpressive and it hasn't changed obviously someone payed the DM off or the people running those DM hold XMR there is no other reason, it's really not that good.

Shadowcash It is now the top POS anon coin and for good reason.



https://shadowproject.io/en

https://umbra.shadowproject.io

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/illuminating-shadow-cash/

https://decentralize.today/privacy-within-the-umbra-83ecdba2f51#.92caow32w

http://insidebitcoins.com/news/shadowcash-a-peer-inside-an-anonymous-cryptocurrency/32825

https://www.deepdotweb.com/2015/01/28/shadowcash-zero-knowledge-anonymity/

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-race-for-the-first-decentralised-silk-road-is-on

there are a lot of lies going around  about SDC please do your own research.
Yes we had a bug and it was fixed promptly but transactions were still protected by shadowcash’s stealth addresses
I have been with project for 2 years and personally donated to them i would not do so if i did not trust them.

the lead developer Rhyno even revealed his identity in full

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/shadowcoin-lead-developer-rynomster-shadows/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUuk3W4tSzo interview with rhino.

The team are very real, very loyal to their community and have a great vision that they pursue with a fierce passion.
If there is anything i have learnt from spending over 2 years with this community.
Its that the team take users security and privacy very seriously and are generally pissed off about the Orwellian society that we are quickly becoming as am I.
I know when the Bug was found in shadowcash it was a real kick in the guts to them and they felt like they had let us all down, that shows they actually care about the community.
this isn’t about money for them thats why for 2 years they have developed with almost no funding, SDC had no IPO/ICOs Premine Instamine the dev hold little coins and thats a fact.
they do this because they believe in it and thats why i stick with them for so long.

Our new GUI 2.0 with end to end encrypted chat/group chat soon decentralised market much more.