When I see posts like this it becomes clear how much many in the crypto currency communities have deviated from Statoshi's original ideal after close to 8 years. A good place to start is to read the introduction to Statoshi's paper.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
The whole point crypto is to provide a digital payment method that behaves the same as cash, and can be used over the Internet. This is all about cutting out the corporate middlemen and has little to do with Governments.
But (fiat) money and governments are two sides of the same coin if I may say so. You should read the excellent 5000 years of debt by David Graeber. If you think that the banking world and the middle men are anything else but a pillar of government, then you are missing the most important point.
By doing what Satoshi proposed, one is cutting the most important leg from government and state. Because with free payments comes also freedom from fiscal theft, and freedom to trade without the rules that are verifiable by all state machinery to keep economic freedom strictly limited.
Freedom of money is to state domination, what freedom of speech is to religious domination. However, and that brings us back to my original point, in order to enjoy freedom of speech in a theocracy, you need anonymity. In order to enjoy really freedom of economic interaction (with some freedom money like Satoshi intended) you need cash-like anonymity, and Satoshi was lacking the technology to do so. Bitcoin is not anonymous, because you can trace all expenditures and there are sufficient "real world contact points" to be able to resolve most of the network of transactions.
It is about making electronic payments to individuals, especially individuals who may be very poor. In person one can use good old cash, but online one is forced to use proprietary payment methods whose primary design objective is to transfer wealth to the wealthiest 0.000001%.
The small fee for the money transfer is negligible compared to the fiscal theft. Honestly, if you look at the fiscal theft from a rough trade: "I mow your lawn" traded for "you give me a book", with social security contributions, income tax and VAT, you're most of the time far over 50% if you do that all according to the law. On most raw trades, more than half of it is stolen by the state. You don't mind adding a few percent to transfer money to the other side of the world if already more than half of it gets stolen by funders of armies, useless state employees, and bank bailouts, right ?
So the REAL freedom in payment is the economic freedom (from fiscal theft), which is implied by the liberty money Satoshi intended to invent. But for that, anonymity is necessary, and this is technologically lacking in bitcoin.
The first is that Bitcoin can only be used by a very minuscule proportion of the worlds population. This is of course the 1 MB blocksize limit in the Bitcoin protocol. Dash does not address this at all since 4x minuscule is still minuscule. Monero does because it has an adaptive blocksize limit.
I agree with that, but even monero would have a practical problem with a huge block chain if every payment in the world happened on its chain. The 1 MB limit is an artificial limit, but the huge chain is an inherent problem of the technology of block chains. Newer coins seem to work on solutions for that if I understand well.
The second is that Bitcoin in reality is not fungible and is subject to coin taint and possibly even reversibility of transactions. Furthermore there is no privacy on the Bitcoin blockchain, in particular from the payer. The recent events in Ethereum have demonstrated that a decentralized proof of work blockchain is not enough to prevent reversibility of transactions one also needs anonymity, fungibitly and privacy.
I agree with you. That is why I say that monero has added the needed technology that bitcoin is lacking, unfortunately.
Dash addressees anonymity, fungibility and privacy by implementing Coinjoin on a second tier masternode network. There are serious shortcomings with this approach. Mixing on the Dash masternode network can take hours or even days, and has to be completed before a transaction, and then again after a transaction with the change. Furthermore the Dash masternode network is actually very centralized. There are for example over 4x the number of Banks and Credit Unions in the United States alone that there are Dash masternodes. By this token alone the US banking system is actually more decentralized than the Dash network.
I fully agree with you. That is why Dash is the best possible solution with bitcoin technology, and is in fact not good enough.
Monero addressees anonymity, fungibility and privacy by using ring signatures. Mixing is seamless and part of the transaction. Sending Monero is essentially the same as sending Bitcoin, with no distinct mixing step. Furthermore in Monero all transactions are mixed. Monero's approach avoids the need for second tier network with all the centralization and regulatory risks this entails, while at the same time providing a much superior anonymity, fungibility and privacy solution.
Indeed.
Because another important aspect in anonymity is that it should be automatic. If anonymity is an option, then anybody using it becomes a suspect.
It is also the area where crypto will face fierce competition from cash and pre paid value apart from proprietary payment methods. Still it is possible this could be a niche opportunity for Dash.
I think that there is in any case a problem there, and only Lighting-like smart contract solutions can probably solve this issue: by pre-setting up a block chain agreement, and "simultaneously pushing the button" when in person-to-person contact.
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