this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
528 points (94.0% liked)
Privacy
39971 readers
119 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
No, that is not correct. Global outage shows the dangers of centralized systems would be a better headline. Monero Worked all day throughout the entire outage with no problems.
Define "worked" in this context. You mean their own infrastructure didn't crash? You certainly didn't pop down to the store and buying anything useful with Monero ๐
Not that day I didn't, but I have bought Domino's several times this month, and I bought my groceries at the beginning of the month.
There are businesses that specifically sell gift cards to retailers for Monero and when possible I search out and purchase from retailers who accept Monero. Https://monerica.com and https://xmrbazaar.com help with that.
You can still exchange funds as normal because no necessary components or intermediaries were affected by the outage. Only conventional banking systems.
My point was more that using Monero as an example is probably not the best way to cryptobrah an illustrative point.
I don't see how you were making that point.
Because you can't just go and buy real world goods at will as with cash. If there's ever a Carrington Event, your Monero is worthless in an emergency.
You can use it for all the same things you can at any other time, as I said. Still not sure what your point is.
Lol. How is your crypto gonna work without global peers and internet, friend?
Nothing happened to the internet
Paper wallets. It is definitely false that crypto requires the internet, because it does not. It's more helpful if it has the internet, for sure, but it's not an absolute hard requirement.
Ha. Okay. How do you expect ledgers to get updated then? You're aware that a blockchain can't function without multiple distributed peers, right? That means power, and the Internet.
One internet connected computer could make many paper wallets of whatever denomination they wished and then use those as currency. As long as it's provable that the paper has not been spent which a hologram or one of those gift card scratch off things would help with. Anyone who receives such a paper that has not been tampered with can be assured that the money that it claims to have is actually there and can take it to any internet connected computer in the world and transfer it to their own digital wallet from the paper wallet. Or they could broadcast the transaction over any kind of transmission medium up to and including amateur radio over HF.
Edit: Unless I'm doing my math wrong, which I totally could be, it would take about a minute and a half to broadcast a current Monero transaction over HF amateur radio with a possible maximum of 6 minutes if full chain membership transactions are 10kb (which i have heard as an upper limit)
Friend......WOW.
Appreciate the effort in your response, really, but you're just missing the point. Now you're just desperately grasping to make crypto sound useful in an apocalyptic setting, which it 100% is not, and we were not discussing anything like this in the first place.
Cash or tradable goods are infinitely more plausible and useful than crypto in any scenario where there is still a default monetary system functioning. That's just a fact.
Even central currencies can work if you can make offline and peer to peer payments.
Not easy to pull off cryptographically, though.
True, but do you really expect them to let you use a central bank digital currency peer-to-peer and not have some way of revoking your access to it? If so, you're absolutely nuts, LOL.
Does Taler do this?
I remember reading it in its docs. It probably does, but it is sure it was planned
... And if the systems you actually interact with go down, you can get fucked as well.
If you want to buy food with Monero and the payment processor for the local shop doesn't work, even if it's a local machine sitting in the back office, you still can't buy anything.
A local machine sitting in the back office, acting as a payment processor, is much easier to access and fix than the Visa Network.
Not for you. And certainly not for the staff working in the shop.
Currently, you're bartering with copious amounts of copium.
That is not correct, either. The outage even took out decentralized platforms.
Which decentralized platforms did it take out?
Maybe they are talking about the cash registers running Windows?
Monero isn't bad but I don't think it is great for easily buying things. At the end of the day trying to use two different currencies is hard. Also Monero gets a bad name because it is used primarily for illegal transactions. It is simply two complex and has no accountability
The fact that it's used for crime means that it actually does what it's supposed to do and keeping people private. Shoes are also used by bank robbers and we don't ban shoes. Monero is a tool the same as a hammer or a shoe or a car or a gun.
The problem is that it has zero accountability. Shoes, cars, cash and guns are all physical. At the end of the day someone can inspect your shoes or prevent you from taking a gun inside of a theater. Monero allows payments from anywhere and completely anonymously. You can get rid of it as it is decentralized but you can just not use it especially since cash is easy, private and secure.