Subnostr

As far as I'm concerned, this whole BTC vs XMR debate is silly. Or at least, the common BTC maxi position completely excluding any use case for anything other than BTC is.

Is anyone talking about using XMR to store wealth long term? Maybe there are some, I don't doubt it. But that's not what I see most commonly.

People seem to advocate for XMR as a privacy tool for exchanges, often explicitly describing it as a complement to BTC's SoV use. To me, that makes total sense and is something I can see myself doing, if I ever find myself needed private spending in the future.

In that light, the hypothetical long term depreciation of XMR vs BTC is irrelevant, because XMR wouldn't be used long term. You just buy some XMR with BTC when you have to spend it, and keep your savings in BTC all the same.

It's exactly the same with fiat, which I keep arguing that will never go away for this exact same reason: it doesn't matter at all that it depreciates vs BTC -- unless you get to a hyperinflation kind of scenario when not only the SoV function of fiat no longer holds, but its the unit of account function ceases to exist as well.

The argument for XMR as currency vs fiat is privacy. So three things, to summarize:

1. BTC as SoV

2. Fiat as unit of account and medium of exchange with no privacy

3. XMR as medium of exchange with privacy

That's how I see things at least.

GrumpyGardener 1y ago

A voice of reason. Thing is, very few are using BTC, even fewer are using XMR. Lightning is already providing pretty good privacy for extremely low fees.

I struggle to see the practical use case for XMR. I'm not a fan of eCash, but I think it serves this role for privacy in better way within the predominant infrastructure.

My only gripe is that it seems too easy to devolve into fractional reserve shitcoinery.

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hh 1y ago

I include myself in that group -- I don't use either BTC or XMR as currency. I save in BTC, full-on, everything I can spare every month, I'm literally zero fiat, my bank accounts are kept at zero (in fact, my net worth is negative, if I disregard my BTC).

At the moment, fiat works perfectly fine for me, for the things I do daily: groceries, rent, entertainment, etc. With P2P markets, it works reasonably well even for stacking clean sats (sats that are not directly KYC-contaminated).

I am convinced in the not so distant future, when CBDC's are implemented, or AI is more heavily deployed by the State-Corporation conglomerate to fully track and censor even those trivial uses, I will have to resort to a private means of exchange.

So what I'm doing now is think about it and have an opinion in my head, so the whole process doesn't catch me with my pants down when shit really hits the fan.

To summarize: that was just my opinion today, and it may well change in the future. What's important is to think ahead.