I'm glad I supported the Librem 5 fundraiser. At first Purism seemed to be gimmicky (a few hardware switchs, big deal), but then they continued to take privacy more seriously by supporting coreboot, accepting Monero as payment, and now this.
That's a great write-up about Monero towards the end. The dev is right about Monero's usability being a pain point right now, but with more adoption of services that value privacy, there will be more interest in creating user-friendly ways to use Monero.
Egh, honestly I hope they don't spend much effort on this. They have more than enough work just making a phone that doesn't suck. For their Monero stuff to be helpful, it would need to include the infrastructure to transparently exchange with normal fiat currency. If it doesn't do that, it'll be just another wallet app. That sounds like too tall an order given their funding and existing project of making a phone.
It would be interesting to know the details of the collaboration as well as the plans for the end product. It could be that the Monero devs are doing all of the heavy lifting.
I imagine whatever they are planning just deals with Monero only. And that people will use LocalMonero, Monero ATMs, or exchanges to go in and out of fiat. Monero devs just published multisig for review. I imagine that's a requirement for some exchanges (like Coinbase?) to securely store it before they can offer it.
I don't know much about Monero, but, remembering the lessons from Bitcoin, is it actually feasible to use it on a phone?
- Is running a full node possible on the limited hardware or would the client need to connected to some external server?
- How frequent transactions can Monero support? Bitcon blocks are filling up, resulting in high fees.
Fwiw, as far as I'm aware, monerujo is not actually a "light wallet" because it still must download the transaction outputs set from a remote node and then do the computations to scan for your outputs (with your view key), then cache those. Basically what monero-cli or monero-gui does. I've been asking around the community and we seem to agree to some degree it's more apt to refer to it as a full wallet or some such. Disclosure: partner and lead dev for mymonero
I’m a fan of monero, but transaction fees do not decrease as more transactions occur. There are limits to how big the blocks can grow, and also how quickly they respond to demand, and at the end of the day the transaction price will go up as demand increases.
> 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.
edit: I just found a paper [1] which talks about this issue and a potential solution.
Monero certainly has lots of things that make me excited about it, but it seems there is a downside:
To recieve a payment, 'A' must tell the sender ('B') A's recieve address. Now, this recieve address is never encoded in the block chain, but it is known to everyone who sends 'A' coins.
If 'B' and others who know 'A's recieve address keep track of it and the coins they send, some privacy is not preserved.
Bitcoin & many other crypto curencies "solve" this to some extent by using Hierarchical Deterministic wallets ("HD wallets") were a single secret plus a deterministic "count" is used to generate multiple "accounts", each with it's own receive address.
The problem is that it isn't clear to me Monero has any HD wallet implementations, and I'm not familiar enough with monero to say whether generating lots of different accounts would even be feasible.
I'm a Monero dilettante, but my understanding is that this is not the case - your private key (or some derivative of it) is needed in order to unmask transactions on the blockchain that involve you, so others can't see what you've been up to. See below:
"When you send funds to someone’s public address, what happens is that you actually send the funds to a randomly created brand new one-time destination address. This means that the public record does not contain any mention that funds were received to the recipient’s public address.
For the same reason, the funds that you are sending were not associated with your own public address either in the public record. Therefore, when you send these funds, the public record will not show that the funds originated from your public address and will not show that the funds were sent to the recipient’s public address."
Sure, I'm not contending that the information is exposed in the blockchain, I'm saying that third parties that keep logs of their sends can collude at a later time to produce a more complete picture of the transactions sent to an individual.
Right now avoiding that in monero is difficult. Subaddresses (as linked above) solve some of that, but as there is still a linear time scan increase, I wonder how prevalent their use will be. Will people create a new address for each receive they do? Maybe, maybe not.
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.
It isn't really a rating of mild/hot/atomic advantages, it's one offers fungibility and privacy and the other is a public ledger--they have vastly different design goals that will separate them more and more over time.
Monero is super great but would have trouble scaling to bitcoin levels of transactions. I hope they continue to develop it as people begin to consider it more.
How so? The blocksize and fees automatically adjust. The blockchain will get bigger, but as I understand it, there are some theoretical ways to trim some of it. Supposedly trimming isn't a big priority because the theory is that storage capabilities will grow along with the blockchain.
That's a great write-up about Monero towards the end. The dev is right about Monero's usability being a pain point right now, but with more adoption of services that value privacy, there will be more interest in creating user-friendly ways to use Monero.
I can't wait to get my Librem 5.