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The author uses outdated stats and a single adoption metric, missing the real data.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

• TornadoCash had exactly 4637 withdrawals in January 2022⁸.

• Monero had more than 730K+ transactions during the same period⁹.

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