Nah, still privacy, imo. Scaling is an incremental issue that will never be truly “solved” and there will be 1,000 different “solutions.” Lightning will be a ~50x scaling growth for payments at full adoption probably, but we have numerous technologies that will give another order of magnitude benefit.

The reason privacy is the biggest issue is because dissidents need high assurance privacy RIGHT NOW, to literally protect their lives and their families. Where as we don’t actually need to scale to 2 billion users right now, because 2 billion users aren’t desperately trying to use it. The idea of bitcoin is still getting through the Overton window of the vast majority of the world. That will come in time.

Privacy is the more pressing concern, imo, scaling will come in waves that follow the waves of new entrants.

Liana wallet? Timelocks?

Less of an issue than physical miner location. But still an issue. People I think really exaggerate the mining pool problem because in the short term it looks bad, but shifts in pool hashrate can and have happened very quickly in the past. It’s less of a problem in the mid term. The problem would be if miners physically domiciled in some jurisdiction are forced to use “approved” pools, or told that it’s illegal to mine certain UTXs.

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Yup, they will come out of the woodwork no doubt. Monero suffers from a *monetary* problem that they try to cover up with a privacy feature.

Me too, just impatient and time is of the essence now I think.

ETFs will not be good for censorship resistance or privacy related soft forks if/when we try to implement them.

Not so good when using or owning bitcoin sovereignly becomes the highly illegal activity, in most places in the world. It wouldn't surprise me if it happens soon after the ETF:s are approved.

ps, I would suggest as starting research point https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Privacy

It’s not about whether it can be done correctly. Of course there are privacy tools available, but privacy is very often a product of liquidity, in other words is specifically about hiding in the crowd.

Meaning that if it’s too hard for the average person to use, or unfamiliar enough that they simply don’t, then it fails to serve its function well.

What we need is privacy tools that are adopted because they lower on chain footprint and fees, so privacy is adopted *in spite* of users not caring, rather than because of.

Lightning is the closest thing to a privacy boost that most users don’t think about, but it still suffers from the “banned UTXO” problem if miners can be coerced to filter transactions & succeed in keeping them out of blocks.

Why Lightning is powerful though can be seen in any custodial service that doesn’t take “coinjoined” deposits. If you coinjoin to a Lightning channel, then pay over LN, they have no idea where it came from.

It’s getting better, but I’d like to see clearer on-chain privacy tools with wider adoption & as the default simply because it’s better. I realize that’s not easy, which is why I think it should be an extremely high value focus. Fungibility matters, a lot.