Tradeoffs are only bad in the context of a goal
Want permissionless private transactions, good UX, all without paying an arm and leg? Bitcoin tradeoffs are bad
Moneros tradeoffs make it a better p2p digital cash
Discussion
if the only thing that have sense to keep is bitcoin because of his monetary property, then the spending path could be:
bitcoin ---> atomico swap ----> txs -----> atomic swap ----> bitcoin
or, better
bitcoin ----> channel opening ----> lightning ----> txs -----> atomic swap in you want new utxos decorrelated -----> bitcoin
lightning is more efficient (1 atomic swap instead of 2). Lightning is the bitcoin tradeoff for spending, and dont add the risk of have a newly printed utility token with any economic sense.
You're doing unnecessary additional swaps.
You're assuming that you would necessarily go back to Bitcoin after swapping to Monero.
Why would you swap back when you can just have a small stash of Monero you keep for spending directly in the short-medium term?
Or if you're receiving Monero as payments, it is just one swap away from hodling as Bitcoin. No need for lightning privacy gymnastics or trusting custodians.
I dont trust custodians with lightning, it works well without custodians. Also its just better then monero (instant finality of payments, possibility to have complex structure for invoice that can be "locked" for some time, like the one used in robosats for trading without escrows, simply dont need to attend 20 minutes to trade the utxo like on monero, security about being able to obtain bitcoin onchain much higher) and it will become better. Its a payement layer that can scale its features and possibility in a very fast and smart way, without caring of "the blockchain".
Its also really able to scale, with new nodes and liquidity that comes are net-positive and add benefits for all. On the blockchain every new person that arrive to transact is a scalability problem, and monero is even worse than bitcoin because dont disincentivize txs raising the fees, but let people spam the utxo set until monero become unrunnable and txs impossible to validate.
and the fact that people use it custodially is not an argumentation, even bitcoin onchain is probably mostly used custodially. I use lightning non-custodial and the experience I have is very good.
Why is that not an argument? The reason lightning is disproportionately used with custodians (~80-90% custodial users) is because of its shitty UX.
The better the UX is for self-custody and permissionless txs, the more users will use it that way.
I use it non-custodial mostly, everyone is responsible of their stack and do wath they want. Lightning enable a lot of txs sub 100 sats, like zaps, that have much sense to do custodially because who cares of so little stack. Also with ecash we now have private way to do totally private custodial txs with 1 sat fees, perfect for this use case.
For higher stacks I assure you that non-custodial ux is fine, maybe need a lot of improvenent, but I use it and theres no particular skill you need to have to start with something like phoenix.
or zeus if you want private payments also.
Zeus is cool. Probably the best lightning wallet atm. I just think self-custodial LN in general has a lot of pain points especially new users. To even begin using it the user has to commit to 100,000+ sats first. And because of the painful UX of LN, most will use Zeus LSP which gives privacy to the receivers from the general public but not the LSP.
Maybe that is good enough for a lot of users, but that is the same privacy modern banks already offer.
Monero offers privacy from ALL third parties and doesn't require putting down money to get started in the first place
I'm just saying doing all of these things in the first place is already a big jump for most.
The more difficult you make it...the less users will have the the will or capability to use it sovereignly.
P2P digital cash just has to work with as little friction as possible.
Phoenix is not private, not censorship resistant, and requires what amounts to a "minimum fee" to even start. Monero is private, censorship resistant, and can start without first needing to pay to open a channel.
with ecash you have the "how to start", you can have your first private money (with a bit of counterparty risk associated) and then when you have your 50 bucks you can use a non-custodial lightning wallet like zeus. There is a lot to do to make the ux better, I agree on this. But I also think that even today lightning makes monero obsolete.
And in the future we will see a lot greater gap from the two solutions, cause lightning can scale better with new solution as a layer (see splicing channels or bolt12 for example) while monero is a dead end, it cant scale without making impossible for most to verify txs.
Ok, but ecash is custodial...you're just making my point for me about having to choose between either good UX, or sovereign LN, but not both. Moving that $50 to Zeus is less private than ecash though lol.
Yep I've been keeping my eye on bolt12. Definitely a big privacy improvement for LN. There was too much mania over lightning in the early days that fell short of the hype, so i'll reserve my judgement until bolt12 is more widely used and I can play around with it and see it work in the wild.
We'll see
Its a spectrum, even when electrum created the concept of what we call today a "light wallet" there was problem regarding not validating yourself the transactions and delegate to a third party. But light wallet are an immense scalability solution and a tradeoff that can be useful in most cases. Nothing is really black and white, and I think that good hybrid solution are what we realistically need to scale. Ecash for little payments I think is really a cool tradeoff, I dont care to have a 100% security to not loose 50 bucks and delegate custodial. Privacy is more important for this kind of use, and with cashu you have it.
Is like entering the cinema and pay the ticket 1 hour prior. Nothing assure you to not being rugged, you have an abstract custodial asset redeemable at cinema entrance. I dont see no problem with having a custodial cinema ticket if I decided I'll want to see a film today.
You say "nothing is really black and white", "tradeoffs", and "spectrums"
So if you're honest why can't you see that using Monero is just another tradeoff? It has it's own advantages/disadvantages over Ecash, Lightning, and on-chain Bitcoin too.
it is, I used it some years ago as "hot potato money" to transact with lower fees and clean my utxos. Today, as I see developments on layer 2, I think monero is an obsolete tradeoff that is not useful anymore. In general layer 2s on bitcoin are here and mostly works, and no more shitcoins are need to scale, have privacy, have more programmable money, even nfts...
I don't agree. And neither do markets where privacy is critical, but that's okay. Appreciate the chat.