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.
