Whats wrong with Monero?
Privacy is true freedom.
Would be great if bitcoin had the option to be as private one day.
Discussion
the tradeoff mainchain is auditability. layer two solutions for privacy exist tho
Pseudo-anonymity exists in bitcoin. But in real world in the world you usually can’t be pseudo-anonymous. To be employed or start a business you need an official government approved ID.
Privacy via end-2-end encrypted transactions is ideal to protect you from revealing your entire financial history to friends, family, employers, state and criminals while letting you be yourself in the real world.
And L2s have no trade off?
What if I want my privacy without L2 trade offs?
I thought he shilled others besides monero. I could be wrong though (probably wrong). Some have utility for certain use cases, but the issue for me is the marketing that is promoted to retail on those coins is ingenuine at best, hence shitcoins.
Are you familiar with Giacomo Zucco? He’s a hardcore libertarian bitcoiner and brilliant. Here’s one place he has discussed the economic and technological problems with Monero. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_ZfusSdyWA
Oh I agree Monero is not perfect but the privacy aspect makes it unique. That’s why I am fan of Bip300 to being same level of privacy to bitcoin as an option.
*bring
Lightning can offer better privacy
Drivechains never happening, for good reason
Believe when I see it. Just like when will see self-custodial lightning adoption increase 😉
What's stopping anyone from using phoenix?
Not because it's complicated
Custodial : self custodial is similar on chain (70:30)
I don’t know maybe because of the UX of opening channels and all those times self-custodial ln txs fail.
99% on nostr are using a ln custodial wallet for a reason. And it’s not due to lack of education it’s down to bad ux.
Making your own lnaddress takes a little learning. Not because self custody has bad ux. I'm using my own node with alby. Voltage makes it easy but the average person does not like even a slight bit of complication. It's still not 99%, something like 85-90%
https://www.austrich.net/self-custodial-zaps-with-nostdress/
I see stories like this all the time.
One of the reasons fiatjaf is pro-drivechain and criticises lightning. he’s been a lightning dev for a few years now 
To me, that seems like a strike and zeus issue. Zeus had a problem connecting to node over tor prior to an update couple of months ago. I had that problem from time to time. Phoenix is a 10× improvement after splicing and ux is same as using on-chain bitcoin wallet
Fiatjaf is not honest about drivechains tradeoffs. Anyone even discussing drivechains before broad SV2 adoption is not a serious person. Even then, STARK verifier offers better tradeoffs (this is possible using covenants)
Discussion and debate is how things get moved forward.
Pushing issues under the carpet is how slow progress is made.
I know nothing about stark so I can’t comment on that.
Drivechains is not worth discussing because without SV2, it has worse trade-offs than even liquid
Liquid is federated sidechain that requires permission to use.
Drivechain is a trustless sidechain and your forgetting drivechain includes bip 301 as well for blind merge mining.
Drivechain is federated and enables mev and no, that doesn't just affect sidechains as it does with stacks blocks now. It distorts miner incentives in ways that threaten censorship resistance
I haven’t dove into this issue but a new report from Bitmex came out about drivechains. They argue that that there are mining centralization risks to them.
This is just incorrect imo.
Miners are profit seeking so if they don’t wish to mine a sidechain block then they lose out on business by miner who will mine the block.
Drivechain includes blind merge mining.
Also, 75% of miners are required for 6 months to steal btc in a sidechain.
One can make the arguement btc mining is already centralised and by allowing for side chains would help making mining more competitive and decentralised.
There’s also projects like stratum 2 are working on making mining less centralised.
Phoenix is not trustless and definitely not private.
https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq#is-phoenix-trustless
https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq#how-private-are-my-payments-on-phoenix
Caveat:
Lightning can potentially at some point in the future™ offer better privacy. Let's ignore the fact that Monero is not static and constantly upgrading privacy as well.
Let us also ignore any trade offs Lightning brings with it such as interactivity (AKA shitty UX to use sovereignly), centralized hub dependance for smooth experience, non-P2P nature, liquidity juggling, unusable for moderately large payments, and weaker off chain security garuntees.
Well said sir. Much more articulate than me.
Did you guys listen to the concerns raised by Giacomo et al? Virtually everyone wants privacy in the Bitcoin space, there are technical reasons why Monero will continue to lose in the race to become generally accepted money.
Time for us to embrace peer to peer purchases, Coinjoin and second layers.
I don't mind the criticisms about Monero because you're right some are true.
What I do mind is bitcoin maxis lying (ignorantly or intentionally) that L2 is a solution with no trade offs and a complete replacement for Monero, or that on chain obfuscation is privacy.
Darknet Markets are increasingly choosing Monero while Lightning has virtually 0 adoption on DNMs a highly adversarial environment where this stuff is put to the test. Shitcoins are used more than Lightning.
Fair. I would just say that all of us maximalists would love for there to be perfect privacy on Bitcoin, it’s just not a trade off worth the costs.
I don’t know there seems to be some possibilities to make it a real possibility on bitcoin like Bip300. But some core devs are aggressively against the idea of soft fork that tweaks the current miner incentives.
It’s frustrating to say the least. Now changes in bitcoin take years. In the early years there was updates every few months.
Don’t break what’s not broken. You mess it up the price will crash and we are all left HFSP. Do you really want that? Take it slow we are not in a race here, bitcoin only wins by leaving it alone. Unless it becomes a global store of value it will eventually die
Longer it takes. The slower adoption will be.
It’s like shooting ourselves in the foot imo.
Get bitcoin code complete then devs can relax and sit back. Enjoy bitcoin for what it is perfect money.
Yes, I even agree, at this point it would do more harm than good to change bitcoin even if we could since ossification and conservativeness has become such a major value.
I think Bitcoin and Monero have different priorities, some being mutually exclusive like auditability vs privacy. It's fine though because I can use both for their strengths. One to save, one to spend.
Most of your characterizations of lightning are wrong. Typical monero shill misrepresenting lightning and burying his head over the fact monero will NEVER work at scale. Ditch the shitcoin token, build trustless 2wp, the sidechain would still have inferior ux for payments vis-a-vis lightning
I have never bought Monero or owned Monero!
I bought the lightning hype like everyone else. But in reality the UX is terrible unless you use a custodial wallet.
You're now pivoting from privacy to scaling. But thats ok.
Which of my criticisms about lightning is wrong? And explain why. I doubt you can. Everything said was basic facts about LN.
You're confused. Global adoption is not an obsession in Monero like it is with Bitcoin. We are not deluded enough to think everyone in the world is going to be using our coin for everyday transactions.
It's hilarious that you think Lightning is going to scale globally since it takes on chain transactions to onboard in the first place. Now, what? I'm stuck on a weaker security layer forever with my entire stack? On chain will be prohibitively unusable for all but the wealthy of bitcoiners in that future. Pray your channels aren't force closed!
Using LN sovereignly is a UX nightmare, not beginner friendly at all, but you simultaneously want every average joe in the world to use it. The outcome is they won't use it soveriegnly. And everyone will use it in a custodial panopticon form just like they do today. Even w/ nostr zaps where people should know better. ~90% use LN custodially (WoS, Chivo, Alby, Bitcoin beach). Remainder use Phoenix (not trustless or private). The truly masochistic run their own nodes.
You're sharing a screenshot from a consensys shill who can't transact if infura goes down?
Lightning is 1000x more scalable than any shitcoin chain and has potential to scale another 1000x. Look into covenants, hierarchical channels, multiparty channels, multipath payments, route blinding... your understanding of lightning is outdated by at least 4 years. The fact that there's no reliable source of public data for lightning is proof enough of lightning privacy, which continues to evolve. IRS has a $650k bounty to crack lightning privacy.
Alby is not necessarily custodial. That's how little you understand
Monero is not about scaling for everyone?
So who should have privacy and who shouldn't?
Monero can support roughly 100x more transactions on current protocol with no more upgrades without straining current tech limits. It already cut down transaction size by ~80% since inception. It's scalability will keep improving over time and consumer tech is always getting better.
Monero is for anyone, not necessarily everyone. If you think the masses are going to want to live in a state of cryptoanarchy I think it sounds pretty copium... But anyone that wants is free to use Monero it is open and permissionless.
My take :
Bitcoin Onchain for hodling
LN for quick / easy payment (eg, buying a gift card)
Monero for private transactions when needed
I run a LN node and agree that it’s not for noobs. In the current situation, most people will use custodial solutions like WoS.
Do you trust the privacy with how you acquire Monero? Most people use Bitcoin to squire Monero, which essentially like Coinjoin to an attacker. They know you had it but they don’t know where it’s at now.
Liquidity is a big part of privacy. People aren’t generally holding Monero so the market cap is smaller and you’re hiding in a smaller crowd.
Why are you guys jumping in and out of altcoins rather than just buying Bitcoin privately and/or coin joining?
You can onramp P2P directly to Monero KYC-free using LocalMonero or Bisq.
You can also atomic swap for XMR if you have BTC using unstoppable swap. Samourai Wallet just announced a crosschain atomic swap for XMR <-> BTC yesterday. Or use Trocador.app if you have other crypto.
Yes, liquidity is important, but I hope you don't assume the whole Bitcoin network is your anon set... It is smaller than one would think. If users have their bitcoin on KYC centralized exchanges❌. If they don't coinjoin at all after withdrawing ❌ If they use remote public nodes not behind tor/i2p ❌. This consitutes the majority of normies and Bitcoin users.
Coinjoins are inferior privacy.
Encryption > Obfuscation
Monero completely hides amounts and recievers from the chain. There is no transaction graph. Where as in a coinjoin all connections and data is there and can be saved and used with future data to deobfuscate. Or you can mess up and consolidate coins connected to you.
I'm not jumping in and out of alts. I'm saving with Bitcoin and spending with Monero. I don't recommend going BTC -> XMR -> BTC. Probably the worst way to obtain privacy on Bitcoin. You're involving a third party. Trivial to trace if not done correctly. (Timing attacks, amount analysis, etc)
Most recommended:
BTC -> XMR -> Spend XMR
Alternatively:
BTC -> Coinjoin -> Spend BTC
These people just can’t seem to leave it alone. Weird I’m less worried about the price of bitcoin but instead people pushing for “upgrades” so they can make bitcoin “better”.
Yes, there are many more upgrades coming to bitcoin in the works. Bitcoin still has a long way to go before being code complete.
Improving privacy UX is just one of the many but to me it should be top priority if you really want bitcoin to take on the fiat system properly.
Looks very unbiased. Lol.
I still like Giacomo so here is a more nuanced, good-faith discussion with him.
