Why would a business want to accept Bitcoin and let their suppliers see how much they have and how much they make? Businesses would just use Monero instead.
Discussion
As a business I would like to note that unless you have places where to spend Monero, it is bigger trouble due to CEX delistings.
Bitcoin can be easily accepted using custodial solutions, and depending on how they are implemented, I doubt that it will be easy for 3rd party to know how much you make of profit relying only on blockchain data.
If you are relying on centralized exchanges, instead of the circular economy, you have completely lost the plot. Also, there are people on Twitter who are literally trolling through people's transaction data and can say, oh, Elon Musk spent this amount of Bitcoin here and then spent this amount of Bitcoin at this other place and then converted this amount of Bitcoin to this amount of Dogecoin and spent it here, etc. That shit happens right now.
Unfortunately, most businesses are not into cryptocurrencies due to different reasons, and thus even ones who "got the plot" are forced into using fiat to pay to their contractors at least.
In that case, either convince your supplier to take Monero or buy extra of that thing and become a supplier for that item in Monero for other businesses like yours and make more profit.
This is exactly how it currently works.
But what I meant is that it is not easy to convince generic business to accept cryptocurrencies due to legal barries. This applies to Monero much more than to Bitcoin, and for some non-techy business it is easier to adopt Bitcoin by using custodial service, which is not available for Monero (at least in Europe).
Monero is cash and can be treated as such. With Bitcoin a business is required to KYC and if any part of a transaction has what the authorities consider to be taint then your entire transaction can be frozen and the coins confiscated from you and the service not rendered. No thank you. That sounds like a horrible way to conduct business. Besides, custodial equals IOU and IOU equals can be removed at any time for any reason.
Your arguments are good, however if they did work no one would use banks. Unfortunately, all businesses I know have at least 1 banking account.
That's because until now there's never been a choice other than holding a ton of cash at your business, physical location, which is inconvenient and quite frankly dangerous.
If you're in *business* the intention is to profit. I'm all for privacy and advocate for it but there's no point in privately going bankrupt. Lightning and eCash are methods to obfuscate transactions if one is so overly concerned.
The bigger picture is holding onto those illusive profits. Many merchants accept Bitcoin and save the proceeds. It's like a forced savings account for the future.
If a merchant accepted and saved Monero instead of Bitcoin over the past year, they will have lost 50% of their savings. This is enough reason in and of itself to accept Bitcoin whether their competitors know it or not.
And at least lightning is totally custodial, unless you're willing to deal with all the crap that comes with running a lightning node and setting up channels and dealing with channels for closing, etc. I'm almost certain e-cash is also custodial, and any custodial solution is bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. No custodial solutions ever. Bad, bad, bad, bad. However, I don't think either of us are going to see the other person's point of view.
Almost all the merchant payments we process are done over the bitcoin lightning network so the transactions are not publicly visible as you seem to be implying.
If you use lightning correctly, it can absolutely be private. But the vast majority of people are not going to use it correctly because it's extremely difficult to use it correctly, and there's a lot of information that goes along with that. Since Monero is private by default, the act of using it is using it correctly.
Not sure I agree with you there. I think the majority of people using lightning are using no-KYC custodial wallets like ours and Wallet of Satoshi which offer decent privacy without any difficulty. Of course you're trading convenience and privacy for trustlessness in those cases but for small spending amounts that might be ok for many people.
Installing Tor Browser or Orbot is a pretty easy additional step people can take to avoid leaking their IP to us. E-cash is another good step forward because you can use it to transact without even having a pseudonymous account that the custodian can link payments to.
Ark is coming soon too and we're hopeful that it'll be another big boost for privacy and scalability on bitcoin with a simple UX.
The problem is right there in your post. You said custodial solutions. Yes, they may be no KYC. But as long as they are custodial, they are bad, even for small amounts. You should not need to be rich in order to have non-custodial currency. That's just not okay.