The Case for Private, Programmable Digital Cash

Interesting take, privacy as a baseline makes a lot of sense. Tari’s combination of fungibility plus programmability could be a game changer if adoption picks up.
 
oxren388 said:
Interesting take, privacy as a baseline makes a lot of sense. Tari’s combination of fungibility plus programmability could be a game changer if adoption picks up.
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Agree, one graphic I saw recently shared on X makes it pretty easy to understand how Tari and similar could fit into the crypto ecosystem.

Tari's market cap would have to be 1,300x higher to match Monero's or 11,000x higher to match Solana's. I don't think that's likely in the near future, but if things went well I'd say it's possible.

What I do think is inevitable is a greater focus on privacy in crypto. We are already seeing strong narratives building around it with influential builders and investors pushing it hard. New narratives / metas will mean BIG opportunities for the right projects. Similar to the way memecoins took off a few years back.

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Sorry if off topic but a quick shout out to Bullion Barron for his contributions to the forum back in the day.
It was his analysis that helped me pull the trigger on some NST shares which have turned out to be an awesome investment.
Hat tip to you sir Barron…
 
Bullion Baron said:
It’s been a while since I last posted here... it's been good to come back and see the forum refreshed and under new (mystery ) ownership. It feels like the start of a new phase.

I checked back in partly because metals have been on an absolute tear. Prices are moving, sentiment is changing, and this year I’ve started to lighten my load a little. Not exiting, just trimming. Scaling back toward a core position over the months and years ahead rather than holding everything.

That process has forced me to think again about why I hold what I hold, and where I’m willing to take asymmetric risk outside of physical assets. This post is partly that thinking written down, and partly an invitation for others to share projects they think genuinely respect privacy and fungibility. I don’t hold many crypto positions anymore. In fact, the one I share below is the only one that’s remotely significant for me right now, simply because the opportunity feels too skewed to ignore.

Most people who stack gold or silver already understand that money is not just about price. It’s about freedom, control, and the ability to transact without permission. Physical cash and precious metals gave us that for a long time. You can trade directly, without intermediaries, without surveillance, and without leaving a permanent record.

Digital money was supposed to extend that freedom globally. Instead, most public blockchains became a permanent surveillance ledger. Every transaction visible. Every balance traceable. Forever. Where your coins come from is tracked. Who touched them leaves a trail.

That breaks one of the core properties money needs to function properly: fungibility. One unit should equal another unit regardless of history. Once money carries baggage, it stops being neutral. And once money is no longer neutral, it is no longer free.

In the real world, privacy is not radical. It’s normal. Your bank doesn’t publish your transaction history (to everyone ). Your employer doesn’t see where you spend your salary. The retailer doesn’t know where your cash came from. Crypto flipped that expectation and then seemed surprised when adoption didn't take off.

People don’t want their finances broadcast. Businesses can’t operate that way. If crypto is ever going to move beyond gambling on price, privacy has to be the default again, not something you have to opt into or apologise for.

This is where Tari comes in (MinoTari on CMC).

Tari is built with privacy at the protocol level, not bolted on later. Confidential transactions are the default. From the ground up, the assumption is that users should not leak their financial lives just to participate in the network.

That already puts it in a small group, but what makes it more interesting is how it differs from other well-known privacy projects.

Monero is still the gold standard for private digital cash. It does one thing extremely well: private, fungible payments. But Monero is intentionally conservative and not programmable in the modern smart-contract sense. That makes it excellent money, but limits what can be built on top of it.

Zcash took a different path. It introduced powerful cryptography, but privacy is optional. Most transactions remain transparent. That weakens fungibility and turns privacy into a feature rather than a baseline. It's also not programmable.

Tari sits somewhere else entirely. Privacy is default, like Monero, but the roadmap includes a programmable Layer 2 (testnet next quarter). The aim is not just private money, but private applications, private stablecoins, and eventually private payments between autonomous software agents.

Tari’s lead developer is a core contributor to the Monero protocol. These are builders who have already taken an idea from obscurity to real-world use. They understand privacy at a level most projects simply don’t.

Stablecoins are already one of the largest real use cases in crypto... yet almost all of them leak everything. Who paid who. How much. When. Forever. That doesn’t scale to real-world use. It’s a compliance layer disguised as innovation.

A stablecoin that settles confidentially by default changes the equation. It restores what cash used to do, while keeping instant global settlement. That isn’t a niche feature. It’s a prerequisite for mass adoption.

This becomes even more important when you consider what comes next. The next wave of economic activity won’t just be humans. It will be software. AI agents buying data, paying for services, settling invoices, operating continuously in the background.

That brings me to the investment opportunity (maybe better described as speculation ).

All pricing is USD to keep things easier.

Tari’s market cap is roughly $6M. The current price is around $0.002 per token.

At $0.002, $1,000 buys about 500,000 tokens.

If, over time, Tari were to reach a $1B market cap, the price would be around $0.20 assuming a ~5B circulating supply (as a PoW coin, emissions are currently quite high). That’s a 100x from here. $1,000 becomes $100,000. I think Tari has potential to be even larger than this.

That is not a prediction. It’s a scenario. One that requires patience. It could fail. It could take far longer than expected.

But this is what people mean by an asymmetric bet. The downside is capped at what you allocate. The upside, if it works, is many multiples of that. One of the main reasons Tari is priced where it is today has very little to do with the technology itself, and a lot to do with access.

Tari is not yet listed on any major exchanges. Liquidity mostly lives on smaller venues, through mining, or via wrapped versions of the token. That naturally keeps awareness low and friction high, which tends to suppress price regardless of fundamentals.

That is slowly starting to change. Kraken has already added the wrapped version, wXTM, to its public listing roadmap. Wrapped assets are often the first step toward broader exchange support and deeper liquidity. When access improves, the pool of potential buyers expands very quickly.

For anyone who chooses to explore it further, there are currently a few different ways to acquire Tari, each with its own trade-offs:

1. Buy USDT on any exchange. Transfer it to SafeTrade (non-KYC exchange). Purchase XTM (the native token). Then withdraw it to your own wallet using the Tari Universe app. If you self-custody, write down your seed phrase and store it safely. If you lose the seed phrase or share it, the tokens are gone forever.

2. Buy wXTM on Uniswap. This works if you already use an Ethereum wallet. Same rules about seed phrase protection apply.

3. Buy XTM or wXTM on Gate or MEXC. This is the easiest method. Just remember that leaving tokens on exchanges carries risk.

4. Mine Tari slowly over time if you have a gaming PC. You can download Tari Universe and mine directly. This spreads your entry cost out over time, however it would take a long time to acquire a meaningful amount. Software is at tari.com. I have a mini PC with a beefy CPU and it earns 100-200 XTM daily.

I’d be genuinely interested to hear what other privacy-focused projects people here are watching or hold. This just happens to be the only one I currently hold in any size, because the risk-reward at these levels feels, frankly, absurd.

Privacy isn’t a feature. It’s the foundation. And Tari is one of the few projects building as if that is important.
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Not spam but a pump and dumb, day 1 was the best time to sell at seven cents, this digi coin is in a death spiral, not worth mining as the electricity bill will send you brokeeeey, the coin is down since inception.
Biggest red flag infinite supply,
Only upside will be if this is the new start to a new pump & dump?
 
GAMEXHOSTILE said:
Not spam but a pump and dumb, day 1 was the best time to sell at seven cents, this digi coin is in a death spiral, not worth mining as the electricity bill will send you brokeeeey, the coin is down since inception.
Biggest red flag infinite supply,
Only upside will be if this is the new start to a new pump & dump?
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Most PoW coins struggle to get off the mat early on as they start with high emissions.
Barely any was owned when trading at 7 cents.
Look at the start of Zcash price discovery.
Supply becomes a trickle once initial 21 billion exist: https://tari.com/tokenomics
Moving XTM to XTR (once programmable L2 is live) will incorporate token burn (so may end up deflationary).
Hard cap is risky. It's not known if Bitcoin's economics will survive long term.

Give me your best privacy coin pick and we can revisit in a year!
 
long john silver said:
Sorry if off topic but a quick shout out to Bullion Barron for his contributions to the forum back in the day.
It was his analysis that helped me pull the trigger on some NST shares which have turned out to be an awesome investment.
Hat tip to you sir Barron…
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Thank you, has been a bumpy but rewarding ride! Still holding a few thousand myself in super.
 
mmm....shiney! said:
Why's that?

I don't analyse Bitcoin through an economic lens so you'll have to lay out your thinking for me to understand where you're going with this line of thought.
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The short answer: mining rewards provide economic incentives for the level of security Bitcoin has. With the rewards halving (in BTC terms) every 4 years, the price needs to keep rising exponentially, or network fees will need to be high enough to take the place of falling rewards.

I don't see that economic model surviving.

For the long answer, Justin Bons has put together some good posts explaining in more depth:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1942621676224594135
 
Money has to inflate in order to be functional. BTC is terrible money because it's not inflationary.

BTC was never designed to be "freedom money", it was hijacked by ancaps. Justin Bons has missed the plot. It was designed to eradicate the need for a middle man and in so doing solve the problem of double-spending.

Nothing economic about that, it's just technology.

And then there's his comment re: security. What a dipshit.
 
Brendio said:
Why?
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Money (maybe fiat is a better term) needs to be inflated in terms of supply which affects value……

Because it gives the illusion of getting wealthier for those that own assets, but for those that truely understand the system, assets can be used for collateral to access credit to access more wealth on a large scale. Credit……debt……inflation……tax…...wealth……..it’s never enough
 
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Then there is economic cycles.

You got to know when to hold’m
Know when fold’m
Know when to walk away
Know when to run

At the end of the day our system debt based which requires constant consumerism in order for it to survive and the rich getting richer.

Every decade we are programmed to a new fear, global warming, climate change, ice age, pandemics, Terrorism etc etc, new industry is created replacing the dying out dated old one. One thing remains the same………the bankers get richer and richer
 
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betterinvestmentthanshare said:
Money (maybe fiat is a better term) needs to be inflated in terms of supply which affects value……

Because it gives the illusion of getting wealthier for those that own assets, but for those that truely understand the system, assets can be used for collateral to access credit to access more wealth on a large scale. Credit……debt……inflation……tax…...wealth……..it’s never enough
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Again, but why? I know that fiat is inflated and our savings are being stolen by the money printer. But does it really need to be this way? What would a world look like where this wasn't the case?
 
Brendio said:
Again, but why? I know that fiat is inflated and our savings are being stolen by the money printer. But does it really need to be this way? What would a world look like where this wasn't the case?
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In this case, it doesn’t matter.
The masses have no clue so it runs it’s course regardless.
Either play the game or struggle. If the game changes and it will one day then adjust accordingly.
I have found a lot of my time, energy and mental had been wasted on things I can not change.
The 12 step program has a few steps that can help move forward even if your not a addict
 
betterinvestmentthanshare said:
In this case, it doesn’t matter.
The masses have no clue so it runs it’s course regardless.
Either play the game or struggle. If the game changes and it will one day then adjust accordingly.
I have found a lot of my time, energy and mental had been wasted on things I can not change.
The 12 step program has a few steps that can help move forward even if your not a addict
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I am playing a different game. That's why I bitcoin. I can know with confidence what the total supply will be 115 years from now, and I can audit the current supply with a single command on my own node. I am not worried about price, tail emissions or the security budget diminishings over time. The aligned incentives work to sort that out.
 
Brendio said:
I am playing a different game. That's why I bitcoin. I can know with confidence what the total supply will be 115 years from now, and I can audit the current supply with a single command on my own node. I am not worried about price, tail emissions or the security budget diminishings over time. The aligned incentives work to sort that out.
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It’s entirely up to you.
We all have to deal with the consequences of our choices.
For me, crypto is a wealth extracting tool which works fantastic every now and then, put in a certain amount and get out when it hits my %, rinse and repeat, nothing more, nothing less. So price is important to me. I’ll do it till the music stops. It beats working for a living
 
betterinvestmentthanshare said:
It’s entirely up to you.
We all have to deal with the consequences of our choices.
For me, crypto is a wealth extracting tool which works fantastic every now and then, put in a certain amount and get out when it hits my %, rinse and repeat, nothing more, nothing less. So price is important to me. I’ll do it till the music stops. It beats working for a living
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Indeed. My jam is bitcoin, rather than fiat or crypto, which are wealth-extracting tools for those in control of them. My time horizon is decades to generational wealth.
 
Part of Gresham's Law that states:
- When two forms of currency with the same face value circulate, people hoard the more valuable "good" money and spend the less valuable "bad" money.

A point to the side of bad is: higher rate of inflation.
So when 2 forms of fiat are "of the same value" (i.e: simply because of an exchange rate between them)
The one thats inflating the most is less hoarded and actually used as currency (economicly spent / circulated + returned to the issuing financer).

other points to the side of "bad" are:
- poor divisability, fungability or physically decays over time.
- is of no other practical use other than as an exchange medium.
- is bulky, or otherwise burdonsome/a risk to carry/possess or hold long term.

But mostly, inflation is partly supportive of making fiat usefull as it supports its circulation and not its hoardability.
Nonbody is going to short squeeze fiat paper that can, and is, printed to infinium... unless:
- theres a return on the holding (interest rates) - {note: this grants a measure of system control by issuing financers}
- your able to hold negative values that depricate your debt rather than credit over time (again: interest rates as a control mechanism)
- can be used with leverage to increase its purchase power. (which is in part reliant on a financer anyhow whose terms mostly invlove extra risks and interest or a gample such that its in their favor to actually lend) - {i.e you cant just "buy a house", on forex with 20:1 leverage, and not actually pay interest on a loan..... but you can with gold, silver, bitcoin and even exposure to other currencies...}

so money supply base increase is important to support currency being less valuable than the stores of value, and to position it as a medium of exchange that is otherwise ~worthless.

and tax...
because inflation causes relative capital gains to any other better money.
 
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