its less efficient because decentralized things are less efficient by design. they sacrifice efficiency for the authoritiless nature. That is the goal - to remove authority from money. Money should just exist and have rules and thats it. That's what cryptocurrencies are.
to me, its that even if what is happening is that some new ruling class is being established, the difference is that the new ruling class won't be able to fundamentally change the rules anymore. Currently our monetary system is managed by rooms of Very Smart People that can change things at a whim and the cracks are starting to show.
but yeah, things are interesting though.... there is a recent upswell of proof of stake, which is just central banking all over again. So the new system might end up looking the same as the old system if these PoS coins become more common. The difference is though is that bitcoin is unstoppable. Like, its price could be 40k, its price could be 400k. The protocol will still work. The old system has no choice but to adapt or whatever.
but it does have to do with the dollar bills. The discussion centers on the technology as a currency and money. I think these things have bee separated in our general understanding of things, but in bitcoin they are melded into one. You control the outputs on the blockchain. The dollar bills on the blockchain. Sure, if you deposit your bitcoin at an exchange then yeah, you will get different bitcoin back, but the discussion isn't about that. It's about how the blockchain system works. And the way it works is that when you use bitcoin, and you own bitcoin, you do sorta ask for the same dollar bills back that you deposited. You don't really "deposit" them on the blockchain, but you kinda do. You deposit proof of ownership of a unit of account. Bitcoin calls it an output, a monero dev has coined the term e-note (or adopted the term i dunno) to try and better describe what it is.
maybe you know all this i dunno. if you do, slap me around a bit. if you don't, i hope this makes sense.
Haha well, no slapping necessary. I like to think I'm right but would love to be proven wrong.
It's important to distinguish between fungibility and tracibility because fungibility is an extremely important property for a currency to have, and without it it's all but useless.
Theoretically, if the US were to go to an all digital dollar, we would functionally have a blockchain (assuming all these transactions were reported centrally somewhere). This would not have changed the fungibility of the dollar, because the dollars you get in your paycheck are still the same as the dollars you get back as change or the dollars someone Venmos you for cocaine. Once they're in your bank account, there's no way to separate out which dollars came from which source. Now, you could pay someone to give you money with a "clean" history, but you're not paying more money for those dollars, you're paying someone for the service of giving you dollars with a clean history.
Let's say you happened to make a transaction with someone who you didn't know to be a criminal. He buys a nice ring for the girl on his arm and gives you $1K in marked bills (which are bills that have serial numbers recorded by some agency).
Now in that case, he's flashing around cash, which is not that uncommon say in certain locales (Las Vegas comes to mind). In that case, the cash you received doesn't lose any value. Though you may get questioned by the police.
Now ink stained bills and bills glued to each other should be rejected since they were likely from a bank or atm heist. But that makes it easy to spot.
Well diamonds are fungible for any definition of the word you may choose and for the vast majority of the stones. Some of them are unique in that they're very large, very pure, have been worked on so much they are identifiable, have an IAG number engraved, etc. but the vast, vast majority of diamonds you can trade at any diamond shop in a very fungible manner, no questions asked.
> No, I want the world's energy and carbon footprint to reduce, rather than have people with a decentralisation fetish invent new ways to incentivise thrashing.
Then any way to dismantle the existing consume-everything-to-make-a-profit economy, which is caused by archaic and inefficient monetary systems, should be good, right?
How much energy is wasted / burned because of our existing monetary policies?
cryptocurrency PoW is bajillions times more efficient than, i dunno, exerting currency dominance by shows of military power or shipping goods all over the world because its "cheaper" to make things here and sell things there.
any way? No, and particulary one that, for instance, encourages competitive.burning of power for profit and uses the power demands of a small country to service the transactional needs of a town.
>How much energy is wasted / burned because of our existing monetary policies?
Probably quite a lot. But then they do so much more than cryptocurrency can, so the comparison is nonsense.
"bajillions" being code for "I have no idea at all" renders your argument at the end there pretty moot.
All I can really say is that the cryptonote protocol was probably designed to focus on privacy within the blockchain. Intrablockchain privacy. Anything out-of band was not considered within scope, maybe. I'm just speculating because who knows what the cryptonote developers were thinking. The Monero core team is working to advance what cryptonote started, and subaddresses are a step in the right direction.
> but transaction fees do not decrease as more transactions occur.
Yes, it does. The transaction fee is a dynamic fee based on the block size. As the block size increases, the transaction fee decreases. The theory being that an increased blocksize means there's increased demand for Monero, which implies that the value of Monero has increased, so the transaction fee should decrease.
Perhaps. But they are not hardcoded. The limits are based on the network infrastructure (lag, node calculation speeds). Basically, the blocks will grow until orphaning becomes a serious problem.
> and also how quickly they respond to demand,
This is in, in fact, the only hard coded limit of the things you mentioned.
The dynamic fees you mention are a client side default that may be a good heuristic for client side transaction pricing but has precisely 0 effect on which transactions a miner will include in a block, which will purely choose the highest price transactions. Furthermore, the price is in terms of monero, so sure, you may be paying less monero but it’ll still price out stuff like microtransactions as the fiat price goes past tens of cents.
When I say there is a limit to block sizes, I am referring to the factors, lag, etc, you mention. I believe monero has had to change the block times in the past, as too many orphans were occurring, and block size is another dimension that this will occur on, as it affects the latency of communicating the blocks.
Monero is great, but once you factor in the larger transactions I am extremely doubtful that you could get a higher throughput from it than bitcoin.
> In a P2P economy (which is this technology is meant to lead us) fungibility problems are not a thing beacuse there is no relative central party to make a standard.
wat?
fungibility is not about a standard. fungibility applies at every level.
"Hrmmm yes while you are looking at this car here I'm just going to scan your blockchain activity and hrmmmmm it seems that you are in about the top 30% of income in this country so yessss the price of this car is X"
boom. That car salesman just defacto made your tracecoin less valuable than some poor shmuck in the lower 50%.
to me, its that even if what is happening is that some new ruling class is being established, the difference is that the new ruling class won't be able to fundamentally change the rules anymore. Currently our monetary system is managed by rooms of Very Smart People that can change things at a whim and the cracks are starting to show.
but yeah, things are interesting though.... there is a recent upswell of proof of stake, which is just central banking all over again. So the new system might end up looking the same as the old system if these PoS coins become more common. The difference is though is that bitcoin is unstoppable. Like, its price could be 40k, its price could be 400k. The protocol will still work. The old system has no choice but to adapt or whatever.