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The issue with Monero tradeoff is it will grind to halt once too many people use it. But sure, enjoy while you can!

Some problems you mentioned are applicable to Monero as well (e.g. IP address - just use Tor in both cases ffs) or are hugely inflated.

The biggest one is the ridiculous idea that merely being offline for too long makes you vulnerable. It doesn't. To steal an attacker must predict with very high probability whether you will be online the following x days, where x is configurable being 14 in many wallets IIRC. The attacker must literally predict the future. But I don't blame you, this idea is spread by even the otherwise smart bitcoiners.

Also don't forget that Monero has a bunch of problems. There are serious edge cases that can break privacy and it also historically had a catastrophic cryptographic bug that was luckily caught soon enough.

It's correct that there are only tradeoffs, however most people are not properly informed about all of them.

Saberhagen The Nameless 1y ago

FCMP will introduce L2s if that is your worry. And if technology continues getting better and rate of adoption is steady, as it has been, that problem may never happen.

Monero is the only one that protects your IP address by default if you run your own node via Dandelion

Even Monero with "catasrophic cryptographic bugs" (not sure what you're referring to) still offers better privacy than Bitcoin with no bugs or current state of Lightning how the vast majority of users are using it. But yes I agree everything has trade-offs

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Discussion

Elephant in the root 1y ago

What's your privacy good for if you lose the money you're protecting anyway?

It's quite strange how many Monero fans don't know history of it while simultaneously mocking bitcoiners for very similar events. I have the inflation bug in mind. I remember reading about it at some point between years 2016 and 2018, not sure more precisely.

Anyway, good that L2 is finally on the table. Dandelion was considered for bitcoin but IIRC it introduces DoS vulnerabilities. Not sure if Monero solves them or YOLO implements it anyway.

Papa Figos 1y ago

But again, if we look at what actually happened, it's bitcoin that's had an inflation bug.

Monero had a flaw that luckily (and yeah, it was just dumb luck) was never exploited.

Back in the day bitcoin was rolled back and the billions of bitcoins created just vanished. Would that work today? Probably not. Or it would at least severely hamper trust in the system.

Bitcoin was very small back then, it's no longer the case and it hasn't been for awhile.

This to say, transparent or opaque, you can have inflation bugs all the same. And ironically (because the opaqueness of Monero is often criticized in the context of it potentially giving rise to such bugs) it actually happened in Bitcoin.

At the end of the day, there are different tradeoffs. In the case of this specific critical Monero bug that was not exploited, it was possible to scan the chain for exploitation of the bug. I am not 100% certain that this would be possible for every kind of bug of the sort, the answer is probably not - so it is an ever-present risk that Monero's supply might not entirely match the expected curve.

In short, Bitcoin's radical transparency doesn't *prevent* inflation bugs from being exploited, as its history shows, but the transparency does allow for quick detection of such an attack, at the cost of unintendendly (to be charitable) facilitating a mass-surveillance system, even though it is dubious that Bitcoin's reputation wouldn't take a massive hit if another inflation bug is exploited and the chain needs rolling back again..

.. whereas Monero's opaqueness doesn't *necessarily* prevent us from scanning the chain for exploits, at least in some of the potential scenarios - we know because this happened - while enabling every user to have pretty decent privacy and anonymity, with some edge cases (for the moment) which we already touched on previously.

As always.. there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

All things considered, the wiser option to me seems to be holding BTC even considering the ever-looming possibility of another inflation bug, while spending Monero as digital cash whenever possible.

Elephant in the root 1y ago

By "lose" I meant the network being destroyed by the scaling issue and inflation that's already happening, not bugs.

Saberhagen The Nameless 1y ago

Monero could also implement a periodic turnstile to ensure supply is sound. But that's not a perfect solution either.

Saberhagen The Nameless 1y ago

Inflation bugs have nothing to do with privacy or scalability, but yes that will always be a problem with crypto in general. Although easier to detect Bitcoin is not inflation-bug proof as you know and once one is taken advantage of there is no good fix. You have to either leave the fake coins and devalue the entire network or hardfork them out and screw over users who gave away real goods and services for those fake coins.

afaik Dandelion++ fixed some of those original DoS issues

Elephant in the root 1y ago

You should also put a table of how much the cost of running Monero rises with the number of users. In bitcoin the relationship is linear* with number of users. In Monero it's linear* with number of TRANSACTIONS. Huge difference, the number of transactions depends on number of users over time but also amount of economic activity. I estimate it's quadratic or worse with respect to number of users which is a huge difference compared to btc.

*linear - I'm aware of "The myth of RAM" and I know it's actually n*sqrt(n), I used it for simplicity of comparison. With the myth of RAM accounted, it's even worse for Monero as it's something like n^3 for Monero vs n*sqrt(n) for Bitcoin.

Saberhagen The Nameless 1y ago

Yep it's heavier and requires more resources vs Bitcoin I wont argue with that. Like I said I guess it depends how quickly one figures the rate of adoption and technological advancements will be.