Monero's ANON FAIL !

[tolikkk]

anon realy important because the preservation of open network confidential information, when the security will respond only to the network itself and no one else, and that after the transaction it is not possible to control, I believe that this can further give confidence to the user if we're going to talk about the open information in the bitcoin, we will talk about additionally structure to give information about transactions only for ad-hoc queries, because the storage and delivery of confidential information protected by law about human rights and privacy, and understand creating additional structures, we take on the burden of additional expenses and the eternal appreciation, in the end, the most primitive mechanism becomes unprofitable and economically inefficient

[toknormal]

The beauty of transparent blockchains is that EVERYONE has the same view.

Where obscured-tech goes wrong is that it creates a gaping great asymmetry between holders and non-holders which kind of makes a mockery of its claim to "fungibility".

To compound that problem, it's the non-holders who support the value (being on the bid side of every transaction) and they're the group locked out of that blockchain's transparency. Even the verification of individual transactions is asymmetric between sender and receiver leaving the a prospective economy based on such a system wide open to social engineering attacks.

It's a tech that's based on an ownership record keeping archetype for 3rd-party backed money, not unbacked monetary assets.

[MrJelliesBelly]

I dont think they failed, as long as they keep trying they can figure it out later and still succeed.

[Spoetnik]

I think there is a variety of problems with the PUSH for an anon coin.
There seems to be no way to get through to many guys around here.
They are just plugging their ears and saying La La La La.. endlessly

To me i side stepped the actual determination of whether it is a suitable goal to aim for.
I have all along simply strived to show users how there is a glaring & obvious problem.
ADOPTION.

I just finished saying that when the LBC guys got arrested they broke anti-money laundering laws.
I believe it was because they sold person to person 30 grand worth of Bitcoin.
The Florida law (i think) is that any transaction that goes over 10 grand MUST be properly documented.
Which with an Anon coin it will not be..

Note: the Florida anti-money laundering laws are common all over the globe.

So you have a massive barrier to adoption right there.
And adoption *IS* what this fucking bullshit is about.
It is *NOT* about catering to a criminal niche on Dark Markets bound to get arrested for crack cocaine and Pedo porn after using Monero. (for profits on Poloniex after handing over your Picture ID)
This my fellow shitcoin'ers is NOT what we are striving for is it ?

What are we striving for ?
To get a main stream digital currency adopted world wide by the GENERAL PUBLIC.

So how the fuck do you do that when the coin violates FIAT law and you are pretty much stuck using FIAT to buy the damn coins ?
..showing your fucking ID at Poloniex (for example)

I agree with the guy who commented before me (i think) hard to get his advanced comment a little though.

But that was never my goal around here.
I stand neutral on the ANON matter..

What i have long tried to portray is that i see a problem we can not overcome ..like it or not.
And that would be 2 key areas.. Security and Regulations.

The niche users who are going to have minor levels of adoption are at risk.
And i do not want them to get burned believing in the Monero "merch" Hoodies that say "Secure & Untraceable"

And then for the main stream i don't see large adoption happening if you are forever opposing the govt regulations.

Think of it this way people..
Had we have been spending the last 8 years working on a compromise with regulations
we may have already achieved major world wide adoption on a larger scale than Bitcoin ever achieved.

Many people in Crypto have all along tried to say we don't need ties to FIAT.
That is not practical or realistic.
Crypto needs it ..like it or not guys.

The notion that in our life time FIAT can be dropped in favor of a digital currency is silly.
So since we will still need FIAT for a long time to come users WILL be using it.
So how do they get Crypto coins ? They buy them with FIAT for fuck sakes !

I don't know how you can possibly explain the obvious to people so many times and have them still not get it.

I usually get mouthed off because of my "opinions".. but i don't have any.
I have FACTS !
For example Anti-Money Laundering laws DO in fact exist and yes Coinbase did rat out KickAssTorrents.com
Yes those guys were arrested in Florida years ago by an FBI sting.

Chanting free market does not keep you out of a jail cell Crypto-Pundits. 

And i think most push the anon altcoin idea simply to pad their wallets.
Yet if they were smart they would be rallying for adding regulations and compliance.
Want money ?
Think about it.. cater to a niche Dark Market crew of users who constantly have their funds seized..

vs.

Catering to PLANET EARTH and all it's 7+ billion users.

Like fuck people, if you REALLY wanted money then you are doing the opposite to achieve this goal.

Imagine being the guy buying cheap coins now and seeing 4.6 billion users swarm in to buy your shitcoins.
Wrap your little kidiot retard profiteers heads around that shit !

I swear to bloody god it's like you guys all mostly spend all your time doing the opposite.
Rather than moving forward you just go faster and faster in reverse collectively.

Regulations are coming i said for years to guys who laughed at me calling me names.
I was right !
Canada was the first major country to add crypto to tax guidelines officially (before the USA)
So..
Resisting them means ignoring them ..at your peril.
It means then not taking part in drafting the regulations we want and would be ok compromising with.
As i said for years we should have been all along contributing to the process
or will get what we get..
Which will not be something we like or want.. what you were all worried about in the first place. LOL

In another world or time i would be ok with ANON shit or no regulations.
But i have to face reality and look out the windows and be an adult.
I have to be rational and realistic and i hope you all are willing to join me  

..after all i genuinely believe that is where your "profits" reside anyway.

[DrkLvr_]

Hey sputnik you are a fucking retard. Toknormal too. Same person probably

[sui_generis]

Suppose that you, Joe, are a guy who has a bar, and that I'm a plumber...Mary comes and drinks a coffee in your bar, and pays you with her coins

You're describing blockchain transparency. The very reason bitcoin has value as an unbacked monetary asset.

If an asset has value, people will soon find a way to keep their ownership of it private. But building obscurity into the asset itself amounts to signing it a slow death warrant since "privacy" was never a monetary property in its own right.

Encrypted messaging systems (which is what Monero is) are useful for hiding stuff. But they are not 'the future of money'.

I've seen you make similar arguments in the past, and it really doesn't make any sense to me. The coin supply can be verified by anyone. That's the only form of transparency that is absolutely essential.

[toknormal]

I've seen you make similar arguments in the past...The coin supply can be verified by anyone.

The "arguments" have nothing to do with verifying the coin supply.

[sui_generis]

I've seen you make similar arguments in the past...The coin supply can be verified by anyone.

The "arguments" have nothing to do with verifying the coin supply.

I can't follow your logic with regard to the asymmetry between holders and non-holders. If I have $1000 cash at home, and I take out a $100 bill and then pay you for some goods, you don't know about the other $900 I have. Same with something like gold. You can't see the flow of all dollars or gold. What you do have is an understanding that the asset in question has value and scarcity. So it is with Monero. Even if you don't have any Monero, you can download the software and verify that there are X coins in circulation. So what do you mean by asymmetry?

[obit33]

I've seen you make similar arguments in the past...The coin supply can be verified by anyone.

The "arguments" have nothing to do with verifying the coin supply.

I can't follow your logic with regard to the asymmetry between holders and non-holders. If I have $1000 cash at home, and I take out a $100 bill and then pay you for some goods, you don't know about the other $900 I have. Same with something like gold. You can't see the flow of all dollars or gold. What you do have is an understanding that the asset in question has value and scarcity. So it is with Monero. Even if you don't have any Monero, you can download the software and verify that there are X coins in circulation. So what do you mean by asymmetry?

I don't get toknormal either... He seems to have a whole monetary theory of his own, unsupported by any theory/history... I've given up on trying to understand what he means...

[toknormal]

So what do you mean by asymmetry?

Bitcoin is in the "maximising consensus" business.

It's designed so that everyone in the entire world has a uniform view of the blockchain - including in their ability to group outputs by address and tally them. Your view of bitcoin's blockchain isn't skewed or restricted depending on whether you happen to posses a private key or not. On the other hand, your ability to modify it, of course, is, which is why possession of a private key has value.

The reason it's designed this way is due to its archetype - an open, tradable, anonymous asset that being unbacked, places transparency, uniformity and confidence as priorities above all else to maximise value.

You don't do that by burying the blockchain in a thick, syrupy layer of cryptography so opaque that only 1 person in the entire world can view an address balance and the rest have to make do with paultry transaction IDs. Thats an approach who's archetype originates from an online private records archive, or even a transactioning system for "backed" money. In both cases, the asymmetry of verification methods available to the participating parties in the transaction doesn't matter because in the former the sender and "retriever" are the same person and in the latter you have a 3rd party guarantee of endorsement of the address balance.

In an unbacked asset, however, it does matter because choosing and implementing a monetary archetype faithfully is as important as any technological feature - if not more so. You can't have it both ways - i.e. on the one hand claim it’s an anonymous monetary asset and then proceed to implement it as if it were in fact a personal records archive.

Bitcoin is anonymous. Full stop. No personal information is stored on the blockchain and an address balance exists independently of any particular keyholder. The fact that the blockchain contains a visible audit trail is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. To make the addresses more fungible, the right problem to solve is to improve its resistance to pattern detection, not bulldoze away its universality, or transparency.

I think what happened with Cryptonote is that somebody - Nick Sabernhagen possibly - adapted an old design by creating an implementation for mineable blockchains. But they still stuck with the old banking archetype by retaining the principle of "record keeping privacy". That implementation then got picked up by the Bytecoin people who thought they'd make a fast buck from it through a combination of premine & hype. Then when they were done and had filled their pockets, the Monero people came along on the back of the 2014 "Anon" coin fever and thought they'd have a go.

Except it's still the wrong archetype. An asymmetric, encrypted record keeping technology, closed where it needs to be open, exclusive where it needs to be inclusive and opaque where it needs to be transparent - trying to pass itself off as "fungible money".

[rapazev]

..."privacy" was never a monetary property in its own right...

Can you distinguish one ounce of gold from another? One stack of $100 bills from another? (Not really.) The point is that you can distinguish one bitcoin from another, as lots of folks that have been banned from Coinbase have found out, and that is a problem. With Monero this is much less of or not a problem at all.

that's fungibility.
Anonymity isn't the only way to achieve fungibility, but yeah, i agree with you.

fungibility is important to any type of currency and a big problem in bitcoin(probably one of the main reason against massive adoption).

[sui_generis]

...

Ok, I see what you're arguing. I disagree, and feel you've chosen that standard completely arbitrarily in an attempt to support your chosen cryptocurrency. You've randomly chosen an aspect of Bitcoin that Monero doesn't have and use that as your argument.  It makes as much sense as saying that Euros can't be money because they lack features specific to US Dollars. They aren't green, and they don't have pictures of US presidents on them, so they aren't money. The Dollar preceded the Euro, it's always been done this way, so Euros can't work.

You've made no argument as to why Monero's approach would preclude its use as a medium of exchange. There is literally nothing about the fact that Monero balances can't be viewed without private information that would lead to a lack of confidence in Monero. And then you arbitrarily exempt bank accounts from your standard? Please come back with an argument that makes sense.

[toknormal]

You've randomly chosen an aspect of Bitcoin that Monero doesn't have

Blockchain transparency isn't just "some random feature".

As I said earlier - it's the entire basis for bitcoin's value. On contrary, I'd say that the promoters of obscurity-based tech have "randomly" selected the property to obscure just to suit their particular archetype. When you don't see everything through the "privacy-equals-value" distortion lens then the ability to sum transaction outputs using an address dimension is no different from auditing the blockchain by any other dimension. It's just as essential to monetary confidence if people choose to see it that way.

It makes as much sense as saying that Euros can't be money because they lack features specific to US Dollars

Imagine a transporter full of brand new cars. Then imagine a ledger which holds ownership records of those cars. The cars are not private - they drive around in full view of everyone. The ledger of ownership records is subject to privacy concerns. The two are decoupled - they are not the same thing.

It's more like saying that the ledger can't be money if it's not backed by the cars (i.e. the ledger ceases to have value if the cars cease to exist).

If you build an electronic asset using the cars - base asset as your archetype then possession constitutes ownership, transparency is the priority and anonymity is supported by virtue of the asset being unbacked (i.e. it's not an ownership record referencing some other asset).

If, on the other hand you build an electronic asset using the ownership ledger as your archetype, then privacy IS the priority, transparency can be compromised and anonymity is supported by obscuring the ledger from public view.

Which one looks more like Bitcoin and which more like Cryptonote ? Not exactly difficult.

So how to decide which archetype to choose ? You use the first for an unbacked asset and the second for a backed one (such as banking records). Thats why bitcoin has a fully transparent blockchain that is symmetrical in terms of holders and non-holders alike and does not obscure any aspect of its properties. The fact that people can see me getting in and out of my car doesn't change the fact that it's the right archetype.

...it's also why this model, which shares its archetype with cryptonote, has a bank in the loop, so it works as well.

The problem comes when you try to use a record-keeping archetype with a base asset that is not backed. Then you're screwed because it's a mismatch and you will have conflicting priorities regarding the monetary properties of your new asset.

[sui_generis]

Blockchain transparency isn't just "some random feature".

As I said earlier - it's the entire basis for bitcoin's value.

I disagree. It just happens to be way Bitcoin was designed. The basis for Bitcoin's value is the ability to transfer value without the need for a third party, or the counterparty risk that accompanies a third party. Once again, you're not stating why transparency is important. It's certainly not important for the integrity of the currency supply.

Imagine a transporter full of brand new cars. Then imagine a ledger which holds ownership records of those cars. The cars are not private - they drive around in full view of everyone. The ledger of ownership records is subject to privacy concerns. The two are decoupled - they are not the same commodity.

It's more like saying that the ledger can't be money if it's not backed by the cars (i.e. the ledger ceases to have value if the cars cease to exist).

Poor analogy. The cars exist in a physical sense, and thus obviously don't have value if they don't physically exist. Blockchain outputs are an imaginary construct. Being able to publicly "see" them moving around is immaterial to their value, which is to facilitate transactions without the need for a third party. I put see in quotes because in both cases you're trusting software. The software interprets the data and then displays it in a way that is easy for humans to understand.

If you build an electronic asset using the cars as your archetype then possession constitutes ownership, transparency is the priority and anonymity is supported by virtue of the asset being unbacked (i.e. it's not an ownership record referencing some other asset). If, on the other hand you build an electronic asset using the Ownership ledger as your archetype, then privacy IS the priority, transparency can be compromised and anonymity is supported by obscuring the ledger from public view.

You're just seeing blobs of data in either case. That data has no meaning outside of the context of wallet software. It contributes nothing to the integrity of the blockchain to be able to see the coins moving back and forth.

[toknormal]

The basis for Bitcoin's value is the ability to transfer value

Actually it was to BE value.

Slight difference between a technology that's just transferring it and one that's "being" it. Don't worry, Jamie Dimon makes the same mistake - he thinks Bitcoin's just a conveyor belt as well. If it was, it would be satisfactory to have designed it using a record keeping archetype which possibly explains why you don't see any problem with cryptonopte's approach.

It contributes nothing to the integrity of the blockchain to be able to see the coins moving back and forth

Not if you can't tell the difference between record keeping for money and being a monetary commodity

[paratox]

As I said earlier - it's the entire basis for bitcoin's value. On contrary, I'd say that the promoters of obscurity-based tech have "randomly" selected the property to obscure just to suit their particular archetype.

In a fair and just world, where people are friendly and don't want to harm others, a fully transparent transaction history might not pose problems. But since this isn't the reality we live in today, a privacy orientated blockchain is needed as a solution to some of the problems that are part of our current state of civilisation. Maybe sometime in the future, it won't be needed anymore.

Imagine a transporter full of brand new cars. Then imagine a ledger which holds ownership records of those cars. The cars are not private - they drive around in full view of everyone. The ledger of ownership records is subject to privacy concerns. The two are decoupled - they are not the same thing.

It's more like saying that the ledger can't be money if it's not backed by the cars (i.e. the ledger ceases to have value if the cars cease to exist).

If you build an electronic asset using the cars - base asset as your archetype then possession constitutes ownership, transparency is the priority and anonymity is supported by virtue of the asset being unbacked (i.e. it's not an ownership record referencing some other asset).

If, on the other hand you build an electronic asset using the ownership ledger as your archetype, then privacy IS the priority, transparency can be compromised and anonymity is supported by obscuring the ledger from public view.

Which one looks more like Bitcoin and which more like Cryptonote ? Not exactly difficult.

Could you maybe explain it without analogies? They seem to not make much sense the way you put it.
Am I right in assuming that your logic goes something like this :" Bitcoin is "backed" by transactional transparency and therefore has value, because everyone can see all transactions details, while Cryptonote is "unbacked"  and has no value because everyone can only see that coins were correctly transacted but not to whom and from whom"?  

So how to decide which archetype to choose ? You use the first for an unbacked asset and the second for a backed one (such as banking records). Thats why bitcoin has a fully transparent blockchain that is symmetrical in terms of holders and non-holders alike and does not obscure any aspect of its properties. The fact that people can see me getting in and out of my car doesn't change the fact that it's the right archetype.

You don't really explain the reason why you think/believe that transaction transparency is essential for a blockchain to have value and why a blockchain where certain transaction details are obscured can't have value.

The problem comes when you try to use a record-keeping archetype with a base asset that is not backed. Then you're screwed because it's a mismatch and you will have conflicting priorities regarding the monetary properties of your new asset.

Could you please explain these conflicting priorities and which problems this would cause for a user of such an asset?

Actually it was to BE value.

Slight difference between a technology that's just transferring it and one that's "being" it. Don't worry, Jamie Dimon makes the same mistake - he thinks Bitcoin's just a conveyor belt as well. If it was, it would be satisfactory to have designed it using a record keeping archetype which possibly explains why you don't see any problem with cryptonopte's approach.

If I understand your view correctly, you think that bitcoins value lies mostly in its total transparent transaction history. Wouldn't you say, that the "immutability" of the transaction history is more important to the value of the blockchain than the transparency of transaction details(sender/reciever)?

[MrJelliesBelly]

Even with everything said today its still not a fail, just a failed attempt. As long as the attempts keep coming it can win eventually.

[dinofelis]

..."privacy" was never a monetary property in its own right...

Can you distinguish one ounce of gold from another? One stack of $100 bills from another? (Not really.) The point is that you can distinguish one bitcoin from another, as lots of folks that have been banned from Coinbase have found out, and that is a problem. With Monero this is much less of or not a problem at all.

that's fungibility.
Anonymity isn't the only way to achieve fungibility, but yeah, i agree with you.

fungibility is important to any type of currency and a big problem in bitcoin(probably one of the main reason against massive adoption).

With a block chain type of currency (aka a crypto currency), anonymity IS the only way to obtain fungibility.

In fact, both notions are about equivalent, even though they inspire different ideas.  Anonymity comes down to "only A and B know about the transaction from A to B".  Fungibility comes down to "when A pays B, B doesn't know where A got the money from".  This is in fact almost the same notion.

The difference seems to reside in this:
With anonymity, nobody knows about A paying B, except A and B themselves.  With fungibility, everybody may potentially know that A paid B, but shouldn't know where A's money came from.  But one sees that this doesn't work.  Because if everybody knows that A paid B, and everybody knows who paid A, then one DOES have knowledge where the money came from that A used to pay B, and fungibility is gone again.

So the only way to reach fungibility is anonymity.  Hence both notions are equivalent.

Now, a block chain is all about being able to verify publicly that there is a conservation (or an accepted form of creation) of currency by having a list of publicly known transactions where that conservation is known to be valid (or that creation is known to be according to the accepted rules).  The most obvious way is to see all transactions.  Then you can verify obviously that conservation holds, and that every coin can be traced back to an agreed-upon way of creation.  

As such, if in the block chain, it is possible for B to know where A got his money from, the currency of that chain is not fungible.  But that seems to pose a problem.  How can one have a "chain of transactions back to the moment of creation" (which is the verification mechanism of a block chain) and at the same time "not know where the money came from" (which is the concept of fungibility) ?  People like toknormal seem to think that this is fundamentally a contradiction.  They think that a block chain implies automatically lack of fungibility and lack of anonymity.  However, they miss that "tracing back a coin" is only ONE way to verify conservation of money in a transaction, and legit creation, which is the essential part of a monetary asset.  Are there others ?

Well, monero and zcash are two examples of how this can be achieved cryptographically with two different techniques: ring signatures versus zero knowledge proofs.  The cryptography used allows both to verify the validity of transactions or of creation (which was the reason why the block chain was invented), and at the same time, to hide the origins of the funds to some extend.

DASH and mixers do it in a different way, by using the "partial fungibility" of a multiple-input multiple-output transaction.

In all these anonymisation techniques, the block chain still proves conservation of money in transactions, and legit creation, but doesn't do this by showing the explicit transactions, but simply by providing proofs of the check sums in different ways.

They reconcile, in different ways, the apparent contradiction between the concept of a block chain on one hand, and the monetary necessity of fungibility which comes down to anonymity.

In a mixer like with DASH, if A paid B, but mixes with C who paid D, E who paid F and so on, we end up only knowing that A, B and C paid someone, and that D E and F got paid and that the balances check.  This is what is needed for the monetary asset.  However, privacy information is leaked, in that we know that D got paid by A, B or C, that E got paid by A, B or C, and that F got paid by A, B or C, and that A, B and C did spend their money.

With monero, something similar happens.  If A paid B, we know that A, D, E or F paid B.  It could also be that A actually paid Q, or that D paid Z.  However, we know cryptographically that if ever it was A that paid B, that A won't be able to spend that money again ; that if ever it was D, he won't be able to spend it again, etc.... but if it wasn't A, A can still spend it, so maybe A didn't spend his coins after all.    In other words, we know that the balances check.  But we don't know which balances, and we don't know who did spend his coins and who didn't.

With ZCASH, we only know that, if B can pay you with a note, that he got that note from someone else, who can't spend it any more, but who got it himself from someone else etc.... until the conversion of a legit "open" coin into a note.  (unless someone kept the golden key and can produce notes at will...)

[toknormal]

@ dinofelis Citing a lot of anecdotal arguments to try to establish a principle is basically a self-fullfilling exercise. You're implicitly using a record-keeping archetype in your appraisals of what is a priority and what isn't, which will clearly always lead to the same conclusion. You need to first make an appraisal of the monetary archetype itself.

Think of it as a chain of trust. All forms of money - whether commodity, paper or credit, lie somewhere along a chain of trust where one "tier" is backed by another until you get down to some tangible form of value that is not a reference to something else.

Even fiat money is ultimately backed by future economic activity = think diggers, schools, roads and farms. Then the chain starts - bonds are issues backed by that activity, currency is printed backed by the bonds, credit is issued backed by the currency etc. Chain of trust. If you're choosing a monetary archetype for a new electronic token, the very first characteristic which informs the priorities given to the properties of that new money is where you're placing it in the chain of trust.

With that in mind, we can note that all the tiers in the "backed" columns basically share the same basic priorities. However the base tier exhibits exactly the opposite priorities. So when choosing an archetype for the new money, we cannot blur or combine the two into 1 because their monetary properties are in conflict in terms of priority:

Anonymity comes down to "only A and B know about the transaction from A to B"

In fact, thats a stretch of the concept of anonymity that has been pushed by promoters of opaque blockchains.

"Knowing" about a transaction doesn't change the intrinsic properties of a monetary medium. "Anonymous" = "A-nony-mous" means something is un-named. A lump of coal is anonymous by that definition. If it gets passed around 100 people and I'm the last one to hold it, then pass it to you. You know that I had it last because you have knowledge of the transaction. But it doesn't change the nature of the lump of coal as anonymous.

It's different from, say, money in a bank which cannot exist independently of the person who backs the credit it represents. That is not anonymous money. Again, it's a question of relevancy and priority. You can see me get out of my car, so that makes my ownership of the car "less private" than it would have been. So what ? You saw me pass you the lump of coal and may even have knowledge of a previous owner. So what ?

It isn't a reason to hide the car or disguise the coal. Recourse to mitigating transparency is not an option if we want to maximise value - the archetypal analysis tells us that.

The answer therefore is to decouple the problems of fungibility and transparency so they can be independently optimised - not at the expense of each other.

[dinofelis]

Think of it as a chain of trust. All forms of money - whether commodity, paper or credit, lie somewhere along a chain of trust where one "tier" is backed by another until you get down to some tangible form of value that is not a reference to something else.

No, that is simply not true.  All forms of money are a recursive belief system.  They are the belief that a certain asset will be accepted by others against something valuable, because they believe the same thing.  That's all there is to a monetary asset.  There is no "backing" of it by anything, it is just pure belief.  I am willing to provide value in return for the monetary asset X, because I believe that I will OBTAIN value again when spending it,  simply because the next guy will hold the same belief as I do.

However, in order for that belief to be sustainable, the belief must be held too that one cannot create AT WILL the monetary asset out of thin air.  I'm not going to deliver value for X, if you can make X out of thin air AT WILL.  

On the other hand, X has to come from somewhere.  So it has/had to be created, found, dug up, .... whatever.  In a monetary system, one ACCEPTS a way of creation of "legit" currency.  Because it is the state, because it can be dug up from the ground, because one has to spend effort on it, because there's a fair competition in doing so.... WHATEVER reason that is considered fair/legit/acceptable, and this must be the ONLY way of making X.  We can accept that the state prints it (because we believe that the state is there for the common good) ; we can accept it that the king prints it (because we are humble servants of his Majesty) ; we can accept that one digs it up (because we could also dig it up) ; we can accept that it is mined (because we can also mine it) ...

But there must be a LEGIT way to CREATE the currency X, and no other means.  One way to create it, but surely not the only one, would be the John Law kind of issuing of currency, namely creation of certificates, the way you illustrate it.  But as I said, that's just ONE way of creating a currency: as "certificates of ownership of something valuable".  It doesn't have to be that way, and in fact, most of the time, it isn't.

The only other thing we must be sure of, is that transactions conserve the total amount of currency ; or, stated differently, that there is no double spending.

Once that's in place, the belief system is potentially sustainable, and that's all there is to it.    We then know that the only currency we can receive is from a legit origin, transmitted through transactions that conserved the total quantity of currency, and that we will be able to spend exactly that amount, once.

The idea that currency has to be "backed" by something of value is erroneous.  It is just a recursive belief system, nothing more.  A belief system that there is legit creation of tokens and that these tokens are transmitted in conservative transactions.

Gold is also a belief system. Gold has some intrinsic usage value, but that is only a tiny fraction of its market price.  It has some usage in jewels and technology, but that's peanuts.  Gold has value, because people think that other people value it.  That's not "backed" by anything either.  The day that people decide that gold has only technological value, its price will plummet to the price of, say, lithium or cobalt.

That said, the "backing" of a currency can be part of the belief system: if you BELIEVE that you are entitled to something of actual value against the currency no matter what, this is a way to give value to a currency through the value of what backs it.  But it is not a necessity.  As I pointed out, gold is not backed by anything and has monetary value too.

The idea that the modern fiat system is backed by anything is also ridiculous.  It isn't.  It used to be backed by a lie, namely "gold" or "silver", but when it became too obvious that that wasn't the case, people gave up, and now, central bank money is simply not backed by ANYTHING.  "future economy" or whatever is a joke invented to instil confidence and to sustain the belief system.  If there's hyperinflation, you SEE that it wasn't backed by anything.

Money is just belief.  The belief that someone else also believes that it has value.  And it works.