Your ideological purity is showing under your slip bro. Btc bets that fees alone will secure the network. Xmr ensures it. If Btc banks on greed as a motivating factor in all this to work out in theory, why assume users will pay the onchain fees when other options are available? Greed cuts both ways, and I'm afraid maxis haven't thought that far ahead.
Discussion
Free-market bidding for scarce resources isn’t ideology, it’s how every healthy market, from housing to bandwidth, has always allocated value efficiently; Bitcoin simply applies this proven principle to digital settlement.
Free-market bidding WORKS when there’s consistent demand. You ASSUME this demand for on-chain settlement in a world that is increasingly moving off-chain to AVOID those fees! Greed finds a way.
Housing and bandwidth are necessities. Blockspace is optional while competing/preferable alternatives exist. Also, BTCs transparent ledger exposes every settlement to surveillance. Why TF, in a post Samurai world, would you really expect or encourage people to pay for a public record of their finances in a surveillance state? Lemme guess, freedom.
> Free-market bidding WORKS when there’s consistent demand. You ASSUME this demand for on-chain settlement in a world that is increasingly moving off-chain to AVOID those fees! Greed finds a way.
Monero’s fixed tail emission slows the decline in miner rewards, but as total supply grows, 0.6 XMR per block inevitably buys less over time. Like Bitcoin, long-term security depends on price and fee market demand, not protocol emissions alone. Tail emission isn’t a magic solution; over time, the security challenge is fundamentally the same: economic incentives drive network safety, not just predictable issuance.
You're sidestepping the point: why would anyone pay for transparent, surveillable settlement in a post-Samourai world? That’s not a fee market, it’s a self-doxing market.
As for your claim: Monero's tail emission guarantees a non-zero reward — Bitcoin hopes rising fees will fill the gap. That’s not “the same challenge.” That's a false equivalence. One has a floor. The other has a "...?"
And no one called it magic..just honest, predictable, and sustainable, unlike banking literally everything on user generosity and government-friendly transparency.
Bitcoin’s blocks secure more real economic value and attract more honest hashpower than Monero ever has, even with “transparent” settlement and no tail emission. Monero’s floor is just a slower glide down; as both chains age, reward purchasing power shrinks and security depends on price and demand, not just protocol promises. Privacy matters, but physics and incentives aren’t fooled by emission schedules — eventually, every chain answers to the same economic test, floor or not.