On P2P payments from their FAQ: “While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete.”
How about, no? How about me paying €50 to my friend for fixing my bike doesn’t need to be intermediated, KYCed, and blocked if they don’t approve of it or know who the recipient is? How about it’s none of the government’s business how I split the bill at dinner with friends? This level of surveillance is madness, especially coming from an app that touts “privacy” as a feature.
GNU Taler is a trojan horse to enable CBDC adoption. They are the friendly face to an absolutely terrifying level of government control in our lives funded by the same government that tries every year to implement chat control. Imagine your least favourite political party gaining power. Now imagine they can see and control every transaction you make. No thanks.
I frankly wouldn’t recommend Bitcoin either for stability or privacy, IMO it’s fallen by the wayside in terms of the technological development of cryptocurrency. Chains like Monero or Ethereum have privacy-enforcing cryptography built right into them.
Bitcoin’s protocol has not meaningfully changed in 15 years. In terms of stability, in the crypto space, you literally cannot beat that. It will continue doing its thing so long as a few computers in the world still run the protocol. Those In those 15 years it has never been hacked, never had an hour of down time, took no bank holidays, and has fought off competition from other cryptocurrencies and attempted bans from nation states and world powers. And the supply has remained capped at 21 million coins as promised.
Ethereum is centralized AF. The majority of the supply was sold during the pre-mine, and now that “proof of ownership” runs the network, the risk of a 51% attack is significant. And in PoS systems, you get centralization of wealth over time since you are printing new currency and handing it over to people simply for already owning some, the “work” they have to do to stake is minimal. Unlike in PoW systems, once a 51% attack happens, it can happen indefinitely there there is no imposed cost after the start of the attack. Bitcoin has no pre-mine and has been issued fairly and transparently. The majority of Eth’s nodes are hosted in one of like three corporate datacenters because the hardware required to run a full node has gotten ridiculous. You can say it’s “secure enough” or “decentralized enough”, but not that it’s “more secure” or “more decentralized” than Bitcoin, because it simply isn’t. Their L2s are an absolute mess, some of them are incredibly centralized, Polygon last I checked had 15 nodes controlling the entire network. Meanwhile, you can run a full Bitcoin node on a laptop from 10 years ago and a lightning node on an Android phone. All while still being able to settle a transaction in under a second for a penny in fees with lightning.
Once you start to look at all these coins aside from Bitcoin, all of them, of the ones that aren’t outright scams, have traded decentralization (and therefore security) for transaction speed. Now that Bitcoin lightning is out and mature, transaction speed and chain capacity is no longer the limiting factor. Those other coins have no reason to exist.
Monero is cool, its main pitch is privacy. Bitcoin’s privacy continues to get better, I expect that trend to continue. Bitcoin has a conference like every month, there is a massive pool of dev talent and funding. Lightning was released 5+ years ago, Monero doesn’t even have an L2 and without an L2 it cannot scale, and there’s not even an L2 in the developer roadmap. You can’t put everything on chain forever, and the bigger the chain gets, the more centralized it becomes, period. With no L2, transactions are slow and fees will increase as blockspace competition increases. Lightning can make transactions in under a second for pennies in fees since fees are not tied directly to blockspace.
Well, yes, exactly. That’s the problem. There have been innumerable innovations and improvements in the field over those 15 years, but Bitcoin ossified early and so it’s got none of them.
You’ve got a very inaccurate and skewed view of this. Most significantly, it’s not “proof of ownership,” it’s “proof of stake.” Proof of ownership and proof of stake are distinct technologies that operate in different manners. Ethereum is not proof of ownership.
You’re clearly not very familiar with how Ethereum’s proof of stake system operates because “51% attack” is not meaningful. There’s nothing magical about the 51% threshold in Ethereum’s system of staking. There is a magical threshold at 66%, if you’ve got more than that you can prevent “finality” from happening which will in turn cause some disruption to the chain. But most significantly, it doesn’t prevent blocks from continuing to be processed and doesn’t allow stakers to forge blocks. It’s a highly theoretical attack since no stakers or staking pools are anywhere remotely close to that sort of dominance, and even if they did do that there’d still be mechanisms by which they could be slashed.
Lightning has been an entirely predictable disappointment. The problem is that Bitcoin was not designed to support something like Lightning, and that very feature you touted above - Bitcoin’s complete ossification of protocol upgrades 15 years ago - means it can’t be made to support it. Lightning’s total capacity is $300 million. Ironically there’s thirty times more Bitcoin being transacted on the Ethereum network in the form of WBTC than there is Bitcoin being transacted in Lightning.
If you’re interested in layer-2 solutions then Ethereum’s recent updates have been all about providing better support for that kind of thing, using many cryptographic advances that came along in those 15 years. Some of them incorporate Monero-like privacy systems, even, such as Arbitrum.
Except it’s got L2s, it’s got more smart contract abilties, it’s adding zk rollups, etc. It’s not like it hasn’t improved over that timespan. The stability of the core protocol and widespread consensus required to upgrade it (and the slow speed at which this occurs) is a benefit for something that is meant to be money. It’s maybe less beneficial for the world’s most cutting edge smart contract platform, for example.
They call it proof of stake, but it’s proof of ownership. It’s proving you own coins. That’s it. Edit: I think you thought I was talking about proof of authority?
I will need to look into this more so thank you for bringing this to my attention. Centralization of nodes renders much of this inconsequential imo but still worth looking into for my own knowledge.
You’re right, it was not designed to support an idea that didn’t exist when it was designed. But upgrades to improve lightning have been proposed and made it into protocol and more updates (convenants) are coming down the pipe. Lightning works, it works really well, I use it on a daily basis, the network continues to grow. It works for small transactions and large ones. It takes under a second. Cash app supports it, Coinbase added support for it this year. It’s as decentralized as base chain is, unlike many of Eth’s L2s. The only caveat to lightning for self-custody wallets is solving the “inbound liquidity” problem for onboarding new issues, which is an annoying UX thing but not actually a huge problem imo. Nonetheless, convenants will help solve this and there are other proposals (Ark and Fedimint) which solve this problem in different ways with different trade-offs. It has come a long ways in the past 5 years, I tried it when it first came out and it was a major pain to use, almost all of those pain points have been solved.
This is a good point. This WBTC is being used for DeFi etc, it’s not being used as a currency for transactions. And that’s fine, maybe that’s Eth’s place, certainly there isn’t much interest in using BTCs main chain for more complex smart contracts due to concern about bloat. There are proposals (BitVM etc) and some working implementations with “shared security” from main chain with the smart contracts being hosted in some sidechain/L2/etc. But it’s a dizzying array, we’ll see how that shakes out. I don’t know about Eth’s long-term future as a decentralized platform when centralization continues to increase and a conspiracy, hack, or government pressure on Hetzner and Amazon could impact over half the nodes on the network.
No, there is a distinction here, and it’s a very important one.
If you’re using proof of ownership then there’s no way of penalizing the owners who are validating the chain if they misbehave. That’s somewhat more like what Bitcoin uses, actually - proof of ownership of mining rigs, in a sense. If a Bitcoin miner 51% attacks the chain then after the attack is done they still have their mining rigs and can continue to attempt to attack it if they want.
With proof of stake, the resource in question - the tokens, in Ethereum’s case - are put up as a stake. Ie, they are placed under the control of the blockchain’s validation system, so if the validator tries pulling some kind of funny business their stake can be slashed. Someone who attacks Ethereum has to burn their stake in the process, which would cost them tens of billions of dollars and prevent them from attempting future attacks.
You can own millions of Ether and that’s meaningless as far as validation goes. It’s only once you put them up as a stake do you get “skin in the game.”
You were earlier touting Bitcoin’s lack of protocol upgrades as a key feature. Now it’s performing upgrades?
The problem with Bitcoin’s upgrades is that they’ve made “no hard forks” into a religious tenant, so whenever they try to do anything new they have to squish it in as a soft fork somehow built on top of the existing foundations. The existing foundations aren’t well suited to this kind of thing, though, since they were designed 15 years ago. So it makes for some very labored and inefficient design, like in the case with Lightning.
Layer 2s on something like Ethereum, which was designed from the ground up to support them and which continues to add new features making them more efficient and feature-rich, are far easier and cheaper to work with.
It’s important to call out that nodes in general are not important for validating the chain, it doesn’t matter who’s controlling them. You can run your own node and there’s nothing those other non-validating nodes can do to tamper with your view of the network, the worst they could do is stop sending you updates (which would be obvious and you could then go hunting for replacement feeds).