this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
-13 points (45.6% liked)
Privacy
40212 readers
784 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, the fact that out payment system is so centralised is definitely a bad thing. But GNU Taler, from what I understand, is just trying to work within that system. It didn't create the system, and it doesn't have the power to replace it.
But it does support the system by being a part of it
Please show me the crypto that just has the stability needed to be used as day-to-day currency. Not even accounting for ease of use, wide adoption etc., which none of them have, they're all volatile shit shows only suitable for gambling, more resembling stocks than currency.
I frankly wouldn't recommend Bitcoin either for stability or privacy, IMO it's fallen by the wayside in terms of the technological development of cryptocurrency. Chains like Monero or Ethereum have privacy-enforcing cryptography built right into them.
Well, yes, exactly. That's the problem. There have been innumerable innovations and improvements in the field over those 15 years, but Bitcoin ossified early and so it's got none of them.
You've got a very inaccurate and skewed view of this. Most significantly, it's not "proof of ownership," it's "proof of stake." Proof of ownership and proof of stake are distinct technologies that operate in different manners. Ethereum is not proof of ownership.
You're clearly not very familiar with how Ethereum's proof of stake system operates because "51% attack" is not meaningful. There's nothing magical about the 51% threshold in Ethereum's system of staking. There is a magical threshold at 66%, if you've got more than that you can prevent "finality" from happening which will in turn cause some disruption to the chain. But most significantly, it doesn't prevent blocks from continuing to be processed and doesn't allow stakers to forge blocks. It's a highly theoretical attack since no stakers or staking pools are anywhere remotely close to that sort of dominance, and even if they did do that there'd still be mechanisms by which they could be slashed.
Lightning has been an entirely predictable disappointment. The problem is that Bitcoin was not designed to support something like Lightning, and that very feature you touted above - Bitcoin's complete ossification of protocol upgrades 15 years ago - means it can't be made to support it. Lightning's total capacity is $300 million. Ironically there's thirty times more Bitcoin being transacted on the Ethereum network in the form of WBTC than there is Bitcoin being transacted in Lightning.
If you're interested in layer-2 solutions then Ethereum's recent updates have been all about providing better support for that kind of thing, using many cryptographic advances that came along in those 15 years. Some of them incorporate Monero-like privacy systems, even, such as Arbitrum.
No, there is a distinction here, and it's a very important one.
If you're using proof of ownership then there's no way of penalizing the owners who are validating the chain if they misbehave. That's somewhat more like what Bitcoin uses, actually - proof of ownership of mining rigs, in a sense. If a Bitcoin miner 51% attacks the chain then after the attack is done they still have their mining rigs and can continue to attempt to attack it if they want.
With proof of stake, the resource in question - the tokens, in Ethereum's case - are put up as a stake. Ie, they are placed under the control of the blockchain's validation system, so if the validator tries pulling some kind of funny business their stake can be slashed. Someone who attacks Ethereum has to burn their stake in the process, which would cost them tens of billions of dollars and prevent them from attempting future attacks.
You can own millions of Ether and that's meaningless as far as validation goes. It's only once you put them up as a stake do you get "skin in the game."
You were earlier touting Bitcoin's lack of protocol upgrades as a key feature. Now it's performing upgrades?
The problem with Bitcoin's upgrades is that they've made "no hard forks" into a religious tenant, so whenever they try to do anything new they have to squish it in as a soft fork somehow built on top of the existing foundations. The existing foundations aren't well suited to this kind of thing, though, since they were designed 15 years ago. So it makes for some very labored and inefficient design, like in the case with Lightning.
Layer 2s on something like Ethereum, which was designed from the ground up to support them and which continues to add new features making them more efficient and feature-rich, are far easier and cheaper to work with.
It's important to call out that nodes in general are not important for validating the chain, it doesn't matter who's controlling them. You can run your own node and there's nothing those other non-validating nodes can do to tamper with your view of the network, the worst they could do is stop sending you updates (which would be obvious and you could then go hunting for replacement feeds).
Most "western" countries, like the US or western European countries, have very stabile currencies. You cherry picked three countries known for ridiculous instability in their currencies, that doesn't show much TBH. For my day-to-day living, I'll definitely pick the currency I know with very high certainty I can pay rent with in a year.
They have to be stabile enough to enable me to receive them from my employer as payment, and not risking my ability to pay rent because the value suddenly reduced significantly.
There's an entire category of cryptocurrency designed specifically for the use case you're asking for, the stablecoins. They are pegged to reference values using a variety of techniques. US Dollars are a common denomination, since it's already frequently seen as a global reserve currency, but if you really want there are stablecoins pegged to other things as well.
If you want a more specific example, I typically use DAI as a go-to example since it doesn't depend on third party trust like some of the more commonly-used ones (such as Tether).
Yes, and stable coins are all long known to be scams that are backed by nothing but empty promises.
Some, maybe. And some fiat currencies are more stable than others too. There are stabletokens that are run using smart contracts where you can see the backing assets on-chain, those ones couldn't scam you if they tried.
You are completely delusional if you think the these smart contracts are backed by anything but other smoke and mirror coins. Those are literally automated scams; it's all a bezzle.
All you're saying here is "nuh-uh! I don't believe you!" Which isn't particularly useful.
I could dig up the addresses of MakerDAO or Liquity vaults, you could examine them directly using Etherscan and see which tokens back them. But I somehow get the impression that that would be a waste of my time. Is there literally anything that could convince you, before I go running around doing any further work trying?
You are either so deep in the bezzle that there is no point in discussing this further or are actively involved in scamming others yourself. If it is the former, I feel sorry for you.
But then someone might misuse the privacy it would provide, potentially doing something that some people would consider wrong!