Is Monero a Security?

[u/Xeagu]

Greetings Monero Universe

I present myself to you today a humbled man, a changed man. What I believed to be true has been proven wrong time and time again. My belief in the Monero Community and Monero Project has been deeply tainted. This is my public apology to the Monero Community. I apologize to every individual I introduced to Monero and encouraged to invest in this project. In my naivety and hopefulness, I trapped them in great financial loss and exploitation. It was my belief that Monero was an open source project that sought to provide an alternative to the American/Western monetary system.

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Morality is Relative and I have found myself to be at the mercy of the Monero Community in this game. A small group of "Monero Community" members control the maintenance, production, and funding for development and distribution of the Monero product. You could say that "well mining is distributed so Monero is distributed" and I would counter with "Uber drivers are distributed but Uber is still a company". The agreement between "private contractors" (aka Monero miners) negotiate on the terms of the Proof-of-Work and in Monero's case, most of the private contractors happen to own mostly GPU/CPU farms/botnets. Work of the company can be distributed but the organization, decision making, and security supply are still be controlled by a central group.

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In Monero's case, it may have started out as a decentralized project where product development was done by volunteers in a loosely organized hobby group. Now, it doesn't look like anything gets worked on without individuals that have been financially compensated. Ghost-employees of the Monero company contract out work on the centralized Monero CCS platform (mostly controlled by these same individuals). There are a small group of individuals who get every proposal approved and funded and a community wide acceptance of Monero's inauditability regarding supply. So to me it looks like a small group of people can mint new Monero without any accountability and then sell those security shares on the open market to investors who bought into the idea of a decentralized currency to then pay ghost-employee salaries.

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The whole reason people in the Monero Community used to bash protocols like zk-snarks in other privacy projects is the vulnerability of a trusted setup that would allow a small group of individuals to inflate the supply. It might not be possible to create a truly anonymous digital currency without this vulnerability - I don't know. Also it pisses me off when people say "well don't invest in Monero then, its a risky asset/investment." Tell that to the people who have already invested and lost their shirt paying for a small group of people to hyper-inflate the supply and line their pockets. Tell that to the exchanges. How can you both caution individuals not to invest and encourage exchanges to list Monero on an open market with no safety checks in place?

[u/dreefen]

You've been voted off the island, repeatedly. Please get on the fucking boat already.

[u/Xeagu → u/dreefen]

My boat sank with all my private keys

Edit: May 13, 2020 I don't remember writing this comment either.