As with anything - what's the user need?

The vast majority of people don't seem fazed about their credit card company knowing they've bought a sex toy. Hell, if Amex offered double-cashback at PornHub I expect they'd be inundated.

For those which do want a bit more privacy, it's dead easy to buy a single-use gift card or cash card. Will that stop the police from tracing you? No, but it makes it harder for a company to build a profile or a spouse to snoop.

So you're left with things which are (rightly or wrongly) illegal. Or incredibly taboo.

Is there a huge market for those things? If so, what are the customer benefits of Monero against cash? Or barter? Or owing a favour?

How easy is it - for both sides - to get set up? I can check cash isn't forged to a high degree of accuracy very easily. How much hard work do I have to do for Monero? How much educating my customers do I have to do? If Monero is restricted to shady stuff - how much of a target am I painting on my back?

It's possible for a company to stimulate and create user need. But that's a lot harder than tapping in to a currently unsatisfied niche.

So I agree that transferring of value and for payments is where the usefulness is, but I think there are two reasons why the adoption is lagging:

1. Most people only care about speculation, and don't care at all what cryptocurrencies are or what they can do. And Monero doesn't do much for these people.

2. Monero is more inconvenient to use than Bitcoin is. SPV wallets aren't possible, so you need to rescan all outputs since you last opened your wallet which is very time consuming. Also you need to wait 10 blocks (~20 min) before you can spend an input, but with other cryptos you can spend a 0-conf transfer immediately.

It's unfortunate because Monero really is a better Bitcoin.

Because blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have a terrible UX and don't scale for shit.

Even if someone hand-delivered a smart-phone that had a Monero wallet on it to facilitate me paying for a banned_book_123, it's still an order of magnitude fussier and slower than, say, using a Visa gift card. Or cash.

And what happens if I somehow fuck up the transaction? It has none of the protections offered by the Visa gift card, with all of the shit-out-of-luck properties of physical cash.

On the other hand, it doesn't scale well and thus cannot be used for digital microtransactions.

Any of the solutions I see for scaling could just be used without having a blockchain-based cryptocurrency on the backend.

Anyhow, when it's this difficult to use, it seems perfectly logical that it only gets used in niche cases where the sender/receiver is willing to eat the cost of all the friction, headache, and risk-of-loss of using it (not to mention price fluctuations). So ransomware, paying for illegal goods... what else is there?

Related: I think the motto of blockchain should be: A Solution Begging for a Problem. All these HN posts about it make me think of "The Herlihy Boy" from SNL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXyW5w5RRFY

There are basically two compelling reasons to use a privacy coin:

- You are doing something illegal and don't want to get caught.

- Powerful actors in the economy are abusing their power, and you want to avoid/prevent that abuse.

Most people are not criminals, so let's focus on the second use-case.

If the government created a 1000% tax on all person-to-person transactions, you can bet nearly everyone would switch off of Venmo or Cash App and onto something like Monero. Or if Apple/Google said "we are now going to monitor your bank accounts, and we will be taking a share of all purchases made from your phone," you can bet people would switch.

Another type of abuse might be political. "We will be compiling a list of everyone who donates to the opposing party."

One might argue that those abuses of power already exist, and are already actively harming the average consumer. For example, Experian's multiple data breaches[0]. But the thing is, the average person doesn't feel very affected. If you came after their Venmo or their bank account, they'd feel it.

In a way, I think privacy coins are already benefiting all of us. The "powers that be" know that it's possible for us to switch, and that we will switch if they push us too hard. So they don't push us as hard as they could.

I also want to point out: MobileCoin. Your premise seems to be that privacy-focused coins aren't in wide use, but I don't think that's a certainty. Signal has deployed MobileCoin to potentially hundreds of millions of people. But they are secretive about their numbers, so we don't know how widely it's really used. I've tried MobileCoin with friends who use Signal and it works great. They will surely beat out Monero and others, simply due to the ease-of-use they've created, and the integration with an already-widely-used private messenger.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian#2015_data_breach

I can see some really good uses for something like Monero - for example, purchasing a VPS anonymously. I would definitely consider that a desirable thing to be able to do. And I know at least a few VPS providers take Monero, so we're all good right?

No. Here's the rub... the problem I see, and what makes Monero less usable to my way of thinking, is the "last mile" problem of getting value in and out of the Monero ecosystem. In my case, specifically, the question of how I transfer value I currently hold - which is almost 100% in fiat currency (USD) - into Monero, in an anonymous fashion. Yes, it can be done. No, it's not easy. And then for the merchant who accepts Monero, they probably have the inverse problem of exchanging their Monero for the desired fiat currency (which you still need to buy most things) without revealing information they may not want to reveal.

From what I've read, some of the online drug markets only take Monero. So it would seem people who realize they need anonymity are indeed embracing it.

As a huge fan of monero, I see several reasons the general public may not want to adopt it:

1. To securely use monero you need to at the very least locally download the blockchain. The secure way of doing this takes fucking forever. You don’t need to do this, but monero’s current users are very security conscious and most tooling/the ecosystem assumes you did this.

2. Most consumers may passively want privacy but they want it to be completely frictionless. Monero has a learning curve, slight difficulty exchanging for fiat, etc. - not frictionless.

3. Monero has whales but it’s not new, so it doesn’t have a big team of centralized devs/investors trying to pump it up. As a result it doesn’t have a lot of marketing or mindshare among people who are less technical.

4. Tail emission is a perfectly valid way to incentivize POW over long time periods, but it scares off moonboys and speculators at the very least (because you’re not purchasing a piece of a fixed size pie).

5. Even if most consumers passively want privacy, in practice it’s not important enough to go out of your way for it. How many technically-able people still transact in cash in developed countries? Yes, I know you Mr HN contrarian might, but I’m talking about the general public.

6. The least important factor is that Monero does have technical drawbacks and limitations. It’s not super important but it may be a reason privacy-conscious people don’t promote it as the end-all-be-all solution to private transactions. Some examples: auditing supply, de-anonymizing correlated transactions, POW, how the blockchain could scale with more transactions, quantum-safety.

I think the fiat on/off ramps are a large problem for Monero, I say this as someone who is a huge proponent of Monero and would like to see adoption rise.

It is only offered on one exchange (Kraken) which inherently limits availability, there are certain vendors who do accept Monero such as Mullvad, and a popular wallet for iOS (CakeWallet) will soon allow you to redeem Giftcards for Monero.

Right now, if I gave my friend 1 XMR, what could he do with it?

They're not widely adopted because they don't solve any problems faced by the masses.

Digital cash needs several features to even start getting adoption:

Stable value

Fast finality, low fees, high throughput

Privacy/anonymity/fungibility

Usability

No cryptocurrencies meet these requirements so far.

Because there's no need for them. Your average person, even your average tech savvy person gets by comfortably with a credit card, checks, cash, and Venmo.

Why would anyone use a less well understood, harder to use, less ubiquitous, and unstable currency?

No one is backing them. Users don't care about how crypto works they care if the product works. Take applepay for example, majority of merchants use it because users want to pay with it. Users don't care about a lecture on privacy and government overreach. Tell them it does 2 tap/click payment and also it manages your cc and then give merchants free crypto payment terminals. You can onlh use it online and only if the site owner cares enough.

Tell site owners "here is a service that manages all payments including a ton kf crypto and converts it to uour local currency, also, users can sign up with us and use as an idp so they don't have to register on your site" .

In other words, an Oauth2 extension for payment processing providers + federated identity and services that provide easy integration into your registration+payment workflow might be lacking. Also, with any crypto it is a PITA to just obtain crypto without KYC laws, so more accessible exchanges that are somewhat anonymous without needing Tor that let you barter cash or other payment with them (not other users, it's a mess) might help too.

I watched as Monero was gradually dropped from a lot of the major exchanges over time with no real reason being provided. Same with zcash. My conspiracy theory is that there is a coordinated effort to make truly anonymous coins unusable.

Is there any nice DEX that lets you trade Solana for Monero and vice versa?

I want to do some commerce in Monero but since Monero is banned on most/all marketplaces, it'd be nice to get it easily via decentralized exchange swapping it for Solana. Doing commerce with Monero and then swapping it back to Solana and later FIAT.

I assume the issue with this setup even if one builds it, you still have to tell the government what happened and how exactly you earned your coins? Or maybe you can build another DEX converting Monero to FIAT 'cash' avoiding such questions?

I think it's because women haven't integrated the technology yet. Please let me explain :)

Women are high consumers of luxury goods across the world. The luxury goods market was estimated at more than $400b in 2020, and increasing. If you take into consideration the fact that a large portion of these transactions undergo banking fees at around 2%, that makes more or less $8bn of revenue turned into smoke, which luxury companies lose to banking intermediaries.

The two main reasons why these companies agree to pay banking fees is insured transactions (the buyer pays with a credit card then fails to reimburse the bank) and convenience (most luxury goods customers carry more than one credit card with them).

Pseudo-DeFi offers a good replacement to the first cost (insurance). However, first, most luxury clients actually don't need the credit card: they simply cannot pay easily without pulling out a bag of cash (and look like crooks) or use a credit card.

Second, crypto payment is not yet convenient: we need to offer women an attractive, portable and easy to use wallet mechanism that can easily withstand loss/theft of mobile device, easy to top up, and in the correct cryptocurrency that is accepted across luxury brands. Think of it as the iPhone problem: there were many smartphones with a touch screen before the iPhone, but none of them looked attractive.

Once luxury brands solve this problem (or Apple, I can easily imagine Apple solving this problem, because 94% luxury clients have iPhones), in my opinion, crypto payments will take off worldwide and there will be no looking back. They will reduce costs to both sellers and shoppers, which qualifies quite well to the "why" question.

People don’t actually care about privacy. For those that do, they see a differentiation between privacy (for themselves) versus anonymity (for everyone else).

I tried to mine it a few years ago on a couple of machines. The net benefit was close to zero and I realized even if I rented a lot of them, it was simply not worth the hassle. So this is from the "creator's" point of view.

As an user, I simply don't need it. Most of the time I buy physical products so I have to give them my real address anyway (I could set up an alternative way but again too much hassle for almost zero benefit). For these few times when I actually buy digital products, I simply don't care enough and I pay via Paypal. So yes, they can profile me using my Paypal address, but that's the price I'm willing to accept.

As a merchant, I simply wouldn't accept it because of high volatility and related problems. Also, in my country there are certain rules for entities of certain size and I'd need to do additional bookkeeping just for that.

Having worked for a startup designing cryptographic privacy protocols, I think I can say that it's simply not something most consumers are interested in.

Anonymity in particular over pseudonymity only has compelling use cases for frankly, illegal activities. There are others of course, they're just not compelling.

Because there is a small group of people that care enough to use it. Most anti-crypto people do not want anything to do with it. Neutral-crypto people don't see the reason for enhanced privacy, or are afraid it might put them into trouble with regulators.

Pro-crypto people can be broken into different tribes. Bitcoin maxis feel that only Bitcoin is worth using, and they might think the privacy of Bitcoin is "good enough." Ethereum maxis want to use applications and smart contracts for DeFi, escrow, exchanges, lending, stablecoins, and Monero does not support that. Ethereum maxis also feel that privacy is solvable with ZK proofs and private rollups. Then there are other tribes like Solana users who are looking for scalability for games and apps, and don't care as much about privacy.

Over the past 3 years the number of Monero transactions increased 10x. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactions.htm...

Over the past 3 years the number of Litecoin transactions increased 5x. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/litecoin-transactions.h...

What do you mean privacy coins aren't seeing wide adoption? Are you deliberately being wrong on the Internet to have someone correct you to draw attention and increase adoption?

Sometimes something fails at a purchase: a misunderstanding, failed delivery, fraud, bad quality, and/or many other problems. In my experience, in about one of three of my online purchases there was some hitch.

Therefore we need arbitration and the possibility to roll back the purchase. This doesn't always work well in the traditional finance, granted, but not at all for privacy coin schemes.

Without these possibilities people tend to feel that they are doing something risky. They don't trust that they get something of value if they use the privacy coin. They are afraid that they get bamboozled or scammed and have a feeling of powerlessness. This deters people and hurts adoption.

Because few people actually care that much about their privacy. Compare the existence of social networks, which exist for the purpose of people being less private.

The vast majority of people want to purchase things as simply and cheaply as possible. And that's going to mean not paying a premium to purchase their money from other people. And since they'd be buying it via their existing non-anonymous means, it wouldn't do anything anyway.

If an economic system already existed, so that people could receive their paychecks in a cryptocurrency and spend it freely at any store, they'd accept that. But anonymity isn't going to be all that much of a draw for anybody who is used to making purchases already via non-anonymous means. The only people who feel compelled to do so are those purchasing things illegally -- which just makes people who would want to purchase things legally even less interested.

tl;dr: Privacy advocates put a lot more weight on anonymity than most people do.

Because you can just use Tornado cash to anonymize Ethereum, and then you still have full access to the gamut of tokens, stablecoins and applications running on Ethereum.

Because the moment you use it, you are on their radar. The arrest of one of its developers was telling, who knows what terms he agreed to.

Very easy, because anonymity was never the point of cryptocurrency - it's all about ease of manipulation and Monero is the "outcast" because it can't be tracked and manipulated.

This is a case where the cryptocurrency world wants "anonymity on paper, but not that much anonymity"

I don't see the value in it. Cryptocurrency in general is far riskier and more costly than I am willing to put up with unless there's a benefit that makes the risk worthwhile.

When I want to do pseudoanonymous transactions, I have a wide variety of ways to do that which appear to be lower risk.

> I consider Web3/NFTs to be a scam

Not all NFTs are the same or even JPEGs. 90% of them are useless though.

The blockchain domains are the only valid NFTs that cannot be right-click saved and are useful.

> the only utility I see in cryptocurrency is the anonymous and decentralized transfer of value.

> However interestingly the coins that do this well like Monero are not seeing wide adoption.

The regulators would like you to pick one trait of (not so) 'anonymous' or (not so) 'decentralized' cryptocurrencies.

Those that can fully guarantee both decentralization and privacy are the privacy coins like Monero, MobileCoin, Grin, Zcash, etc (To some extent Litecoin with mimblewimble privacy) which will basically be banned from exchanges as they are attractive to money laundering, illegal activity, ransomware and payments between criminals and scammers. No legitimate business wants to be associated with that, hence why they haven't got any wide spread legitimate adoption.

But they all do have widespread adoption with illegal activity.

Well it's quite obvious isn't it? If you explain to the general population what it is and how it is used then I'd say most relate to criminal activity or tax avoidance.

Us tech-savvy we know there are probably a few privacy minded people using it honestly.

Can my mom get started with it in under 5 minutes? If not, it will never see wide adoption.

It was never about the transfer of value (anonymous or pseudonymous) , it was always about price increase. Monero as a concept is too similar to Bitcoin, hence the story being sold lacks uniqueness.

The State is hostile to privacy-coins. Its kind of astonishing that the State is not hostile to all crypto as it seeks to separate money from state. Back in the olden days, I thought bitcoin would go to zero because of how the Feds neutralized the Liberty Dollar, this flaw in my modelling probably cost me $100m :(

(Liberty Dollar founder was convicted of "making, possessing and selling his own coins" which were either silver coins or paper-notes backed by metal)

fwiw I think NFTs will be a big deal b/c they will unlock experiences. If we ever move to a Metaverse-type system, this will enable the creation of uncopyable digital experiences (can't just rip an mp3/mpeg)

> Monero are not seeing wide adoption Because it us marketed with an actual use and not as a way to make money

Lack of fiat on ramps

The only answer is this: they are much harder to use.

Privacy against who? I don't particularly care if Visa / Mastercard know where I'm shopping.

HN is notoriously very anti-crypto as a community for valid reasons. While asking this question to crypto maximalists isn’t going to get an ideal answer, you’re not likely to get it here either for different reasons. Too much bias.

To answer your question, as others have mentioned very few people actually care about privacy vs finding another hedge against inflation.