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I believe that you're extremely qualified in math and cryptography. But thinking that cryptocurrencies are all p2p, and that Bitcoin dominates the market because they don't know this one simple thing, are both telltale signs of a novice. They're mostly centralized scams, and the concerns you're bringing up have been discussed to death.
Monero is a great example.
You're correct that it was originally forked off of Bytecoin, which had a premine. So Bytecoin was not peer-to-peer, because one user (the issuer) had a different set of rules than everyone else. If you had invested in centralized Bytecoin, you would have lost money because it was not p2p. They had to start over!
The problem with relying on "actual cryptography" for privacy is auditability, like I mentioned above. When there was a bug in Bitcoin that allowed someone to give himself a bazillion BTC, we were able to catch and revert it immediately. If there is a bug like that in Monero, we won't know until after it's circulated as much as the premined Bytecoins did.
I mean, Satoshi mined his ~1000000BTC, but from a functional perspective I don't see how that's different from just having it hardcoded in the genesis block (or equivalent in another system). It definitely doesn't make Ripple BitConnect, or one of those janky "stablecoins".
It's a problem, sure. If you want auditability at the expense of any guaranteed privacy, again, Ripple. It's is totally transparent, assuming you keep a backup of all the old closed ledgers. And uses computing power more comparable to an old-fashioned bank account than to Bitcoin.
It's never been my main squeeze, but I've dabbled since the early days. Do with that what you will.
Having posted the code ahead of time, and making the Genesis block not spendable. Monero (not Bytecoin) had a similarly p2p launch, but we can't measure how concentrated its wealth is.
I got a ton of free Ripples for free when it launched because it was not p2p, but I agreed to test it. I ended up selling them for a considerable amount of virtually pure profit. Aren't they still using centrally assigned Validators? With that much centralization, they could use virtually no computing power at all.
But it's a reasonable point - guaranteed privacy or guaranteed auditability? For your network traffic, are you bouncing it through an onion route for which the peers aren't required to save records - like Tor? I certainty don't think Monero is centralized or a scam, FWIW. Breaches of privacy are internalized to the users, while a breached supply limit would end the coin.
Honestly I don't recognize your username, but since you're privacy focused I assume you just change it. It's been a long time. ❤️
On a bit of investigation, they run a small number and have endorsed some, but there's many more that you could tell your own node or validator to trust. What the exact interconnection is it's hard to say from just some searching.
The lower computing requirements come from no mining, and no by-default storage of irrelevant historical data. A bank account with only one "node" and no internal network communications going back and forth would be a lot leaner yet, though, so it's not the exact same thing.
Yep, exactly. There's no real substitute for it if you want to use the same internet as everyone else.
It's cool that my instance let me sign up with just an essay instead of going through all the hoops you usually have to, although we're unsurprisingly having the very start of a spam problem.
I do, and it has, but I hate to say I can't be sure we met. When I started out it was small and obscure but not name-basis small.