- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
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The most inefficient system ever invented by humankind so far
If only they knew that LLMs would soon take over as the new energy hog in the spotlight
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.
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.
Ha, Einstein yeah right.
Thanks, Obama
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 yet, looking at this phenomenal waste of resources, tech bros took a good hard look at it and said ‘Hold my beer’ - and made LLMs.
Llms are made by genuinely smart mathematicians and computer scientists. Techbros are just the ones hyping them .
You know, that’s a good point. LLMs themselves aren’t horrible abominations - it’s capitalism that, as usual, ruined a good thing.
Edit whops replied to th3 wrong place
//
Also used for scams. Imo if the #1 use case for a tech is scamming people that’s a good reason to ban the tech
Oh ban cryptocurrencies, just like we banned drugs?
Yeah, because that worked out great didn’t it?
Jesus if I could just have a button to eliminate everyone with ideas like that, you wouldn’t get my hand off it.
Just a little over a century ago we could get laudanum or whatever over the counter, whenever we wanted. And things were so much better.
Not ONE drug cartel, thank God we went to war, right?
The drug war actually made meth and fentanyl use inevitable, to replace heroin, cocaine, etc. If only we had stuck to the classics.
oh well. Time for my wellbutrin and duozepine and quetiapine and prazosin.
Those are the drugs I have to take daily to stop screaming, because screaming is bad now or some shit
sigh
Once again:
Blockchain is not synonymous with cryptomining
Blockchain does not require proof of work
Cryptocurrency and NFT grifting does not devalue blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger
I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding
This is a good comment that makes all good points. But I just wanna say let’s stop saying “blockchain” singular and with no preceding article like we’re tech CEOs and it’s some immutable god. They’re blockchains, plural, like any other data structure there can be more than one and there are. eg The blockchain of ethereum is distinct from the blockchain for bitcoin but they are both blockchains.
Valid point! But then how do you refer to the data structure/architecture/model concept? Sometimes we want a concise term (like bittorrent or ActivityPub) for the abstraction
I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding
Why do you think LLMs are so popular?
Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity? If they don’t have critical mass then your distinction is meaningless. It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger. Databases and governments solve the problem much better.
Cryptocurrency development makes a whole bunch of arbitrary value-guided decisions during creation, all of these decisions have tradeoffs such that nobody has figured out a way to feature them all at the same time, or would they want to.
For example, bitcoin is fully auditable. Anyone with a copy of the bitcoin blockchain can review every single transaction in bitcoin’s history, and trace the flow of every last satoshi from it’s mining to today. This is because the developers of bitcoin place a high value on verifiable auditability and security. Conversely monero was developed for the purpose of being a completely untraceable, unauditable currency that still has a knowable supply. And ethereum was created in a manner that intentionally supported scripting, so that it could be used as a platform for novel applications and contracts. None of these primary features could be ported to either of the other two without breaking them completely, because of the deep programmatic implications of the requirements.
It’s not really a question of better or worse, but of use case. The fact of the matter is that the reason these three examples are the leading currencies for their use case is literally because nobody has yet been able to do a better job. And for bitcoin at least, at this point it’s security rests just as much in it’s wide adoption and interest as it’s design intent, so it’s unlikely that anyone ever will.
Questioning the technical virtues of an alternative product based on lack of critical mass adoption is pretty funny, when you consider we’re on the fediverse. I know that doesn’t defray your argument, but just an amusing observation.
I see why you might draw the comparison, but I actually don’t think the comparison is valid at all. Forums/communities can still be useful and fun with only a few people. Discord is also massively popular with a small community model, for a more successful example to compare with the fediverse. However a currency that nobody uses or accepts is entirely useless until mass adoption happens. That’s why they typically get mandated by force by governments.
You don’t need mass adoption to be useful, the more adopted a currency is the more useful it becomes but it’s not binary. Seychelles has a population of 130k, does that mean that the seychellois rupee is useless? Of course not, 130k people use it everyday.
~100 milion people use or at least own bitcoin, meaning they would probably be willing to pay or accept payment in it, that’s 1.3% of the world’s population, 1 in 80 people, that puts bitcoin between the Japanese yen and the British pound. ~260 milion people use crypto currencies in one way or another, over 3% of world’s population, 1 in 30 people, that’s just under the euro or the us dolar. And if you use 1 crypto you basically know how to use them all, just like €,$,£. If that’s not mass adoption I don’t know what is.
Most merchants who accept ₿ also accept other cryptos like ethereum, stable coins, litecoin, monero, tron, bitcoin cash… There are payment gateways that make it incredibly easy and automatically convert to your currency of choice, so there is no reason not to accept even the shittiest of shitcoins if it will be swapped before it even gets to you.
Or if you need it for some other particular application, like drugs on the dark web.
Great points!
Two points:
Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity?
https://www.forbes.com/digital-assets/categories/proof-of-stake-pos/
Etherium and virtually the whole rest of the crypto scene that is “not bitcoin” has pretty soundly rejected the wasteful Bitcoin design. There was even a fork of Bitcoin that would have used the much more efficient proof-of-stake, but since that would be bad for everyone with a proof-of-work “mining” rig it didn’t take over.
It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger
An “untrusted distributed ledger” is literally the backbone of modern software development. While you could plausibly split hairs and assert that git requires “trust”, I don’t think you’d wind up in a spot that both supports your assertion and a cognizable difference for anyone but mathematicians and security nerds. (And even if you did, the exact same sort of non-scam usages of blockchains are ones that operate like git, with the ledger used for something else.)
would you recommend any crypto in particular?
Monero
thanks! looking into it and syncing up. care to share why you’re positive about it?
The most distinguishing feature is that it’s private by default, the sender, receiver and the amounts are cryptographically hidden from uninvolved parties. Other than that
- Tiny fees - fees are only used to prevent spam, not to replace block rewards.
- Tail emissions - every block rewards the miner with 0.6 XMR ensuring chain security, keeping the fees low and the inflation predictable and small - forever approaching 0 but never reaching it.
- Variable block sizes - the block size grows and shrinks with the demand, allowing for more transactions when demand is high but still limiting spam.
- RandomX mining algorithm - ASIC resistant mining algorithm best mined with the CPU ensures fair access to mining and prevents big minig firms from taking over the mining process.
- Community and culture - the focus of most other cryptos is investing and speculation while monero’s focus is on being the best private, uncensored, p2p money. Because of this while other cryptos encourage their users to HODL their coins, monero users are encouraged to save and also spend their coins, treat them like digital cash rather than something who’s only purpose is to go up in price. In my opinion this culture leads to several things:
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Business acceptance - many privacy centric services like VPN, VPS, e-sim, phone top up, gift card providers etc. accept monero. Usually any service that does, sees it at the top of the chart as the most used crypto, often more than all the other coins combined. Many open source projects accept it for donations as well, with similar findings.
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Community built infrastructure - the monero community focuses on building the infrastructure around the idea of monero being digital cash. Things like xmrbazaar.com, a monero based e-bay/craigslist like market where you can buy/sell things for monero, kuno a monero based gofundme alternative for fundraisers, retoswap.com an instance of haveno, a decentralized, p2p monero exchange, monerica.com a repository of monero accepting business and other monero related things are designed with the idea of treating monero as money.
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Price stability - because of the fact that monero is actually used for payments it’s price is established through adoption rather than speculation which makes it fairly stable in comparison to the rest of the crypto market, thanks to this you can safely spend and receive monero without worrying that a month from now it will loose 50% of it’s value. Of course, there are peaks and valleys often caused by the macro market movements like the recent few day pump to $800 and crash back to $400 but that’s an exception rather than the rule, for the most part (excluding stable coins) it’s one of the most stable cryptos out there with a slight long-term uptrend.
5 Years
All time
Blockchain is not synonymous with crypto. Why are you bringing up crypto specifically? Crypto is garbage. But Blockchain is not crypto
People bring up crypto because it is the only use of blockchain that isn’t worse than already established methods. And crypto is only “better” because it’s unregulated and allowed a bunch of scams to be pulled.
Uses of blockchain other than cryptocurrency that just came to my mind, some are already functioning or being introduced:
- Decentralized, trustless, uncensorable domains that don’t require kyc to purchase.
- Decentralized, trustless, uncensorable replacement for certificate authorities that can’t be hacked as easily as CAs can.
- Decentralized, trustless, uncensorable server for small data like pgp signing keys, torrent magnet links, file hashes, static websites, code etc.
- Decentralized, uncensorable, distributed way to store archival information or historical records like weather data, government document records, wikipedia edit history, book versions. Anything that shouldn’t change or is in danger of getting censored.
- Automated financial markets open to the public through tokenization like stocks, bonds, commodities all settled on chain without 3rd parties.
- Trustless on-chain contracts/smart contracts that will execute automatically or can be proven without a notary.
- Decentralized, uncensorable, trustless identity system
- Decentralized, uncensorable, trustless, provably fair voting system.
If [other applications of the blockchain, which has now existed for an extremely long time] don’t have critical mass then your distinction is meaningless.
Critical mass is not required for internal systems. Not all implementations of blockchain are intended for public use.
I’m really tired of this. Blockchain. Is not. Crypto.
Here’s the research I did for everyone four months ago: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963
I’m not convinced there’s any internal use for blockchain. Internal implies under a specific umbrella, some overarching organisation, who can then be the central trusted server that makes blockchain unnecesary.
That said, non-public but open uses, such as tracking dealings between companies in markets with little trust and no single governments (the shipping example in your referenced comment) is indeed the thin slither of a plausible use-case.
Another limitation is that blockchain loses its benefits if anyone tries to design over the complexity of using it directly (using a ui that under the hood uses blockchain is no different to using a ui that talks to a central database, you’re trusting the central ui provider, you need to (at least be able to) build your own interface to realise the benefits of blockchain.
That means blockchain basically will never benefit individuals, it can’t. Sure, you could have multiple compatible uis shared around, but that’s no different security-wise to multiple central banks with an interoperable transfer system.
The only place blockchain has real benefits is when multiple large corporations/governments are interacting and don’t trust eachother/anyone.
See the link in my other replies for some examples of internal uses that still benefit from immutable, distributed ledgers.
Large organizations still have loss and risk from individual bad actors. Operating a central authority that validates every single transaction in a ledger, and validates ledger history and consistency, can be prohibitively complicated. A well designed blockchain implementation can resolve most of these issues.
A great example is a pharma/healthcare company that wants to manage medicine batch and expiration tracking, as well as distribution/patient assignment. With a traditional infrastructure every participant needs to phone home to a central authority. In a blockchain setup, peers can report ledger events one hop up and propagate it through the chain.
That’s a very simple example but I hope it gets my point across
Identifying anomalous behavior from bad actors is already a solved problem with databases and governing bodies.
Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain… then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own “consensus”.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
and most use cases around things like “smart contracts” end up still requiring a trusted third party at some point
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/
Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain… then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own “consensus”.
No, the community controls the consensus through their nodes. A 51% attack only allows the attacker to perform:
- A double spend attack - sending a transaction, receiving the goods and then reorganizing the chain to undo the transaction.
- Censoring transactions.
In the event of a 51% attack the community can fork the chain - change the consensus and implement preventive measures like changing the mining algorithm, changing to PoW/PoS, banning all of the attackers coins, implementing a finality layer or a checkpoiting system etc.
It’s not 51% of the coins, it’s 51% of the computing power on the network. Both of which are virtually impossible in the case of Bitcoin, though not entirely impossible. I just wouldn’t consider a 51% attack even remotely a threat to the network compared to something like government crackdown
That’s PoW. With PoS, it is coin ownership.
Which is much more distributed than computing power.
Can’t you just split it up into however many wallets you want? If you’re rich that seems like basic security.
You are making my point. Blockchain is not crypto. Blockchain can be useful in private, internal use cases (like a transaction ledger for bank branches) where trust is largely implicit.
If you have trust, why do you need a blockchain?
Distributed / immutable databases are not solely a feature of blockchain either.
It’s a very interesting thing in a vacuum. Basically any application of it so far (with the possible exception of the original one, if it weren’t just a speculation investment machine at the moment) runs into the problem where it has to interact with reality at some point. And most of the problems Blockchains solve are already solved by a variety of other systems, for less time/currency/hardware investment.
Here, I provided a bunch of examples months ago of other ways blockchain is being used: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963
Because it’s an immutable ledger, not just a database. It maintains a history of every previous transaction/entry. Blockchains are used by banks and in the supply chain because it makes backtracing and identifying discrepancies trivial. For things like cryptocurrency, blockchains allow “don’t trust, verify” but for something where you already have trust, they allow “trust but verify”
Cryptographically immutable append only ledgers (aka merkel trees) have existed since at least 1979. A blockchain is different because it has distributed consensus. If your consensus algorithm is trust, then it’s not a fucking blockchain.
A blockchain is nothing more than a data structure. It’s essentially a linked list using the hash of the previous block. Distributed consensus is something blockchains are useful for, but it doesn’t define it
True… But Satoshi did invent Bitcoin, which is proof of work, and is everything in OP
Elon musk popularized the electric car.
It had dumb handles that killed people. It lied about having self-driving capabilities. It had terrible manufacturing tolerances.
The “technically true” nature of it reads like propaganda against electric cars as a whole, does it not? I’d argue that applies here too.
“Popularized” the electric car, maybe?
There were electric cars since there were cars
Popularized it is. I was careful to not put invent, but morning brain not work good.
Fair enough, I forgot that OP said “blockchain,” instead of “bitcoin.”
Your example is not even close to technically true.
Sure. Sure. Insert your own example of applying the sins of a particular implementation of a technology to a hierarchical supergroup. That was an example I came up with in a few minutes on the shitter, not a deep philosophical argument.
_ is bad, because (specific implementation) has these flaws!
That’s the issue being discussed here. It’s misleading without precision.
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most electric cars are teslas so like a statistical analysis would be mostly correct.
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propaganda against electric cars is generally just propaganda against cars in general, for example:
if full self driving becomes a thing you can expect traffic to become MUCH worse as like one minivan for a parent with 3 kids is replaced by four self driving cars that drive each kid around and one for the parent. This could lead to traffic jams at every subburb
Doesn’t have to be cars.
I’m just saying the original post is conflating criticisms against a particular implementation of blockchain with all blockchain.
“The wright brothers invented a useless machine they called the airplane. It only held one person and could fly for only a limited duration. It was also extremely dangerous.”
That’d be a silly sentence, would it not?
Well that’s very different than anything happening in the thread so yes its very silly.
The old newspapers are full of critiques of the ford model T and conflating them with all cars, most of those criticisms apply only to early cars. I think that’s what you’re getting at here.
But realistically in context the criticisms make sense. I would go as far as to say its more a problem that enthusiasts havent renamed bitcoin as a “cryptoasset” since its not useful as currency and apply “cryptocurrency” only to proof of stake designs.
Or as an analogy, it would be like calling a motorcycle a type of bicycle, which is more or less true, but its so goddamn different in use they had the sense to rename it so normal people would be able to tell them apart.
What are the differences that you see?
I think its mostly for most people “crypto” = “cryptocurrency” = “bitcoin” even though there’s some categorical umbrellas there and I don’t think there’s a way to fix it without redefining cryptocurrency to only include currencies and specifically exclude bitcoin and similar coins.
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The only alternative to proof of work is proof of stake. And if the world ever ran on proof of stake crypto, it would make today’s wealth inequality look like a Marxist paradise.
There’s other alternatives. But PoS does not reward just by ownership either.
Check out Gnosis, especially Circles, which is creating a UBI type thing.
I just looked at Circles’ webpage, and respectfully, that is a Ponzi scheme.
How exactly is it a Ponzi scheme, when you don’t need to pay to get a share?
Why? If the rewards are fixed and independent of the amount staked then there is no issue.
What matters is whether or not there’s any significant profit - the reward being bigger than the cost. PoW minimizes this with difficulty adjustment flushing most profits down the toilet. PoS must always have a return competitive with other investments.
Profits should be low, or else it promotes inequality.
If there’s a low barrier to entry then you’re just reinventing POW because someone can run as many nodes as possible with minimal stake in order to maximize returns. Can you give an example of one successful “fixed rewards” Crypto coin?
Ethereum.
The overall network issuance rate is fixed and currently roughly 4.5% per year. If more people stake then less is received per person.
Minimal stake is is $75k per validator.
This stake is slashed if you are dishonest.
You are exactly the type of person I’m talking about :\
Crypto is not the only use case for blockchain.
Blockchain can be useful in inherently trusted, closed ecosystems.
Depending on the use case, proof doesn’t even need to be anything more than a valid certificate (not work, not stake)
Consider a bank that develops its own blockchain ledger for internal use only, replacing their branch ledgers (which require daily reconciliation and propagation).
An immutable, distributed ledger has plenty of valid, valuable use cases without looking like crypto.
“Internal use only” blockchain is an oxymoron. If all contributors are trusted entities, then what does it matter if the data is stored in a blockchain vs any other data structure? If anything the amount of extra work to maintain and modify the blockchain in the case of errors just makes it unnecessary.
If that’s the best example of its many “valid, valuable use cases”, then it’s still a pass from me, dawg.
If all contributors are trusted entities,
This is not true, even inside a bank. Employees commit fraud. Branches don’t trust each other.
the amount of extra work to maintain
Once built, maintaining is easy.
and modify the blockchain
Er. The whole point is that blockchains are immutable.
But as long as you can have a trusted central authority, you don’t need blockchain without needing to trust all the clients. The central authority can enforce authentication and authorization for what each client can do, combine with proper logging it is already sufficient. Blockchain is only needed if there’s absolutely no central authority (which is not the case for any traditional business as by nature they already have a hierarchy where the top would act as the central authority, therefore any business that implements blockchain internally is just BS-ing).
I have a large number of examples in this comment from four months ago. Please read them: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963
Literally the first example you gave was shut down a year later: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/1mpeh9z/when_crypto_bros_are_asked_for_a_blockchain_use/
Pretty obvious that its use in the first place was some FOMO executives trying to get in on “blockchain” technology, just like they’re doing with AI and LLMs now. Funny how BTC and ETH both plateaued a year ago, right around the time AI became the new thing.
I’m not going to bother reading the rest, I already wasted too much time arguing with a true believer. GL with the crypto that you say you don’t have.
Lol you’re a judgemental prick. I have zero crypto because that shit is absolutely moronic.
It’s like you talked to someone who supports nuclear power and responded “good luck with the nuclear bombs you definitely don’t have, true believer”
Sounds like you just want to hate on shit you don’t understand. Go on with your bad self though 👍
EDIT: LMAO from the article you linked they even point out that the tech itself isn’t the problem, but the willingness of businesses to invest in the improvements (which is, like, an incredibly common problem in business that does not in any way make the tech bad)
Its plan to digitize global supply chains hasn’t received sufficient cooperation and support to remain viable.
That is the downside of corporate blockchain projects. They need everyone to share a mindset and commit to a long-term plan. Unfortunately, businesses face ever-changing conditions and financial problems. Few can warrant the cost of buying into such systems under the current market conditions.
You probably preach about how nuclear power is terrible, how if it were so great there would be more of it, and people sticking to coal is proof that coal power is better.
Big brain you’ve got there 😂🫡
The most pathetic system? You can criticize crypto without resorting to petty insults, which just makes your position appear weaker.
Wah~ pls no bully
Yeah, but now you can buy drugs online way easier.
It’s non anonymous, it’s pseudonymous… So, if you want to have your drugs transaction logged with an alias forever in the blockchain, go ahead…
that’s why you make sure you don’t leave PII that links to you in that transaction. Buy bitcoin with cash from your local shady dealer (of course you can buy drugs from them directly, but BTC is still good for drugs they don’t carry)
When i used the silkroad they had a coin tumbler built into it
It’s safer to use multiple independent tumblers in series, or a p2p app that does it.
Bitcoin is, and even then if you send it through a tumbler it becomes difficult to track who is buying what. But most markets these days don’t even accept Bitcoin, they only accept monero (xmr), which is anonymous.
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?
Not all crypto is the same. ZCASH uses an encrypted ledger. Monero combines transactions and redistributes to obfuscate.
The ledger being public doesn’t necessarily mean anyone knows who “13LPtD4GG1XX7fgrze6xMR5V284rRQg9jv” is. But yeah, you can of course track the movement of funds, and make educated guesses on which addresses belong to who.
Which is pseudonymous, and not anonymous. Unless we are talking about monero of course.
Okay, that’s probably a fair distinction. Don’t know enough about anonymous vs pseudonymous to disagree.
“pseudonymous” is a portmanteau (or malamanteau, depending on your opinions) of “pseudo” or “seeming like” and “anonymous”, meaning “seems like anonymity (but isn’t)”.
In a pseudonymous system, it might be hard to confirm identity, but it’s possible. In an anonymous system, it’s impossible to confirm identity.
Had to go check this because I thought I was having a TIL but, while your point is basically correct, the word isn’t a portmanteau but rather means “baring or using a fake name (pseudonym)”
Additionally, you can use a coin tumbler (I think that’s the term) where a bunch of strangers pool their coins for various transactions into one wallet that then distributes the coins to their end destinations, adding a layer of obscurity for which starting wallets are associated with which ending wallets.
That’s literally what caused bitcoin mixer services to exist where you throw some amount of BTC in an account with them, tell them how much you want paid to whom, and then it takes all the transactions for a certain (usually random) time period and plays a shell game with them, passing funds from account to account in various amounts and resulting ultimately in the right amount going from you to the target via multiple intermediaries. Slow because it involves a lot of transactions, but the idea was to make it hard to trace exactly who was paying who, beyond being able to know that one or more of the user accounts were paying some amount to one or more of the destination accounts.
Over the last 5 years or so, law enforcement has been shutting down several such organizations for money laundering, being illegal money transmitting businesses or things along those lines as appropriate to the jurisdiction.
Even without them, with good opsec it can be hard to tie a BTC wallet address to a human person, which is the point of anonymous payment.
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.
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?
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
XMR uses some really cool cryptography actually. Zero-knowledge proofs and shit.
With monero the ledger is encrypted and has a bunch of obfuscated/fake data in it
If you bought crypto, same way money laundering works. Otherwise you can earn crypto while remaining anonymous (but in the case of a VPN, connecting to it from your home IP after anonymously buying it kind of defeats the purpose [partially])
That’s a good point. If you earned the crypto anonymously, you could probably spend it the same way. Because they would tie it to a wallet but not a bank account or a person.
If you are buying online it will track back to you through the payment method. If you buy in a physical location, you give an important clue to where you live. If a state actor wants to deanonymize you, it’s only a matter of how many resources they are willing to spend on it.
You can buy from a physical location if the seller is not a regulated seller (just a random person), chances are they bought the bitcoin from someone else where the coin literally could come from any place in the world. The magic of bitcoin is it is digital so the “coins” can “teleport” around.
If a state actor wants to deanonymize you…
Then there ain’t fucking shit you can do about it. The only thing you can do to keep big brother off your back is to be too small of a fish for them to spend their time on.
Say you buy $50 worth, which isn’t anonymous. Then you add to a pool of several thousand or more, which is then sent out to several clean anonymous wallets as smaller fractions of the whole minus some fee. It’s not rocket surgery but works effectively well so long as you have good opsec and the pool is trustworthy.
The wallet you sent $50 from is known, but which of the hundreds of wallets that got $10 from the pool belong to you vs others in the pool? They can deduce it from patterns and usage, but it makes it a lot harder. And this is just “newbie’s first introduction to anonimized finances”
But unlike cash, the chain exists forever. They can do wild sorts of analysis, which means you need good opsec with clean separation, and lots of obfuscation. But this is nothing new to people in that world.
So yes, it can be anonymous, but it’s tricky and may not always be because it has a permanent public record.
… But if you go thru all that trouble and then just connect to your new shiny dark VPN from your home PC… Uhh… It’s like ordering pizza delivery. Maybe not the best usecase for ‘untraceable currency’
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
You do know that you can pay for mullvad in cash?
You can send cash in an envelope to them with your mullvad ID and they will credit your account.
Let’s be realistic, that isn’t an equivalent alternative
Sending mail is pseudo-anonymous at best. It’s exceptionally slow. Most importantly, it’s insecure to the point where most postal services explicitly recommend against mailing cash
How is it not anonymous?
Because there is a lot of evidence tied to mailing a letter
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DNA
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Fingerprints
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Time and location the letter was mailed from
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Camera footage of you mailing the letter
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The letter itself can generally be traced back to where it was manufactured
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Address handwriting/stamp/sticker
Even if you scrub anything personally identifying yourself, it still leaves a fairly unique fingerprint. A sufficiently motivated investigator would be able to identify another similar payment without inspecting the actual contents of the letter. Hence pseudo-anonymous
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Can I go to their HQ, slip them a tenner with my ID on a piece of paper under the door?
Yes
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.
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?
also no delivery drugs. people would have to go out to get their drugs
I really really really doubt those claims. I would need sources to believe that and also the blockchain itself is not a bad idea. Theres also like a thousand different implementations of it. Its like saying every form of currencies are bad.
I mean, the earliest modems I’m aware of were 300 bps, and in 1990 I had a modem that did 9600bps. That right there makes me question more of the claims.
What, why would you doubt such obvious claims such as “the blockchain […] weights 60 000 tons”
I seriously would like to know WTF the poster meant by that
I thought the context was obvious - in server hardware and infrastructure required to house it.
Verifying this number thought seems essentially impossible.
Tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere is a pretty standard way to measure climate impact.
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).
Theoronic fingers that satoshi nakamoto actually developed bitcoin as a proof of concept, not as a full payment system.
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
Don’t think crypto is the solution to replacing payment processors. The distributed networks is going to have enormous difficulty scaling to even a fraction of the number of card payments processed each day.
That won’t be the case for long, see here for some quick bites in case you are interested: https://www.growthepie.com/quick-bites/ethereum-scaling
Ethereum is on a clear path to scale. Over the next six years, Ethereum Mainnet throughput is expected to surge toward 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) - roughly 1 gigagas per second - while Layer 2s (L2) collectively push the ecosystem toward million-TPS capacity.
For example, one of the Ethereum L2 rollups mentioned, MegaEth, is expected to have mainnet launch date this month after a 35k TPS stress test.
How?
Ethereum’s strategy combines multiple approaches to sustainably increase capacity while preserving its core principles:
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EIP-7938 (Dankrad Feist) - proposes a default, exponential gas-limit growth schedule where clients vote automatically to increase L1 capacity over time (subject to coordination and override). Read the spec here.
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Lean Ethereum (Justin Drake) - a design philosophy to streamline consensus, data, and execution, leveraging DAS and real-time zkVMs for “beast mode” performance while staying verifiable. More.
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More EIPs - parallel efforts improve execution, networking, and data availability.
The aim isn’t raw TPS alone - it’s sustainable, decentralized scale that remains easy to verify.
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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.
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
It is inherently less useful than cash and basic electronic monetary transactions.
Progress is measured by what something does rather than why it could do.
Much of historical research was seemingly useless for a very long time until some progress in unrelated fields enabled them to suddenly become very useful. I prefer to be open minded about technology, not tying it to the way its used by the current time and political system we are living in
So far, crypto is a massively wasteful endeavor. It wastes extreme amounts of power while also hoarding computer hardware.
It’s a speculative asset which cannot be used for as money. It only has value as long as hype exists.
That’s literally all money
Not talking about its usage as a speculative gambling asset, I’m talking about the blockchain as a part of computer science
Some ideas aren’t applied everywhere or at all (e.g equal rights for women in Afghanistan). Does it mean discussing them in those places is useless ?
Are you comparing human rights to speculative assets?
I’m talking about technological progress only.
Well the fact that you call them speculative assets is part of the problem. Bitcoin wasn’t invented to be this, but as an alternative to centralized banking after the Subprimes crash of 2008. The creators’ intentention was very diffirent
But you’re right, I should’n be comparing it to human rights. As a simpler example: the fediverse has huge potential but it’s disregarded virtually everywhere or simply unknown to the vast majority of people. I see it as progress nontheless.
