Skepticism Sunday #1 -- Jul 21, 2024
Despite how bullish i am for monero in general, i have a major concern. Picture the following:
The monero community starts to move heavily into adoption (see what xmrbazaar.com is trying to achieve) and it starts to become widespread, BUT it’s till not officially allowed by governments. In fact, imagine that governments start to realize how bad monero is for their own economics and centralized control, and they start to explicitely ban it and enforce penalties for using it. what about then ?
What about that one random farmer (small business, selling products attending to people’s basic needs to survive), who wants to accept monero to sell his product, he’s going to get bothered by authorities for publicly accepting monero, after getting enough fines, i’m sure he’d actually give up trying to use monero officially.
Going even further down that road, as this would be an attack on the currency itself, what about that one fed guy buying monero (wherever, right, haveno, or whatever CEX) just to find out who’s selling monero, to literally prosecute them for just having monero?
Would Monero always remain a way to transact secretely ? rather than existing it as a way to transact publicly ?
This technology is not even meant to conform to any law, nor any governmental concern to assert their control over the populations, in fact, it is a direct threat to their existing control.
There are plenty of tradesmen working on weekends without reporting it to tax authorities. Common in cities, practically the norm in rural areas. Time spend working doesn’t leave a paper trail and whoever hired them can buy all the materials for “personal use”. Farmers do need to buy supplies, but unless they have John Deer equipment, the harvest amount will not be automatically counted, and it’s trivial to sell some part of it on non-official markets.
I think it all hinges on how fast people get used to using monero “for real” and not only to buy some merch or for other meme purposes. When regulations come down, the people who will be hit the hardest are those bridging between fiat and xmr, because their banking activity can be moderately easy controlled.
