2 Feb 2022 [editorials] [culture]

Sethforprivacy calls out Haseeb Qureshi for spreading Monero FUD with Coindesk Privacy Week piece

Sethforprivacy1 has called out2 Haseeb Qureshi3 for spreading Monero FUD with his recent piece for Coindesk4’s Privacy Week5 titled 4 Reasons Privacy Coins Haven’t Taken Off6:

I don’t usually do threads like this where I take a negative stance on someone elses writing, but there was just far too much here that I staunchly disagree with that needed to be mentioned.7

Seth points out several flaws in the author’s analysis of Monero and privacy, including:

1 - BTC is still the asset of choice [on DNMs]

This is false.

As Seth points out:

The author uses outdated stats and a single adoption metric, missing the real data.

[XMR] has taken almost total dominance on DNMs – up to 84% in 2021 and becoming the only option.

2 - Ethereum-based privacy systems like Tornado Cash have so much uptake in comparison [to privacy coins]

This is also false.

Seth got it right:

The article fails to mention any of the transactional statistics or rise in usage for Monero, and instead points to the “rising uptake” of TornadoCash, a privacy tool on Ethereum that had barely more than 4k withdrawals in January, while Monero had over 700k transactions.

The data is pretty clear:

3 - [internalizing] the costs of privacy on the users who actually care about it rather than forcing everyone to bear the costs of privacy [is good]

Wrong again!

It’s the other way around: optional privacy is harmful to the anonymity sets of participants that opt-in to privacy features.

I fully agree with Seth:

[..] privacy requires buy-in from the whole system [..]

Monero’s privacy by default is a core fundamental value that protects everyone’s privacy. This should not be sacrificed in the name of convenience.

There is more: read the original article6 and Sethforprivacy’s full Twitter thread2 if you need more information to form your own opinion on this matter.

Make sure to keep this in mind when reading Haseeb’s piece:

The last point, and potentially the most objective, is that the author has a vested interest in turning people away from Monero and to Ethereum/Bitcoin, as he is a large investor in many Ethereum/DeFi projects: dcp.capital/portfolio10


  1. https://nitter.net/sethforprivacy 

  2. https://nitter.net/sethforprivacy/status/1488624154714775553#m  2

  3. https://nitter.net/hosseeb 

  4. https://www.coindesk.com/ 

  5. https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/privacyweek/ 

  6. https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/privacyweek/2022/01/28/4-reasons-privacy-coins-havent-taken-off/  2

  7. https://nitter.net/sethforprivacy/status/1488624186692186112#m 

  8. https://dune.xyz/queries/100948/205031 

  9. https://localmonero.co/blocks/stats/transactions/d/30 

  10. https://nitter.net/sethforprivacy/status/1488624184624353286#m