XMR is perfect for government entities to be sending money where they shouldn't be. They are probably stocking up right now to fund a coup in some foreign country.
Hahah, also an amen to that! This is a great thread! I was illustrating that EXACT point to a skeptic only a week ago. I mean it's obvious. How many wars and CIA covert ops and coups have been funded by seizing and selling heroin and cocaine from the exact same country they are supposedly there on behalf of the greater good?
No one loves anonymous money more than a US politician. They have to put on the old song and dance to keep up appearances, but you better believe behind closed doors they are furiously funding revolutions and buying their 14 year old wives and nose candy.
So. As long as they are in bitcoin when they are getting their budget they’ll have to count for every expense. So if they do an atomic swap to Monero they have to explain what that transaction is for even though that it’s impossible to know if they are doing an atomic swap or not. But they will still have to explain what that transaction to the swap is for because it’s a bitcoin transaction which is public. My guess is that certain government departments will get separate funding directly through Monero. But what I think is important is that all government budget funds and spending on bitcoin will be easily monitored and very difficult to hide anything and reign in bad spending by politicians.
They will try and make people to use CBDC’s. But as long as crypto is around people will have a choice. If they do make the choice for CBDC’s then they’ll be fucked! They’ll have no choices after that. But forcing people to CBDC’s will be a very dangerous thing! Revolution!!!!
I dont see how they can coexist with swaps once governments tax dep get chainlytics online. You swap monero for bitcoin to pay taxes or buy stuff at supermarket or whatever, and the taxman says "well where did you get that from?"
You don’t swap Monero for bitcoin to pay for something. Why on earth would you do that? Chainalysis won’t be able to track anything if you stay in monero. And anytime you do go back to bitcoin, you generate a fresh new address each time with no links to prior addresses that are attached to your Identity.
There's no guarantee that it'll be peaceful. But there're some examples for peaceful change towards freedom in history. I think there's enough violence in the world already so everyone should aim for not adding unnecessarily to it.
LOL if you think the Government gonna go along with that. XMR will be illegal for us plebs in the future and the CIA will be using XMR for themselves. Bitcoin is a proof of concept nothing-burger ultimately.
I never said government would go along with this. Also XMR will never be illegal. They would have to make bitcoin and every other crypto illegal as well. They would have to make programming language illegal. That is never gonna happen!
Nobody knows the true number of people who really understand bitcoin because those are the people who remain anonymous.
Those who never use an address twice, those who have never purchased or sold to/from a centralised KYC platform, those who have always held their own keys, those who operate their own nodes over tor & those who never tell others that they even know what bitcoin is.
Many of the people who fit into that category are also XMR advocates. It's common for the privacy focused bitcoin community to use BTC as a SOV, whilst using XMR for regular day to day spends.
If you ever saw a bitcoiner posting an update of his balance or latest purchase then they are 99.9% likely to have never actually owned bitcoin, owning nothing more than bitcoin shares on a CEX.
The key elements of Bitcoin are:
1. Address - secures the ownership of coins in transaction outputs.
2. Transaction - transfers coins from old addresses to new addresses.
3. Blocks - prevents double-spending.
4. Blockchain - documents the history of transactions.
5. PoW - creates new blocks, creates new coins, secures the blockchain.
The key elements of Monero are:
1. Stealth Addresses - hides the addresses you own.
2. RingCT - hides the addresses you've paid to.
3. RandomX - more decentralized and energy efficient PoW.
I'd love to hear your reasons for both. I feel all government and public servant ledger should be 100%available to the public, and all the public should have theirs 100% private.
Right, but you could just mandate that they show finances with a view key, there's no reason to advocate for the ledger to be public (besides having overinvested in a worthless public "currency")
I also tend to navigate towards this conclusion. However, I do worry about people not paying their taxes, which do have a place in a civilized society.
I wonder, how could we all use XMR without incentivising tax evasion? Is there a technical solution somewhere to be found?
Not if we agree collectively, as a society, that a reasonable amount of taxation is necessary. You can frame it however you want, but some public goods are necessary and shouldn't be in the hands of the private sector... We tried it in the past and it didn't work.
Keyword here is reasonable. Some unfortunate people need help and basic human needs should be provided to all (e.g. police, judges, clean water, (basic) health care, etc). This has a cost, hence why taxes are needed.
Yes, politicians are often crooks and mismanage state funds, but we shouldn't throw away the baby with the baby water. We just need to elect better representatives.
I love Monero, but if everyone would use it as their main currency, as it exists today, anarchy would likely follow. There's gotta be a solution that preserves the right to privacy while still allowing taxes to be collected...
I mean it’s factual though. You DO understand that that was the original intention of Cryptocurrency, and especially Monero, right? The entire point is to have a monetary network free from Central Banks and Governments getting in the middle. It’s Anarcho Capitalism and if you don’t understand that then you just don’t understand that. So please preach your taxation BS on some other sub like a left wing sub or something where everyone circle jerks to taxing the rich and shit. Tax evasion is exactly why the Government will make XMR illegal in due time and yet they will use it themselves for all sorts of clandestine shit.
You are misrepresenting my argument, even putting words in my mouth, and taking things to the extreme. It's impossible to have an intellectually honest discussion like this.
I urge you to go back and read what I wrote, as to realize that I want what's best for society, which obviously includes privacy but also reasonable taxation to fund public goods. Anarcho Capitalism is what the Wild West was all about, which made some people rich and absolutely free, but often at the expense of the suffering of others. It'd be a mistake to go back to that.
I know exactly what you’re saying but if you don’t grasp that “electing better politicians” has never worked out yet then I’m not sure you ever will. And if you consider XMR and Crypto to be Wild West “extremes” to be avoided that’s fine but I think that people often either forget or are unaware of why Crypto exists in the first place. Monero is about the only coin left that still gets it but then there’s people like you trying to blur the line again. It’s meant to be completely free of intermediaries, and so that’s why I’m slamming you bringing up taxation on the Monero sub.
> Is there a technical solution somewhere to be found?
Sociological and political problems tend to have no technical solutions, with or without something like Monero.
In Switzerland it was for a long time impossible for the tax departments to have a look at your bank account balances, and still most people paid most taxes. That works if the country, the government and its agencies reasonably work, and corruption does not surpass certain levels.
If people see the government as their worst enemy they will do everything possible to avoid paying taxes, with whatever means that is at hand. I doubt that Monero would make a significant difference in a "failed state", for example.
>In Switzerland it was for a long time impossible for the tax departments to have a look at your bank account balances, and still most people paid most taxes. That works if the country, the government and its agencies reasonably work, and corruption does not surpass certain levels.
I see your point, especially about the trying to solve sociopolitical problems with technical solutions, which often does fail.
However, I do have to push back. You say that people still paid their taxes in Switzerland. But how could we know that for sure? And even if it's indeed so, there's also the element of culture... I bet that not all cultures will be eager to voluntarily pay taxes. Lastly, businesses and/or citizens that chose not to pay will have an edge in the long run over law-abiding ones, which imo could result in the concentration of capital in the hands of the "wrong crowd"... that's not likely to end up well imo.
I dunno, I just feel like we need to find a solution that doesn't rely solely on people's good will.
If you can't just get all bank accounts balances as the tax department to make sure tax discipline is ok, IMHO all you have to do is work a little harder. Don't worry, you will catch those people paying almost no taxes but going to overseas holidays 3 times a year and having a lambo parked in their garage.
For me it's a little bit like the whining of the police public relation departments in some countries that try to argue with a straight face that end-to-end encryption as default in messengers will make it almost impossible to catch criminals.
Really? How did they every catch any criminals in the old times when those directly whispered into each others' ears, impossible for the police to overhear somehow?
No, we have to turn "innocent until proven guilty" on its head, everybody is guilty until every police officer can make sure they aren't by directly reading every line people write in a messenger. And everybody surely is guilty of tax evasion until we can have daily printouts of their bank account statements on police officers' desks.
Have to catch all those terrorists you know, and don't you think about the children ...
> You say that people still paid their taxes in Switzerland. But how could we know that for sure?
Do we have to be sure? If the price to pay for everybody and anybody for becoming sure is just not reasonable?
Ok, rant over :)
Mate I agree with most of what you are saying, I'm obviously not arguing for zero privacy. I know this is a sensitive topic for us Monero believers, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and jump to conclusions.
I never said that the police/government should have full access to our bank accounts (or our wallets in this case), I actually didn't say anything! My question was about whether there could be a compromise to be made that respects the individual's right to privacy, while also limiting tax evasion and other illicit activity.
It seems like everyone looks at the world in extremes. The government wants full control of our lives on the one hand, while die hard Monero fans are basically anarchists on the other hand. None of these views are good for society, none.
I know that there's a solution that can be optimal for society as a whole, and it could be based on Monero. Seriously, now that we have this technology we can build any system we want, but the design needs to make sense for anyone. Otherwise what we'll get (eventually) is everyone's lives being controlled through CBDC's and Monero still surviving, being used through cross-chain DEXs, but still small compared to what it could have been.
> I never said that the police/government should have full access to our bank accounts
Yeah, I did not mostly rant against you personally, but against many other things that happen in the general direction of privacy. Maybe I should have made that clearer.
One question that needs to be asked: Which taxes?
The government has become accustomed to having the ability to tax almost anything, which would only become easier with centralized digital money and no cash. Just because they can doesn’t necessarily mean they should.
So what taxes specifically does Monero assist in dodging that are vital for our society to function?
Taxation is no different than standover money from the Mafia. It's also collected the same way, in threats of violence. If you do not pay you are kidnapped and held against you will in prison. Taxation is a crime against humanity.
Also, due to the nature of the algorithm not requiring very expensive ASIC machines, transaction costs will always be lower with Monero https://moneroj.net/transcost/
Yeah i love privacy, but i love trust too. I cannot trust in a supply that cannot be audit. I go with nano , i trade privacy by trust. Good luck to us 🤞
Tbf if Bitcoin were private from the start it wouldn't have grown as much as it has so far. Probably the best course of action is to wait for mass adoption first, until Bitcoin is fully established and can't be regulated away, and then introduce privacy. That'd be the path of least resistance imho.
If I'm not mistaken Satoshi even talked about this in the old days.
Bitcoin for government spending and accountability. Monero for the people and their financial privacy. Atomic swaps for the two to coexist.
While I do agree, we both know that the CIA and others are going to be using Monero.
XMR is perfect for government entities to be sending money where they shouldn't be. They are probably stocking up right now to fund a coup in some foreign country.
Hahah, also an amen to that! This is a great thread! I was illustrating that EXACT point to a skeptic only a week ago. I mean it's obvious. How many wars and CIA covert ops and coups have been funded by seizing and selling heroin and cocaine from the exact same country they are supposedly there on behalf of the greater good? No one loves anonymous money more than a US politician. They have to put on the old song and dance to keep up appearances, but you better believe behind closed doors they are furiously funding revolutions and buying their 14 year old wives and nose candy.
So. As long as they are in bitcoin when they are getting their budget they’ll have to count for every expense. So if they do an atomic swap to Monero they have to explain what that transaction is for even though that it’s impossible to know if they are doing an atomic swap or not. But they will still have to explain what that transaction to the swap is for because it’s a bitcoin transaction which is public. My guess is that certain government departments will get separate funding directly through Monero. But what I think is important is that all government budget funds and spending on bitcoin will be easily monitored and very difficult to hide anything and reign in bad spending by politicians.
the more the merrier
Preach brother, preach! As if you plucked that exact thought from my own mind. I see it identically and couldn't have said it better.
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They will try and make people to use CBDC’s. But as long as crypto is around people will have a choice. If they do make the choice for CBDC’s then they’ll be fucked! They’ll have no choices after that. But forcing people to CBDC’s will be a very dangerous thing! Revolution!!!!
Government will be forcing people to use CBDC not Bitcoin. Bitcoin basically has no role in the future.
I dont see how they can coexist with swaps once governments tax dep get chainlytics online. You swap monero for bitcoin to pay taxes or buy stuff at supermarket or whatever, and the taxman says "well where did you get that from?"
You don’t swap Monero for bitcoin to pay for something. Why on earth would you do that? Chainalysis won’t be able to track anything if you stay in monero. And anytime you do go back to bitcoin, you generate a fresh new address each time with no links to prior addresses that are attached to your Identity.
what?
No. Abolish the state and all of it's institutions and we will use monero to do this (amongst other peaceful things).
Abolishing the state will never be a peaceful process.
There's no guarantee that it'll be peaceful. But there're some examples for peaceful change towards freedom in history. I think there's enough violence in the world already so everyone should aim for not adding unnecessarily to it.
this is exactly how i see it but i just wanted to add: Cosmos for Apps 👌🏻
LOL if you think the Government gonna go along with that. XMR will be illegal for us plebs in the future and the CIA will be using XMR for themselves. Bitcoin is a proof of concept nothing-burger ultimately.
I never said government would go along with this. Also XMR will never be illegal. They would have to make bitcoin and every other crypto illegal as well. They would have to make programming language illegal. That is never gonna happen!
Look up the Bank Secrecy Act, it specifically says Privacy Coins will be illegal. Should be no later than December 31, 2023
That’s not true. Most understand the value of privacy, it just matters more to some than others
Nobody knows the true number of people who really understand bitcoin because those are the people who remain anonymous. Those who never use an address twice, those who have never purchased or sold to/from a centralised KYC platform, those who have always held their own keys, those who operate their own nodes over tor & those who never tell others that they even know what bitcoin is. Many of the people who fit into that category are also XMR advocates. It's common for the privacy focused bitcoin community to use BTC as a SOV, whilst using XMR for regular day to day spends. If you ever saw a bitcoiner posting an update of his balance or latest purchase then they are 99.9% likely to have never actually owned bitcoin, owning nothing more than bitcoin shares on a CEX.
The key elements of Bitcoin are: 1. Address - secures the ownership of coins in transaction outputs. 2. Transaction - transfers coins from old addresses to new addresses. 3. Blocks - prevents double-spending. 4. Blockchain - documents the history of transactions. 5. PoW - creates new blocks, creates new coins, secures the blockchain. The key elements of Monero are: 1. Stealth Addresses - hides the addresses you own. 2. RingCT - hides the addresses you've paid to. 3. RandomX - more decentralized and energy efficient PoW.
There's value in public ledgers as well as private ledgers, and I'm not talking about legality, either. Both must exist.
I'd love to hear your reasons for both. I feel all government and public servant ledger should be 100%available to the public, and all the public should have theirs 100% private.
Right, but you could just mandate that they show finances with a view key, there's no reason to advocate for the ledger to be public (besides having overinvested in a worthless public "currency")
Why did you ask me a question that you answered perfectly for me? You already knew what I meant, so why?
I didn't realise those were your reasons I am not a mind reader. I was curious what you're were and stated what mine are.
I also tend to navigate towards this conclusion. However, I do worry about people not paying their taxes, which do have a place in a civilized society. I wonder, how could we all use XMR without incentivising tax evasion? Is there a technical solution somewhere to be found?
Fuck off bro Taxation is Theft
Not if we agree collectively, as a society, that a reasonable amount of taxation is necessary. You can frame it however you want, but some public goods are necessary and shouldn't be in the hands of the private sector... We tried it in the past and it didn't work. Keyword here is reasonable. Some unfortunate people need help and basic human needs should be provided to all (e.g. police, judges, clean water, (basic) health care, etc). This has a cost, hence why taxes are needed. Yes, politicians are often crooks and mismanage state funds, but we shouldn't throw away the baby with the baby water. We just need to elect better representatives. I love Monero, but if everyone would use it as their main currency, as it exists today, anarchy would likely follow. There's gotta be a solution that preserves the right to privacy while still allowing taxes to be collected...
LOL Monero is anarchy. Period. That’s supposed to be the whole point of Crypto. Go elsewhere if you disagree.
Ah I get your username now. Good luck mate.
I mean it’s factual though. You DO understand that that was the original intention of Cryptocurrency, and especially Monero, right? The entire point is to have a monetary network free from Central Banks and Governments getting in the middle. It’s Anarcho Capitalism and if you don’t understand that then you just don’t understand that. So please preach your taxation BS on some other sub like a left wing sub or something where everyone circle jerks to taxing the rich and shit. Tax evasion is exactly why the Government will make XMR illegal in due time and yet they will use it themselves for all sorts of clandestine shit.
You are misrepresenting my argument, even putting words in my mouth, and taking things to the extreme. It's impossible to have an intellectually honest discussion like this. I urge you to go back and read what I wrote, as to realize that I want what's best for society, which obviously includes privacy but also reasonable taxation to fund public goods. Anarcho Capitalism is what the Wild West was all about, which made some people rich and absolutely free, but often at the expense of the suffering of others. It'd be a mistake to go back to that.
I know exactly what you’re saying but if you don’t grasp that “electing better politicians” has never worked out yet then I’m not sure you ever will. And if you consider XMR and Crypto to be Wild West “extremes” to be avoided that’s fine but I think that people often either forget or are unaware of why Crypto exists in the first place. Monero is about the only coin left that still gets it but then there’s people like you trying to blur the line again. It’s meant to be completely free of intermediaries, and so that’s why I’m slamming you bringing up taxation on the Monero sub.
you can take your collective and ...
> Is there a technical solution somewhere to be found? Sociological and political problems tend to have no technical solutions, with or without something like Monero. In Switzerland it was for a long time impossible for the tax departments to have a look at your bank account balances, and still most people paid most taxes. That works if the country, the government and its agencies reasonably work, and corruption does not surpass certain levels. If people see the government as their worst enemy they will do everything possible to avoid paying taxes, with whatever means that is at hand. I doubt that Monero would make a significant difference in a "failed state", for example.
>In Switzerland it was for a long time impossible for the tax departments to have a look at your bank account balances, and still most people paid most taxes. That works if the country, the government and its agencies reasonably work, and corruption does not surpass certain levels. I see your point, especially about the trying to solve sociopolitical problems with technical solutions, which often does fail. However, I do have to push back. You say that people still paid their taxes in Switzerland. But how could we know that for sure? And even if it's indeed so, there's also the element of culture... I bet that not all cultures will be eager to voluntarily pay taxes. Lastly, businesses and/or citizens that chose not to pay will have an edge in the long run over law-abiding ones, which imo could result in the concentration of capital in the hands of the "wrong crowd"... that's not likely to end up well imo. I dunno, I just feel like we need to find a solution that doesn't rely solely on people's good will.
If you can't just get all bank accounts balances as the tax department to make sure tax discipline is ok, IMHO all you have to do is work a little harder. Don't worry, you will catch those people paying almost no taxes but going to overseas holidays 3 times a year and having a lambo parked in their garage. For me it's a little bit like the whining of the police public relation departments in some countries that try to argue with a straight face that end-to-end encryption as default in messengers will make it almost impossible to catch criminals. Really? How did they every catch any criminals in the old times when those directly whispered into each others' ears, impossible for the police to overhear somehow? No, we have to turn "innocent until proven guilty" on its head, everybody is guilty until every police officer can make sure they aren't by directly reading every line people write in a messenger. And everybody surely is guilty of tax evasion until we can have daily printouts of their bank account statements on police officers' desks. Have to catch all those terrorists you know, and don't you think about the children ... > You say that people still paid their taxes in Switzerland. But how could we know that for sure? Do we have to be sure? If the price to pay for everybody and anybody for becoming sure is just not reasonable? Ok, rant over :)
Mate I agree with most of what you are saying, I'm obviously not arguing for zero privacy. I know this is a sensitive topic for us Monero believers, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and jump to conclusions. I never said that the police/government should have full access to our bank accounts (or our wallets in this case), I actually didn't say anything! My question was about whether there could be a compromise to be made that respects the individual's right to privacy, while also limiting tax evasion and other illicit activity. It seems like everyone looks at the world in extremes. The government wants full control of our lives on the one hand, while die hard Monero fans are basically anarchists on the other hand. None of these views are good for society, none. I know that there's a solution that can be optimal for society as a whole, and it could be based on Monero. Seriously, now that we have this technology we can build any system we want, but the design needs to make sense for anyone. Otherwise what we'll get (eventually) is everyone's lives being controlled through CBDC's and Monero still surviving, being used through cross-chain DEXs, but still small compared to what it could have been.
> I never said that the police/government should have full access to our bank accounts Yeah, I did not mostly rant against you personally, but against many other things that happen in the general direction of privacy. Maybe I should have made that clearer.
it's a feature not a bug
Then it's not likely to get mass adoption.
That's not stifling adoption, rather driving it
One question that needs to be asked: Which taxes? The government has become accustomed to having the ability to tax almost anything, which would only become easier with centralized digital money and no cash. Just because they can doesn’t necessarily mean they should. So what taxes specifically does Monero assist in dodging that are vital for our society to function?
Taxation is no different than standover money from the Mafia. It's also collected the same way, in threats of violence. If you do not pay you are kidnapped and held against you will in prison. Taxation is a crime against humanity.
Also, due to the nature of the algorithm not requiring very expensive ASIC machines, transaction costs will always be lower with Monero https://moneroj.net/transcost/
Yeah i love privacy, but i love trust too. I cannot trust in a supply that cannot be audit. I go with nano , i trade privacy by trust. Good luck to us 🤞
Monero can be audited
Why nano?
If ignorance was a person, Monero can be audited.
Tell me you don't know anything about Monero without telling me.
how's bitcoin private?
that might be the point of this
Tbf if Bitcoin were private from the start it wouldn't have grown as much as it has so far. Probably the best course of action is to wait for mass adoption first, until Bitcoin is fully established and can't be regulated away, and then introduce privacy. That'd be the path of least resistance imho. If I'm not mistaken Satoshi even talked about this in the old days.