Monero, a fix to big data and myself?
By: John Rudolph
Tags: Monero, Cryptocurrency, Privacy, Big Data, Vulnerability

This is an opinion piece only. None of this is investment advice, nor should you take some solely from a Medium article. I would categorize this as dumb people’s self-help.

I made my first Monero transaction this week, after about 8 months of listening and reading Monero content and about 2 years of watching the blockchain space as a whole from afar. The privacy-focused cryptocurrency became appealing to me when I began to realize my own vulnerability and society altogether. Be warned though, I’m no developer or a tech guy, nor do I understand much of how blockchain actually works. My understanding is that it mimics a ledger’s functionality, debits and credits. The only difference is no centralized middleman is needed to record those debits and credits. Good enough for me coming with a mundane finance background.

My investment thesis in Monero is quite simple: Monero technology is private, the community espouses privacy, and the world will slowly begin to see the value in privacy. The current institutions, companies, and nation states have no real incentive to give it to us. We have to take it for ourselves.

Privacy? I never thought it was necessary — this coming from someone who thought Google’s “don’t be evil” slogan made perfect sense (I was a little teenager back then forgive me)! What has changed? My evolution is inspired from listening to people who understand the algorithms of these big tech companies and my own understanding of how feeble our human brains are. The part about human vulnerability took me many years to learn, by mostly making really dumb mistakes. I deleted Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram in early 2019 — a decision that has made me marginally happier. My mind is no longer focused on what 150 other people are doing during their day, instead I’m focused on my own values, how I can be productive and conquer my own struggles.

What does private money have to do with big-data algorithms and my marginal happiness gain? Incentives. Why does Facebook and Snapchat produce algorithms that attempt to hold our attention? More attention gets more advertisements which leads to more money. It’s a resources game, and our attention is the target. Privacy, actually privacy I mean, should negate this type of incentive structure. I think everyone has had at least one creepy experience of searching something on one site and then it being advertised to you on a different website. I tend to think of that example thriving but on a much larger, subliminal scale with social networks and commerce as the facilitators. Something like a privacy-themed blockchain seems like a necessary, if not crucial step in the right direction. Preventing algorithms that are smarter than us from holding our attention is akin to taking back our individuality.

I bought some bitcoin and ether in early 2019 (somehow good timing), and my third asset is Monero. These communities differ in the values they profess. From what I gather, Bitcoin is an anti-inflationary hedge against the current monetary policy, while Ethereum is attempting to be a global settlement layer for both monetary and non-monetary transactions. Each of these communities also value privacy, but it’s not their first and foremost concern. While it may seem contradictory to some to invest in Bitcoin, Ether, and Monero, I see how these communities value privacy as a spectrum. Bitcoin has CoinJoin, Ethereum has Tornado Cash, but the chains themselves are not private (they are pseudonymous, which can still lead us to be targeted). Anyone can look up the previous block’s transactions and potentially trace IP addresses. To achieve the goal of creating a technology that makes it impossible (or at least unbelievably difficult) for people’s attention and thoughts to be shaped and warped by algorithms of nation states and tech companies, privacy should be the first and most important value of its community.

Does privacy have to be apart of every single transaction we make as humans? Absolutely not, and I know that world would look insane. Just like a spectrum of privacy exists, so does the spectrum of identity. We need identity in our lives to form groups and relate with one another. So I think these technologies and communities can work and achieve their own missions without killing each other off.

So when and how did privacy become such an important value to me? It was about four years ago when I started to see it. The real ahah moment for me, quite honestly, was when I realized how stupid I am. I looked back at the crazy shit I’ve posted on the internet in the spirit of impressing others. It wasn’t complete virtue signaling or politics posting, but just looking at some of it I couldn’t really get a sense of why I put that material out there. I didn’t get a sense of how it related to who I am. And if I couldn’t get a sense of why it was out there, I’m left to reason the attention economy made me do it and that I am a weak person. Hint: we all are vulnerable.

On a big picture scale, polarization is at an all-time high (which is great for people attempting to hold our attention) in the United States. If your transactions are private, no one, including governments and large technology companies, can try and warp your brain with sophistication.

If and when people wake up to the fact that they aren’t that smart and are vulnerable entities, they will begin to see the value of privacy. The next step in that realization is to follow and try out technologies that espouse the value of privacy. It didn’t take much convincing for me after listening to the Monero’s community podcasts like Monero Talk and Coffee chat (which I highly recommend looking up on Youtube (go figure)).

As I said in before, I am not tech person. I built a computer when I was 12 and that’s it. My brain has been warped by the powers that be. From that perspective, the potential for another privacy-focused blockchain to gain traction, perhaps one that is more programmable or even one that is deemed more secure and private is possible, perhaps even likely. But until that becomes apparent, and smart tech people start saying the X project is more secure and private, and therefore better for stupid people, I won’t move my Monero. I will try to learn and absorb as much content as I can and hope that this path of iterations will lead us to freedom.

Links to Monero Channels that I listen to: