Interesting article about the future of BTC and Monero. I know a few markets are using it now and it's gaining traction pretty fast but I think we should be moving to this as a standard as soon as possible.
OB2 are implementing / have implemented Alt Coins right? That would be the holy grail.
Link to the article below
http://cryptoizzy.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-bitcoin-flaw-monero-rising.html?m=1
part 1
The Bitcoin Flaw: Monero Rising By Izzy Otomakan
I recognize the irony that barely a few months after I shared The Power of Money: A Case for Bitcoin I am now releasing this piece - critical of Bitcoin. I wrote TPOM largely because I was fed up with people and institutions claiming Bitcoin was a fraud, ponzi scheme or bubble. It is none of those things. It is however, in a critical respect, over.
Bitcoin has been beaten[1].
We don’t need to wait any longer for further evidence of this fact.[2]There is sufficient evidence now. At this point, what we see playing out is largely pantomime - as governors of the status quo introduce more mechanisms to increasingly neuter Bitcoin and enforce control over it – whether the general public is aware of it or not. Bitcoin has been compromised as the standard bearer for cryptocurrencies, and the wound is mortal.
I recognize this may sound outlandish, so please allow me to explain.
No matter what anyone may try to convince you of, the single most historic purpose of blockchain hasn’t to do with smart-contracts or disruption of the wire-transfer industry. Those are elements of secondary importance at best – and in proportional value to the larger purpose, pale by comparison. The historic purpose of Bitcoin is that it strives to be the highest quality money[3], and as such enables modern society to peacefully and effectively throw off the shackles of a corrupted system of unsound money that poisons everything it touches.
I spent time in The Power of Money discussing the 3 elements that are required for something to be successfully used as money. These may have been familiar to many already exposed to modern academia’s core economics curriculum. But this is where I went wrong. There are other rules necessary for ‘sound money’ besides those three. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before I was informed of my oversight by several in the Monero community[4]. I had missed a critical element that contributes to something’s ‘moneyness’ and this makes all the difference. Whether it was intuition, luck, serendipity or some combination that I included an addendum which discussed a cryptocurrency which contains this feature I don’t know – I’m just glad that I mentioned it.
This 4th attribute of sound money is fungibility, and is an aspect that while subtle enough to escape notice (as it did with me), is also critical to determining whether a money is ‘sound’ or not. The repercussions for money not being fungible are significant, despite potentially being delayed for a time. But first, a definition:
Fungibility is a feature of money which declares that any transactional unit of the money is entirely indistinguishable from any other transactional unit of the money.
This has never really been a problem when using physical things like gold as money. After all, gold can always be melted down, and carries no recoverable history in itself to tell you where it’s been or who has held it.
But what if I could tell you with 100% certainty that a particular gold piece was kept by Napoleon Bonaparte as a good luck charm? That gold piece would surely be worth far more than the ‘average other’ gold piece that had no such impressive history. In a similar vein, what if I told you that another particular gold piece was used to launder drug money across the U.S.-Mexican border? Once the novelty of its association wore off, you might realize that because that gold was used in committing a crime, government officials could seize it at any time. You might in this case value it lower than an otherwise unburdened gold piece.
What these two examples show is that if a unit of money has an identifiable history associated with it, it can be 'different' from other units that don't share that history. As such, different units of a single money type may have significantly different values associated with them. For a money to attain fungibility, it cannot contain a history of its use. This definitionally means that all transactions (current, past, and future) using the money must have the ability to be truly anonymous. Which leads us to a critical point:
In order for money to achieve and maintain fungibility, it must maintain its anonymity.
Many people get nervous at the notion of anonymous money - feeling that it somehow implies that they will be viewed as engaging in criminal behavior. This is a due to a misunderstanding that may be addressed and corrected. We are not seeking anonymity of money for any purpose other than to ensure the currency is fungible. It has nothing to do with wanting to buy drugs or launder money. Anonymity is a purely technical requirement for money to actually be fungible – and without the trait of fungibility, the soundness of the money is imperfect and ultimately doomed to fail.
And this is where Bitcoin’s flaw presents itself.
Bitcoin, when it was launched, did have some measure of anonymity, and by extension, fungibility. It’s method for achieving this though was anonymity by obscurity – namely, no one was expected to try and figure out how to connect real-world people with public key wallet addresses – certainly not once the transactions began to become complicated. Your privacy was kept by the ‘needle in the haystack’ approach – namely your transaction of hash codes (the needle) was to be lost in a sea of other codes (the haystack).
But that has changed.
There already exists technology to ‘decipher’ the public blockchain – and it’s getting more accurate with each passing day. For those at the helms of government (and money) institutions, they sit in a sea of associative information. Everything from names/addresses of Coinbase users to geolocation’s of those same people’s whereabouts (by tracking cellphones) to voice and facial recognition algorithms - all ensure that the ability to attach names and details to most Bitcoin transactions (or similar-types of blockchain) are but a matter of time. All it takes is one vulnerability in the information chain for someone’s digital identity to be compromised, opening up entire financial (blockchain) histories to be deciphered.
How would you feel if you were required to print, in legible block letters, your full name on every dollar bill before you spent it?
I’m guessing not very excited by the prospect.
Now what if I told you that in addition to your name, it was also your home and email addresses?
A little weirder, right?
Although it’s not advertised, to those with the proper technology– this is basically what can happen when transacting in Bitcoin. Do not be lulled into a state of false security by the fact that these abilities to ‘decipher the blockchain’ haven’t been made widely known. It takes only a little bit of research to realize that the identity security of Bitcoin (the ‘anonymity by obscurity’ feature) has been compromised.
For those who would seek to undermine cryptocurrency as an alternative to Fiat, it is not in their best interests to announce to the world that they have ‘cracked the code’. Did the British announce to the Germans in WWII that they had solved the mystery of the ENIGMA encryption machine? Of course not. In fact, they hoped that the Germans would continue using the ENIGMA machine, as so long as this was the case the British could maintain a strategic advantage.
Why Monero?
Currently, there are a handful of coins that claim to be private or anonymous. There are also functions like coin-mixers that serve as anonymizing services. Do not be fooled into complacency with these – they all have limitations, and this essentially comes down to a critical difference between Monero and these other coins.
All traditional blockchain coins (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, etc.) create transactions that are born as public and broadcast to everyone. If you want to have a private transaction in those coins, you start with a public transaction, then do stuff to it to make it private. Unfortunately, anything done can either be undone, or at the very least identified as having had ‘something’ done to it.