One thing is clear: the golden age of decentralized Monero liquidity is upon us. The way it was supposed to be all along. Liquidity isn't about whether you can buy Monero. If every country on Earth banned Monero, and every exchange delisted it, anyone would still be able to trade Monero anywhere in the world, with only an internet connection. Liquidity is how much of it is available at any given price.
All of crypto has relied on this crutch of centralized liquidity that essentially destroys the value proposition of this alternate financial system by putting control of our assets and binding us to a third party's rules when it comes to your privilege to engage in an exchange. Many focused on protocol-level decentralization while ignoring the elephant in the room: centralized liquidity.
Centralized exchanges cater to every whim of central control: regulators, surveillers, law enforcement, and the state. CEXs will do anything that is asked of them in order to have permission to remain in business, including doing background checks, identity verification, freezing of your funds to be held for ransom. This creates a fundamental contradiction: a censorship-resistant asset traded on censored platforms. If the effect of any cryptocurrency is not to give autonomy and power to the user over their own finances, then what is the point?
Not only does KYC not actually prevent crime or money laundering, it also puts user's safety as risk as we've seen time and time before. Exchanges have the responsibility to guard their customers' data, an obligation that often times, exchanges are unable to meet reliably. Customer's data gets hacked, stolen, or leaked, and then sold and exploited. Scam emails, or worse, kidnappers show up at your doorstep demanding your hardware wallet.
monerowalled
4.85 mXMR to go until this unlocks for everyone
100% of every unlock goes to the author, wallet-to-wallet.
This is how govs always work. Crypto began to centralize around CEXs because of the gov controls around banking and Swift (and gov controls around dispute resolution, escrow, insurance, litigation, etc). Then gov captured those CEXs by threat of regulation/enforcement or the promise of favoritism if they play ball. Not to mention how govs can and will put a gag order on speaking out about their coercion of your corp. KYC is control. Always has been always will be. Repeal the Bank Secrecy Act. We could alternatively just make it irrelevant if monero gets big enough.
I'm probably going to write an article down the road about how regulation and anti monopoly action actually just empowers gov to perform actions that tip the scales in the favor of their friends in industry. Or maybe just an article on How to Get Rich as a Public Official (although I don't want to give any ideas to the really dumb ones).
I love how you bring up that something like retoSwap is necessary for fiat to Monero because there is no way to cryptographically prove a transfer from a bank or an envelope full of cash.
If you have any cryptocurrency at all, then getting Monero from that cryptocurrency is not particularly difficult. If you have nothing but fiat and have no cryptocurrency at all, getting Monero is harder because there is no trust in fiat.
For what it does of getting Fiat to and from Monero, RetoSwap does incredibly well.
There's actually a ton of trust in fiat, but that system of trust is also backed by the enforcement of the banking cartel. Have you heard of the Eurodollar System? Popularized by Jeff Snider in discourse, it's a system by which banks create and transfer US dollars outside of the US regulated banking system. It's estimated to be larger than the US regulated banking system and it has little to no outside visibility into it by the public or gov. When they switched LIBOR for SOFR it killed a lot of the valuable information about the Eurodollar market contained within LIBOR.
In a bit Thorchain will incorporate XMR. There won’t be any problem anymore to swap permissionless