Monero is used for criminal activities, not Bitcoin. How do I know? I monitor crime, mostly but not exclusively drug crime, on Tor's hidden services: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ Monero is the cryptocurrency of choice.

Not all crime is drugs.

Most of it is tax and sanctions evasion.

What is that hidden service scanner showing with regards to monero?

The majority of the criminal activity on the Tor darknet is mediated by hidden services listed by that scanner. You can visit those services (using the .onion URLs) and see that Monero (XMR) is the preferred cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is sometimes used for hosting, etc., but Monero exists to avoid Bitcoin's security weaknesses and the criminals are well aware of this advantage.

This is the same, nonsensical argument against monero that is used against end-to-end encrypted messaging. "app of choice for criminals" "makes enforcement harder" etc.

It completely ignores the benefits of Monero. Crime exists. Its not going anywhere. It is not societies job to make the crime fighter's job a walk in the park. Crimninals use cars to commit crimes, we don't outlaw cars. They use masks, the store sells masks.

The benefits of a global, decentralized and truly private and free medium of value exchange would be massive to the average person, but deterimental to those in power so they must use FUD to squash it.

How has it not been a store of value?

It's a store of value in the sense that it has a non-zero price at any given moment, but when people say that one of the functions of money is to be a store of value, they mean that its value must be reasonably stable so that its future usefulness is predictable.

A store of value is an asset with as close to 0% volatility in price as possible.

Bitcoin is a speculative asset: it has very high price volatility. It is not a store of value in the proper term.

Over the past year,

Bitcoin lost 10.8%

Gold gained 60.0%

> A store of value is an asset with as close to 0% volatility in price as possible.

You just proved his point. In this example, bitcoin's volatility is closer to zero than gold's. Thus, by the quoted definition of "store of value", then in this particular time frame (it would be very different going back 5, 10, 15 years), bitcoin is the better store of value.

qed

It has an extremely volatile profile. You might as well stick your money in the SP 500 and call it is a currency.

It does go down by double-digit percentages from time to time though, which is really inconvenient if you want to, say, buy a house today or tomorrow.

There's a reason people still use USD, EUR etc. and not fractional ETFs to pay and get paid.

And when it goes down the answer is to buy the dip. If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments. As people get older, they should be moving large amounts of equities into bonds to lock in their gains.

There is a reason people still have things like checking and savings accounts and CDs.

> If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments.

That’s exactly my point.