Heard the news that Binance delisted Monero recently, in a perfect world this should make the price go higher as people should understand that the pressure from governments, etc, forcing an exchange to delist a token specially created to make transactions untraceable, means that it does what it's sought out to do and does it well. Anyone remember zcash? Can't believe it used to be tradable 1:1 with Bitcoin back in the day. While I'm not a geek to understand the privacy coins under the hood, my understanding was that zcash's algo was a mix of different algo's and that they've "promised" that no one has the code to decode it, while Monero can prove that no one can decode it or to that effect.
Now hey, don't get me wrong. I don't condone the use of illegal activities using any currency and I'm not going to bore you with the usual "hurr durr dollar is still the most used currency for illegal activities" that gets splattered all over twitter every time this is brought up. No shit, most people don't use crypto so the same goes for illegal activities, but if it was more common place eventually people are going to start using these more and more. It's the same with these chat apps, people who wanna use them for illegal activities go and use the ones that secure the messages end-to-end and make sure no one can spoof them, some times it works, some sometimes it doesn't as I remember a chat app called Wickr that was used by drug dealers, etc, got hacked and the police found themselves having a field day knocking on dealer's doors.
Aside from delisting, this is also something that makes me think is why currencies such as our Hive here are difficult to list. As @crimsonclad has often pointed out, exchanges always want people to hold accountable in case things go wrong, they need the KYC and team or spokesperson when dealing with exchange listings. They're not used to listing truly decentralized currencies run by independent block producers and a diverse community, aside from Bitcoin and maybe a few that were launched in the same era as the initial altcoin boom, but they have their early adopter advantage and volume that the exchanges care the most about. We ought to really put some more effort into generating volume for hive ourselves on exchanges but it's this thing where we're constantly at odds against the exchange, it's like being in the casino where each trade you do decreases the odds that you end up profiting off of the trades due to fees. We have it too good here where we can just convert or trade hbd for hive securely and without any fees against one another.
What we deem strengths, people out there deem as weaknesses at this current point in time. It's sad but that's how it is. Let me give you a scenario, imagine I had reached out to say any of the thousand of laid off people these past few years and been like
"hey, I have this great unique idea for a game, ecosystem and brand. I'll provide the marketing, the community, you provide the team and we'll give us 40% of the tokens, we hold 10% for the exchange"
instead of
"hey, I have this great unique idea for a game, ecosystem and brand. I'll organize the team and workload, you take care of this section, someone else from the community takes care of this, we find someone to build the game from scratch, hire a few freelance artists and then see what the community thinks, but we give ourselves no tokens to launch it fairly."
Which one do you think will get a binance launchpad + listing? Duh, the one where the exchange either gets a ton of tokens or a ton of $.
Dex's should get more usage, I know Khal often talks Thor and there's a lot of volume on ETH for the big trades and some volume on BSC for other trades but that latter is linked to the exchange so is it really decentralized? Not sure, I haven't looked at the validators/block producers but I wouldn't be surprised if it was aching to what it looks like on Tron or EOS. Keep in mind that exchanges want this to go on like this forever, they are thriving at the moment with the fees and trading against costumers and everything you can think of, don't give them that power, always look if you can trade currencies on dex's instead.
One thing to remember, they may delist us, they may ban us and even make us illegal to use just cause there may be a few bad apples here and there doing shady or illegal things. Are we going to have our first usage of hbd to buy firearms? Okay bad joke there, and again, I don't condone it, but what I do want is freedom. That's what Satoshi wanted and why he created Bitcoin and blockchain technology. There's going to be an interesting fight in the near future between a dystopian future where you're constantly being controlled and tracked and one that offers freedom and privacy. For now people are just chasing the money but eventually, it's going to come at a priceless cost.
I'll leave you with one of my recent favorite videos by exurb1a.
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