I had not researched this.

For a sovereign medium of exchange in an adversarial world, I'd still prefer Bitcoin's architecture - tight, ossified, cheap-to-validate L1 + truly sovereign (non-custodial, batch-heavy) L2s.

Monero's elastic block policy is elegant for burst handling, but it hands adversaries a bloat lever and raises validation costs over time, which erodes home-node density and increases capture surface.

This of course ignores:

- Bitcoin's recent L1 drift - rising default policy that tolerates junk payloads; heavier relay requirements; sync time creeping up year on year.

- Current L2s being mostly "convenience custodians".

Elasticity is a bloat vector in a world where the opponent's budget ≈ unlimited.

If you copy Monero's elasticity, you must add hard ceilings and anti-subsidy heuristics that make adversarial expansion uneconomic — which drifts you back toward... a de-facto small L1.

So it's pros/cons.

Pros for Monero:

- Handles short-term demand surges without massive fee spikes.

- Privacy defaults are strong; observability/censorship is harder at the transaction level.

Cons:

- The Penalty mechanism can be gamed by a rich adversary to expand supply of blockspace and bloat the chain.

- As chain weight grows, residential nodes drop. Privacy without verifiers still invites macro-level capture (ISPs, clouds, peering).

Ideally, I'd put the scale knob on L2, not L1 and scale by:

- More users per UTXO (channel factories, pooled channels, Ark-like constructions with constrained trust, etc).

- More settlement per byte (aggressive batching/aggregation, proof compression, periodic settlement).

- No custodial intermediaries that can be deputized.