Why XMR is gold(en)

You know what’s nice about gold?

  1. can’t be printed;
  2. full ownership;
  3. centuries of stability proof;
  4. anonymous;

BTC reflects fully points 1 and 2; point 3 won’t happen for a long time, however it seems that recently its getting more stable around the 100k USD mark… But what about anonymity? Well, technically, if you mint the bitcoin yourself you are literally just a number on the blockchain, however, the moment you use an CEX or on/off-ramp solution, you are linking these BTC to your IRL identity.

XMR begs to differ from BTC

Recently there’s been a surge in popularity with privacy oriented coins: we have ZEC, the more “commercial” option - not well supported IMHO by ramp solutions, and DASH, which is a lot more accepted, should’t be considered a privacy coin (“CEO” tweets). Finally we have XMR.

XMR is recognized as the coin built from the ground up for privacy. This means, of course, bad actors use it to make transactions bypassing the law and since no law can bend math, it makes perfect sense to not allow it on many exchanges.

But what about gold? Do people consider risky? Even if I were to give Mario 1k USD in gold for some drugs or kill someone, none will ever know, plus I don’t really need to inform the gov that I own this asset - I mean, it can be f*cking molded as a dildo hidden in plain sight - and yet we still invest a lot of money into this asset, and its considered one of the safest assets on this planet.

There’s a difference, however: with (real) gold you can make jewels and cool tech, with crypto.. well, good luck :)

So it’s just for criminals… right?

I will forever remember back in ~2018 when I asked my parents to invest into Bitcoin and they told me that “it’s stuff only criminals use”… Well, back in the day, sure it may have been popular among them, but has now gone mainstream. What if the same happened with XMR? What if people woke up one day from this 1984 dystopia and decide that XMR has actually a use? Actually, the shift may already have started: after Windows 10 end-of-life, some brave soldiers switched to Linux, maybe because it’s free, maybe because it’s private… Some people are also dropping socials, mostly due to “dopamine-detox”, but some also to stop giving data to tech giants.

What now?

After XMR (along with other privacy coins) pumped a nice +300% in a few weeks over the new year 25-26, I believe it’s not too late to invest into this asset: I found a really nice project called eigenwallet, that allows BTC-XMR swaps, and even direct XMR buying via SEPA thanks to DXF (swiss ramp solution) over TOR.

Right now I want to support the development of the project (maybe even get some nice bounties), and who knows, maybe even start putting some money aside into XMR. Well, guess we’ll never know thanks to its privacy!