You must log in or # to comment.
Yeah but without anonymous payments (xmr) there’s no good way to easily pay for diy estrogen or hosting for piracy services, or to anonymously pay my mullvad account.
Granted if society wherent setup as a giant fucking fascist capitalistic panopticon we wouldn’t really need any of that.
Any who, I mostly agree with the sentiment though. “Career” investors and venture capitalists belong against a fucking wall IMO.
How do you anonymously pay for things when the ledger is public?
xmr is a cryptocurrency which aims to make reading transactions from the chain impossible. Iirc the main mechanism of this is that they bundle a lot of transactions together and send out coins from that pool only once it is large enough, without preserving each specific coin. This repeats for a few proxies. You could trace a coin from origin to endpoint, but this would be pretty much useless as you cannot know whether the endpoint was the intended one or not.
Interesting! So at best you could narrow down the purchaser to one of many possible sources.
My first thought is that a large enough organization trying to demask you could do so by looking at repeat subscription purchases over time coming from the same wallet. You know, like a monthly fee for a VPN. The first month you’re one of a thousand people. The second month. Maybe you’re one of 500. Eventually they get you.
But I know nothing about XMR, they probably solved for this. I just can’t be bothered to read :-D
I believe the way they deal with this is by having the recipient create a one-time address for every sender, so it is not possible to recognize patterns between senders and recipients. Another thing is that every wallet has two associated keys. There is a “spend key”, which is a write-only key that can spend money from the wallet, and a “view key”, which can be used to view the contents of the wallet. You can publish the view key if you want that to be public information, but you don’t have to.
How does the mechanism know who to send the coins to? How can I be sure the coins I put in go to where I intended them to go? And can the sender prove to the receiver it was their transaction?
As I understand it, this happens cryptographically. Send keys can be added to form a larger key, which gets used to sign the pool of transactions. Because the signature used your key as well, the recipient can verify that they have received your coins(from a pool you signed). The important part is that it is impossible to tell who signed what part of the pool, just that one of the people in the pool did. Because all money is pooled together and sent at the same time, it is not possible to read from the amounts sent which transaction belongs to who.
I think I get it (in theory). As much as people shit on crypto, it really is a cool implementation of math and economics.
XMR uses some really cool cryptography actually. Zero-knowledge proofs and shit.
Not all crypto is the same. ZCASH uses an encrypted ledger. Monero combines transactions and redistributes to obfuscate.
With monero the ledger is encrypted and has a bunch of obfuscated/fake data in it
Okay, politely, fuck off. Its 2026 and I absolutely refuse to believe anyone educated on crypto enough to know what a blockchain is and how it works, even if just a basic understanding, doesn’t know about encrypted blockchains or XMR.
You get to post this comment like once in your life, and after that we both know its in bad faith. I really doubt its the first time.
There’s actually a surprising new discovery coming out of East Asia this year. After years of research, they’ve discovered that you can educate someone online without being a total dick.
I too thought it was impossible. But I can’t argue with science.
Normally I’d agree but this gets posted anytime anyone says something about anonymous crypto payments like some magic gatchya, and Its getting really hard to believe its not in bad faith at this point.
Insert 10000 xkcd. If you see it so often, just have a text ready to copy+paste anytime anyone says something about it
Zcash has opt in anonymization. So it really doesn’t work because any offramp can just not accept any zcash that has been obfuscated. With monero, its all obfuscated by default.
If a diy hrt seller doesn’t accept obfuscated cash they are 100% a fed, but point taken
Admittedly I’m not a hardcore crytography nerd, but I know they’ve been improving things for years, and that message on that mailing list looked like it was 10 years old.
Not saying your wrong, but Id take it with a grain of salt. Anytime I see a newer encrypted block chain I see it and think whatever improvements have been done here, will eventually bleed into monero because of that. And that unlike the other encrypted blockchain, people will still actively be using xmr for real transactions.
You might be right, I have not followed xmr closely. You might also notice that this vulnerability is unlikely to deanonimise you, but the point was more that it is a mistake they shouldn’t have made. Their last audit looks fine, though it was made by a blockchain auditing company which I don’t know. I don’t think there is much harm in using xmr for this, groups who would be capable of exploiting vulnerabilities in this kind of project are unlikely to do so, unless an issue of national security becomes associated somehow
I’m not sure I’d trust whatever that link is as a source that XMR isn’t secure… I mean, what even is that link?
I don’t know what a mullvad is, but now I want one. I HAVE CASH
Good news! Put that cash in an envelope and post it to them and they’ll give you VPN time: https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
It’s a privacy-first VPN.
also no delivery drugs. people would have to go out to get their drugs
Dude was just bored and wanted to implement his idea from his University paper. He was long gone before Bitcoin became a trading commodity instead of a novel currency.
Of which Bitcoin did it to itself which is why we got hard forks like Bitcoin cash that barely reached $2k when bitcoin was at $70k.
Not to mention that plenty of superior cryptos came out to replace bitcoin like xrp, monero, etc.
These posts are often very dumb and never understand that most of these tech innovations are novel ideas from University research that happend to become the latest trend.
Even LLMs and AI have excellent use cases, yet you’ll see idiots like this crap on it 24/7 like its the antichrist.
It’s like blaming Einstein for the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
I have always been fascinated honestly by how reductive public discourse often becomes the larger its activity is. And it honestly is rather simple to explain: If an opinion becomes popular, it has no link with its veracity or validity, all it has to do with is how it appeals to common sense and how easy it is to swallow because for it to be popular, it needs to be approachable by all types of humans no matter their social, economical and personal backgrounds.
It is just like how academic or legal documents often seem classist by the language they use to approach real and proven phenomenons, but the reason their vocabulary is not accessible is because it needs to be nuanced to allow proper human abstraction the reality around us. Whereas the popular vocabulary is common since it’s very nature is to allow exchange with all people.
Ha, Einstein yeah right.
Thanks, Obama
the Einstein files
Adam Back, who potentially might be Satoshi himself, is the CEO of the company that advised against increasing block sizes. It was more profitable for him if the main chain is inefficient.
Here’s a decent video on this conspiracy theory
So there’s some malice involved here, but not sure if the malicious person was Satoshi himself or if Satoshi and Adam are different people.
That’s still a YouTube conspiracy theory after all these years because it was always bullshit from scammers pumping “Bitcoin Cash”. Everyone downloading everyone else’s coffee purchases to store forever is wildly inefficient scaling.
The big miners were pushing for increasing the block size because it favors more centralized datacenters and discourages end users from running fully p2p nodes.
All other theories about who Satoshi was including that one seem nutty, once you read about the life of the late Len Sassaman: https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10
And banks could continue having a monopoly on controlling money and transactions.
I really don’t care about the legal form the oligarchs give themselves, but at least the state can impose statutory requirements on banks, even if they’ve always been too lax.
Impose what? Have you hear about fractional reserves?
2008 financial crisis that resulted in zero accountability and tax payer bailouts for the banks?
History is plagued with examples on how banking fucked up the plebs.
Not to mention half of the world is outside the banking system.
At least Bitcoin is money with clear rules engraved in code, no bailouts and accesible for everyone.
Spot on! And diluting your income and savings by money printing and inflation.
GNU Taler is a far better decentralized payment system (although it’s still in beta)
payer is anonymous, but reciever is known, so it’s unsuitable for ransomware; this design is so that it is taxable and thus more suitable for everyday usage by the masses
Does anyone know I’d proof of stake ended up being better than proof of work? I dont follow crypto but kept hearing that was supposed to improve things
Crypto is a big deal because it enables grifting and crime, but with how shit payment processors are and their tendency to use their position for censorship, crypto actually would be a potential way of solving that problem IF it werent ludicrously volatile and wasteful. But I have no idea if those problems could really ever be solved, or any progress has been made on those fronts
Proof of Stake and Proof of Work are two different ways of electing who should append the blockchain with new transactions.
Proof of Work: the one who can waste most energy fastest is most likely to be elected.
Proof of Stake: the one with most money is most likely to be elected.
It’s a bit oversimplified, but that’s the general idea.
Proof of Stake: the one with most money is most likely to be elected.
This is misleading. Winning the validation election doesn’t give you more power.
The one who is most dishonest gets their stake burned.
Yes, Ethereum has been using PoS successfully for over three years and they’re not the only major blockchain to do so. PoS works great these days, still using PoW in 2026 is a deliberate choice.
IMO xmr kinda saved proof of work by optimising their algo for consumer grade CPUs.
CPU mining is much less econimcal than GPU because you can’t fit as many CPUs on a single system. Plus server grade CPUs with lots of smol cores instead of a few big ones hurts it too.
Makes it hard for anyone other than nerds with am extra PC to make money mining, and most of those guys won’t be purposely picking a geographic location with the cheapest/most environmentally harmful electricity source. (More nerds live off of nuclear/solar than datacenters full of miners do)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#Transition_to_proof-of-stake
I know Etherum made the switch, but I don’t really know about the rest of the ecosystem.
Also since we’re throwing questions around for those who don’t follow the developments anymore:
- Did larger blocks ever become popular, since the BTC, BCH split?
- Did the lightning payment network ever become popular?
Did larger blocks ever become popular, since the BTC, BCH split?
At least on the Ethereum ecosystem, it has been increasing slowly until last year. See “Ethereum Mainnet: Historical TPS Capacity” [TPS = transactions per second] graph here: https://www.growthepie.com/quick-bites/ethereum-scaling
Since launch, Ethereum Mainnet has methodically improved efficiency and capacity without compromising decentralization or security. It went through several key upgrades, each contributing to incremental improvements in efficiency and capacity. You can read more about these on our ecosystem page. From 2015 to today, Ethereum scaled from ~0.71 TPS to 24.9 TPS, a 35.0x increase.
After years of steady gains, the pace is set to accelerate. The goal is to scale by ~3x per year with upcoming improvements. This takes today’s 24.9 TPS into the thousands before decade’s end.
There are many other upgrades yet to come. You can also find more details about them here: https://forkcast.org/
But the scaling approach also changed. We are no longer just looking for vertical scaling, like larger blocks, but also via horizontal scaling, which is usually called Ethereum Layer 2, which aims at millions of TPS. That first link also has more details in case you want to dive deeper.
Did the lightning payment network ever become popular?
As far as I am aware, it’s barely used
Perhaps Americans don’t see the point of crypto since USD is the world reserve currency for now, but cryptocurrency has been a great way to have economic non-cooperation with authoritarian regimes.
When the government can inflate the currency at whim to pay out their billionaire friends while leaving the common man to suffer, crypto is a nice escape hatch since it has a fixed inflation rate. You don’t have to worry about government supression of funds for journalists either.
Bitcoin’s proof-of-work blockchain is to usable crypto-currency what tulips futures are to fiat currency.
And while the literal supply of bitcoin is predictable, it’s also as a store of value extremely deflationary by intent. Which makes it far closer to a bond or stock than it does a usable “currency”.
I agree. Bitcoin has become more of a store of wealth than an actual currency. Similar to gold. If you live in an authoritarian and corrupt regime and need to use money, I’d suggest Monero (XMR).
Yeah, but now you can buy drugs online way easier.
I think the technology itself has great potential, though capitalism using it for the worst reasons imaginable and making it as inefficient as physically possible will never show us the true potential of this technology.
Under different social structures, it could possibly be a pretty great foundation for new kinds of monetary systems
The most pathetic system? You can criticize crypto without resorting to petty insults, which just makes your position appear weaker.
Wah~ pls no bully
I’m not sure how much of this is accurate, but I have to agree it’s been a bane to humankind. Maybe, just maybe, we should learn to stop, pull our heads out of our asses and think very carefully about potential consequences before we do things.
Bitcoin’s network draws a negligible amount of energy considering the amount of financial transactions it allows.
Do you think all the extremely complex (and corrupt) existing financial system is more energy efficient?
Also miners gravitate toward regions with cheap, renewable electricity, and market pressures continuously push the ecosystem toward greener power mixes, so the energy profile is improving over time.
Are you really gonna smear Bitcoin with financial missbehaviour? Do you know what’s the currency most used for ilegal purposes? No? It’s the dolar.
Trillions of dollars fuel narcotrafic, human trafficking and other crimes against humanity.
This post also fails to consider that Bitcoin serves a vital purpose as a savings mechanism, in the face of government that are not fiscally responsible (inflation).
Housing prices, stock market manipulation, over investments and more and more shenanigans are only incentiviced by the fact that people cannot save in any currency, when the best of it lost 90% of its value in the last 70 years.
BTW, don’t get me started on the big dumpster fire of energy and capital that is the AI bubble…
If you are going to hate something you might as well take 10 minutes to understand what you hate, otherwise you are a zombie.
Do you think all the extremely complex (and corrupt) existing financial system is more energy efficient?
it is.
If we’re comparing against the energy cost of securing Bitcoin, then wouldn’t we need to evaluate the energy cost of securing the legacy financial system - its military?
This guy’s feed is sad. It’s fine to oppose bitcoin, but if you’re an anti-capitalist IMO there are many more valid targets to spend literal years tweeting against daily. Dude cares a lot about the externalities of propping up a currency yet he hasn’t said a peep in all this time about the US military.
Lol… please, keep posting this stuff. I’m vacuuming up all the cheap satoshis that are being dropped by speculators.
Bitcoin is utter shit. Only idiots, morons and the sexually depraved invest in it. If you have it, sell it immediately.
Only idiots, morons and the sexually depraved invest in it.
Damn, I’m only two of those things!
Drop that Bitcoin now impostor
rubs nipples
Now compare that to how much damage billionaires and banks are doing to this planet and all the people? At least btc blockchain is not controlled by the 1% of greedy fucks.
This is literally the propaganda that banks and billionaires want you to keep parroting.
Funny, they seem to be the ones currently delegitimizing crypto through grifting.
Who? Banks and billionaires? Isn’t that what I said?
You’re completely wrong! This tweet by this very specific person is just a front to distract us from the Epstein files! /s
It is possible two hold two thoughts in ones head and even think both are bad, at the same time!
What a dumb take. You don’t have to go anti-technology in order to be anti-capitalist. The technology itself is not the problem, it’s the capitalist capture that’s the problem. You don’t have to throw the baby with bathwater.
Problem is I don’t see a baby whatsoever…
People have looked at it from all sorts of directions and tried to propose use cases but none have come up with any particular use for this concept that isn’t just as well or better served by a different approach.
Without the crypto-bros, sure, no one would be especially ‘anti-blockchain’ and it wouldn’t have the negative impacts it does today, it just would be a forgotten concept that didn’t go anywhere.
Trust this comment. This guy knows what he’s talking about.
none have come up with any particular use for this concept that isn’t just as well or better served by a different approach
This is literally the fault of the banks and billionaires controlling them. This is exactly what they want you to believe.
They’d go bankrupt if people started keeping their money on a blockchain and they will do anything possible to prevent that and push the propaganda in the oop post.
While it’s partially true, banks and billionaires are much more toxic to this planet and people.
Money and capitalism are toxic to the planet. You cannot have an economic system based on infinite growth when you live on a planet with finite resources and ecological limits. Blockchain enabling* a “better” way to spend money doesn’t change the fact that money is still a disease.
In general, I get it, but the weird thing about arbitrary number as currency is that you can have ‘infinite growth’ because the numbers are made up and if the number decreases in value by about 2%, then stable value would look like abotu 2% growth.
So you can’t have infinite growth in real terms, but we can play this currency game to pretend stable value is growth. Of course, merely keeping pace with inflation is not considered good enough, so they do tend to want to push ‘infinite real growth’ which is impossible, but if they settle for ‘kept pace with inflation but still say growth’, that can work because of this shared hallucination that is money…
So what are the good uses for this tech then? That was the main point you disagreed with but didn’t provide ant examples
Read other comments, there are plenty. I’m lazy to parrot what was already said by others.
The one thing people are doing is piling a whole bunch of money ‘on a blockchain’. That use case is very much alive and all the problems it has on that front are precisely due to the nature of a blockchain in an economic context. Wildly varying valuation day to day, massive resource usage for relatively small volume of transactions, low throughput of transactions, a ledger that lets everyone know your financial activities.
This is going to be an unpopular take here, but its true
Not all technology improves human life. There are torture devices, etc. The problem isn’t just that corporations see an uncomfortable toilet or addictive app and see dollar signs.
Drugs have been a major problem for society since it began and there’s still no real solution for them. Some things just inherently cause problems and need some degree of restriction.
