FCMP is being worked on by kayaba who has delivered in the past.

Development is active, but unfortunately slow due to the limited number of developers and incompetence within the community. Unlike BTC and ETH, which have significant financial incentives, Monero relies solely on community-funded initiatives, which are infrequent and unreliable. Monero tends to attract hobbyist developers because of this who lack the motivation to deliver timely results, treating the project as a mere experiment to tinker with.

For example, Monero has not seen a proper DEX release in years, with projects like Haveno being complete failures with barely any volume and a basic AMM DEX has been in development for over two years by the so-called revered kayabanerve without any mainnet release - quite literally a Uniswap clone taking over 2 years without any solid results - how sad!

Monero only serves as an illegal tool to facilitate crime online

Well, that’s provably false :) I pay for hosting and domain of my instance with Monero, quite sure this is legal. You can prove yourself wrong by paying for something legal with Monero, if you want.

until it will be regulated by our governments (hopefully this happens soon).

They already try to do that, don’t they? I wish them to have as much success as they had (and have) with banning drugs. They can’t really stop Monero (unless they force people into whitelisted internet, or find a critical bug in the software).

Monero fails to be a medium of exchange that is widely accepted, except for crime and extremely niche cases that will eventually be regulated to oblivion.

This is not a valid argument… There’s no “medium of exchange” that is accepted everywhere (even US dollar). Zimbabwean dollar is also not widely accepted, yet I suspect you would call it a currency. You can argue (and you would be correct) that it is not widely accepted, but you can’t say that it’s not a currency because of that.

Neither is Monero a store of value. As proved by past price history, its extreme volatility and reliance on the price movements of BTC/fraudulent cryptocurrencies means that when they eventually fall, Monero will follow. No one on this planet would save or transact in a currency with extreme volatility that could mean losing half the fiat value of your money over night.

This is an even more invalid argument… How many fiat currencies have failed, how many had hyper-inflation? And yet again I suspect you would call them currencies. And people transacted and saved in them.

Monero has a tainted reputation

I guess in some sense it’s true. But that’s part of a bigger problem. People need to understand that just because some government labels person a criminal, does not mean that they have actually done anything bad or are a bad person. My country considers me, and many more people like me, criminals - because we don’t want to go to a war and die for a Nazi regime… They freeze our bank accounts for that as well (and yes, Monero fixes that). I’m sure you consider me a bad person for that and would rather see me dead or at least my money confiscated, but oh well - I don’t.

It uses old blockchain architecture that only allows one block every 2 minutes with limited transactions that can barely handle the transaction throughput of Visa or Paypal.

This is being worked on, right now stress test is conducted on stagenet and results are being used to improve scalability :)
There’s always an option to introduce L2s, if they will ever be needed, etc. It’s just not a priority right now because in the current state the network can handle order(s) of magnitude more transactions than it has now.

You have to sync the blockchain worth hundreds of gigabytes, which is continuing to grow infinitely, to run your own node. In the future, normal people won’t even be able to run any node as the size of the Monero blockchain grows extremely large. It will rely on data centers and centralized entities like Bitcoin making the network vulnerable to attacks.

You can sync a pruned node, which take around 70GBs now, that’s less than some modern games. If that ever becomes a problem, a pruned node can sync an even smaller percentage of total blockchain to make it viable for more people to self-host.

Also, unlike Bitcoin or other transparent blockchains, you have to scan the entire history of Monero that can take hours if you have unluckily stored your money in it long ago. Imagine waiting hours at the cashier register waiting for the blockchain to sync so it can register that $5 of Monero that you stored years ago!

With FCMPs we will have a new type of private key, that you can share with a remote node to scan the blockchain for your transactions, without a significant loss of privacy :)

Monero is centralized

Well, I guess this argument is valid (just as much as it is valid with other cryptocurrencies). But you can always fork. People didn’t like where BTC was going, BCH was forked. If people won’t like where XMR is going, XCH (or whatever) can be forked :)

I will provide FOUR irrefutable arguments against Monero below.

Dunno, seems quite refutable to me 🤷

If you have decided it’s not for you, why are you here?

Chain analysis companies have proved that almost all of Monero’s usage is crime-related darknet activity. Ransomware, drugs, CP, and all the worse things you can imagine are used strictly with Monero in mind.

This is not skepticism. This is bullshit, plain and simple. Unless you have behind-the-scenes knowledge that the public does not currently possess, there is zero evidence to suggest that almost all of Monero’s usage is crime-related. As of 2024, the IRS has still not paid out their final bounty for a tool to trace Monero transactions, and almost all spokespeople for chain analysis companies (some of which I have personally talked to) say that Monero is effectively untraceable in the majority of cases. As such, I don’t see how you conjured up this statement unless you have a specific distaste for Monero and no sense of obligation to speak truthfully. Please point to a source where chain analysis “proved” the majority of Monero usage is illicit. Even if we take at face value that Monero is the currency of choice for many criminal rings, there still needs to be evidence of actual numbers related to the criminal volume versus total Monero volume. Some organizations have tried scoping this out, but I honestly know of no source that pins it anywhere near that high. Most place it around the same as USD and BTC at ~1-3%, with some going as high 15%. There is a ton of variability in those figures, and all acknowledge that comprehensive data collection is inherently impossible (criminals don’t report their transactions, and good financial data is hard to collect even for honest participants), and not a single one has ever claimed to “prove” any of those figures.

Hidden amongst all your bullshit (which Bobr has dissected) you do have a few reasonable points

barely handle the transaction throughput of Visa

Firstly that’s a non-sequitur, you don’t need Visa throughput to be a currency, but scalability is a genuine issue in the long term. That will need a 2nd layer technology, probably using sharding or other approach for more parallelism and throughput.

Monero is confusing for average people

Generally true. Any self-custody solution will be more complex than just trusting a bank service, but substantial UI improvements can be made and some trusted simple apps will develop.

Monero is centralized

There is currently a small group of developers and researchers, but they are distributed geographically and not connected except by their involvement in the project. All hosting and communication occurs on multiple platforms, including distributed ones like this one. It’s one of the most decentralized open-source projects around, certainly far better than BTC or ETH for example.

will not be allowed to be hard-forked

Bullshit, no-one can prevent hard-forks. Both source-forks and chain-forks can be created by anyone. That is a concern actually as bad actors can cause confusion.

community can’t decided unilaterally … technical stagnation

It will be the reverse. Unanimity or a centralized foundation would cause stagnation. Monero has had forks in the past, and it will have more in the future. That guarantees technical innovation. Customers will choose their preferred version. It’s a free market for currency innovation.

Monero is successful.

xmr-node.calewallet.com:18081 syncs instantly for me. But i run my own node

What kind of Monero node does it connect to? Did you try a different one?
For example in my experience with the desktop wallet is that syncing through I2P send to be generally extremely slow, it did not complete in hours after being unused for a few months.

Vibes

Oh, my bad 😣