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There are people who only want Bitcoin to win, because according to their thesis Bitcoin fixes everything.

This is one of the most outrageous things I've ever heard from people with the capacity for conscience.

What fixes everything is the inner and individual change that each person makes to become a better person, which consequently improves the community around them.

Everyone preaches change in others, but how many really want to change themselves?

Bitcoin doesn't fix anything, because bitcoin is a tool and like all tools, it doesn't have the free will to do anything on its own, it doesn't have the free will to decide to only allow its use for good.

Bitcoin was created with the main role of being a tool that removes personal exposure from the creation of new currencie, and in that respect it has fulfilled its function exemplarily so far.

Now, is Bitcoin the best tool to use as everyday money?

In my humble opinion, no, because to make a purchase or exchange goods there is no benefit in exposing so much information in a simple transaction.

Would you feel comfortable if every time you made a purchase with your bank account the person you were buying from could see how much you had in that wallet?

Is it sovereign to use your main wallet to make payments in Bitcoin?

I don't know anyone who has the slightest understanding of Bitcoin who makes any payments with their main wallet!

For this very reason, I don't think that the main use case for Bitcoin is to replace physical money, but I do see it as a substitute for a savings bank account, protected from all anti-sovereignty measures and devaluation of the currency through new issues of the same.

In the case of a digital substitute for physical money, I think it's much more viable to use the most private too in the digital world, which in my opinion is Monero.

When person A makes a transaction to person B, only A and B know how much has been transacted between them, and with the information they both generate in the transaction, neither person A nor person B knows any information other than what is strictly necessary to carry it out!

In this way, I consider Monero to be an approximation of what physical money is in digital terms!

In conclusion, nothing external changes what's inside, and tools are just tools, it's what we do with them that can trigger change!

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Discussion

TKay 2y ago

I don’t think anyone disagrees with this.

But still if I send you Bitcoin, what’s in the wallet doesn’t necessarily equal the amount of money I have.

It’s like when you open your wallet in public to pull out a 20, and people can see there is more than the 20 in that wallet.

Russo 2y ago

I know that, but the information that is exchanged is more than what is needed to do a simple transaction, and if there is a better tool for that specific use case why would i use a less efective tool?

TKay 2y ago

Just Zapped you. How private would you consider this?

Russo 2y ago

not enough privacy to my standards brother, but much better than doing it in Layer 1

Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

How many people are zapping from their own lightning node? 3% if that? And even then reciever privacy isn't great

Overwhelming majority is involving third party, like WoS or even ACINQ, surveillance into their transactions

Monica 2y ago

Couldn't agree more. But I do believe people say "Bitcoin fixes this" because it is easier to understand than "We can fix THIS by using Bitcoin as a ......."

People have very little attention span and they like slogans or rhymes haha

bitcoin.rocks 2y ago

Fair point. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Bitcoin fixes broken incentives that have led us to where we are today.

Ronin 2y ago

Because no one will want to use different kinds of "moneys", if most people will save in bitcoin they will not want to swap it to other currency to make payments, and then swap some back to btc for savings. It is friction, also one would use monero, others zcash or whatever, it's troublesome. This is way they say best money takes all, it drives others out.

Russo 2y ago

If that was true Monero wouldn’t have 3 billion market cap..

Ronin 2y ago

It's not overnight, even btc it's not widely viewed as SOV, still XMR is loosing against BTC. There will be many BTC L2s some with great privacy, all interoptable through LN. Ark protocol will have good privacy, there will be many options, each person will choose his protocol and pay/receive through LN.

Russo 2y ago

When that option come, if they are better than monero why would i change?

Until then i use the best solution i know 😉

Ronin 2y ago

Ofc you will only change if they are better in your view, but over time if btc keeps being better SOV than XMR, then with more bitcoin acceptance everywhere, you will have less reasons to keep XMR if it's not widely accepted like BTC and with good privacy options on BTC. Until then yes, XMR is probably better for privacy.

Russo 2y ago

And if a better tool borns in the future than both i will migrate to that tool, thats how world works.

Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

All these privacy L2s so far are custodial, permissioned, or require intermediaries (ecash, liquid, lightning, etc)

You can have privacy AND sovereignty with Monero

Bada₿it 2y ago

Dogecoin has 11 billion market cap for ... ?

Russo 2y ago

You want really compare a meme coin, with a coin with a pourpose? 😅😂🤣

Papa Figos 2y ago

Using different kinds of money isn't the issue imo.

The issue is friction to swap between them - unfortunately to this day this isn't as simple as it could be (not even close).

Russo 2y ago

That could be easily solved if devs from both sides put the fucking ego away and build together, we would have a much more resilient tools to separete the money from the state

Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

There's also quite a lot of friction in high fees, optional privacy, and tainted coins. All not ideal if your goal is MoE/p2p digital cash

With atomic swaps growing it isn't that inconceivable to imagine a multicoin future where these things are handled by wallets automatically and seamlessly

__XaristosX__ 2y ago

Why don’t you use Lightning instead?

Save in #bitcoin and have a separate #lightning wallet which you use for payments. Lightning is instant, almost zero fees, more anonymous than btc. Why use monero? Monero has nice tech but what are you going to do with it? Are you going to transfer the money back to btc? And just use it as a tool? Why would it gain significant value as a currency, I just don’t see it.

Russo 2y ago

Because Monero is better than lightning in both jobs, privacy and low fees!

Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

sovereign UX too

Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

Here's a few reasons of why Monero over Lightning

Usability:

-you need to have sufficiently funded channels to be able to even receive or send to begin with (very inconvenient, unintuitive, and annoying)

-limited in the amount you can send without your transaction failing

-can't transact without both parties being online at the time of transaction

-can be force closed onto the base chain against your will negating the benefits

Security:

-can be rugged if your node is offline

-ability to grief honest users with zero cost

-recent unresolvable critical security issues discovered that cannot be fixed without base layer changes

lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2023-October/004154.html

Privacy:

-bad receiver privacy, IP is exposed by default, and hidden balances can be discovered by a passive adversary

-centralization of massive routing nodes negates/reduces any help from onion routing

-relies on large centralizing middlemen nodes for succesful routing and cheapest fees (incentives opposite to decentralization and privacy)

Any solution to these so far usually come down to custodians or trusting someone else.

Worst of all lightning isn't even a real solution for scaling bitcoin for all the downsides you take on:

https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/lightning-limitations

__XaristosX__ 2y ago

Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

In my experience until now, I can easily just download muun wallet on my phone fund it with some real bitcoin and start spending using lightning immediately.

So the usability case is not a problem for me at all. Also I don’t think it’s true that you need the other party to be online to receive a payment, I never saw that mentioned anywhere.

As for the security and privacy, it always depends on your threat landscape, I’m not so worried for the ultimate security and privacy as I’m not doing anything illegal. So we always need to compromise between security and usability according to our situation.

But anyway, how do you use monero? Do you buy it directly using fiat? Do you buy bitcoin and exchange it to monero? And after you are done with your private transactions do you convert back to bitcoin, fiat or you keep holding monero? I would like to ask you if you believe that you lose security and privacy at this stage when exchanging back and forth with monero.

Thank you

Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

FYI Muun wallet is not a real lightning wallet. It uses submarine swaps and batches transactions on chain. It's cheaper than transacting on chain, but more much more expensive than lightning.

Both parties definitely do need to have a node online to transact with Lightning (if you are not doing it then someone else is running that node for you like with Phoenix or Breez. That means you're trusting them and they also have vision into all your transactions)

Fair, but if security and privacy don't matter to you, and you prefer convenience and usability, why not just use Paypal, Cashapp, Venmo, etc for spending? Way more people use and accept those than lightning too.

-Onramp to Monero directly with fiat noKYC and P2P using LocalMonero.

-Buy it using Bisq - Monero is their largest volume trades by far after Bitcoin.

-Simply swap Bitcoin or another crypto for it using a swap aggregators like trocador.app

-Buy at big exchanges like Kraken if you must, but I don't recommend since they require KYC. But at least once you withdraw they lose the trail similar to withdrawing cash from an ATM.

You can constantly swap back and forth if you want, but I don't do that and wouldn't recommend doing that bc its bad for privacy and also would be expensive to do that all the time.

Only buy the amount of Monero you're planning to use over X amount of time you're comfortable with (just say 3 months worth). The timeline you hold Monero is too short and the amounts are too small to be significant vs long term price action of BTC. For example, all of 2022 if you held Monero instead of Bitcoin during that year you would've made ~2.5x more. I'm not saying to do this, but just an example that these timelines are too short to matter.

Places to use Monero directly:

monerica.com (massive directory)

kycnot.me/?type=service

moneromarket.io

And freenet markets of course

Giftcards and virtual debit cards:

coincards.com

buy.cakepay.com

stealths.net

__XaristosX__ 2y ago

Thanks that was great info!

I’m good with my setup though and I don’t see a problem with the submarine swaps, looks like a very clever way to settle transactions on and off chain! Brilliant!

I don’t see a use case for monero in my life but I’m happy that it’s a tool useful to many people. I’ll be sticking with btc and lightning for now but great discussion! Thanks again

m4dire0701 2y ago

Mathematical Proof That the Lightning Network Cannot Be a Decentralized Bitcoin Scaling Solution

https://scribe.rip/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800

Papa Figos 2y ago

Why not both?

Monero has advantages that lightning doesn't have (and vice versa). Two basic examples:

1) all of lightning is one big hot wallet, and there is risk of loss of funds if your wallet is offline for extended periods of time.

2) It would be very difficult if not impossible to pay for a very large item (car, house, etc) on Lightning, unless you open a channel directly, which begins being cumbersome, reduces privacy, etc; with Monero, you just send it and forget about it.

For on-chain payments, honestly Monero just takes the cake, while for quality long-term savings, imo Bitcoin takes the cake.

Both are great tools, both have advantages and disadvantages, as well as a lot of overlap, and imo both tools are useful to freedom lovers.

No need to be tribal about any of this.

Brunswick 2y ago

Eventually bitcoin will move to a privacy model. There is no requirement for it to make that move before mass adoption. For now, simplicity is the more valuable feature. If the average programmer can't explain how it works to the normie, all bets are off for mass acceptance. In the meantime, blockchain transparency provides the right mix of trustworthiness and auditability that it makes it very politically difficult to outright ban.

Papa Figos 2y ago

Or all this transparency and the masses of people failing to see why keeping digital privacy end up normalizing a world where transparency and full traceability is a requirement for legal services and in the eyes of the government.

It seems to me that by and large we are already there. And it was precisely the normalization of mass surveillance along with general apathy and ignorance that got us here.

In light of the above, more transparency-by-default seems to me like a very bad idea.

Why do you think all the KYC stuff is such a pain in the ass? Legacy banking got progressively blanketed with it, cash became less prominent, more/most payments became digital-traceable, and all of this was normalized.

Then along came transparent blockchains and now it's a whole new level. Whereas before you ostensibily needed some kind of warrant, now all the financial data is there for the world to troll for the rest of time.

And listen don't get me wrong, I'd be the first to cheer Bitcoin having always-on privacy like Monero, but I just don't see it happening.

Glad to be proven wrong about this one - I'm happy as long as there is some system that allows me to keep financial privacy, not because I have somethinf to hide but because it's my right.

Right now the best system for that particular purpose is Monero (I use Lightning a lot too). The important thing is that such a system exists.

Brunswick 2y ago

Full financial transparency is dehabilitating. Privacy is absolutely necessary to conduct business, its impossible to negotiate without it and would break competition, trade secrets and interefere with price discovery. Full privacy in the future is therefore guarantred. Regardless, that is not what we have with bitcoin. Firstly, the more bitcoin is used, the easier it is to break tracability of individuals. Secondly, we already have many privacy mechanisms and practices that assure privacy. Eventually base-layer privacy will be demanded, but at this time its unnecessary. We are still early, and the current state of the art does not reflect the future reality that innovations bring with them.

__XaristosX__ 2y ago

In my opinion, the base layer money should NOT be the latest and greatest state of the art and should not be regularly upgraded. When you update systems you tend to include bugs and increase the attack surface. I think the best is to scale in layers, I’m 100% pro privacy, but not in base layer. Let’s scale like the internet did in layers. That’s how we keep a stable reliable money (Bitcoin), and still add innovations and privacy and fast payments and everything in layers on top.

zhenya 2y ago

There’s a lot of folks here that agree with a btc + monero approach. Seeing a lot more convo on it with WoS drama. I’m following it closely though I’ve never used monero I may in the future. Seems like xmr/btc spreads are tightish on non kyc exchanges.

As for comments of folks not wanting to switch currency, the swap out of btc to xmr for cash on hand feels similar to driving to a bank to convert digital to physical fiat. While these are technically the same asset, the form is different. There’s reasons to want some spending money in a different form.

Russo 2y ago

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

It's mostly dogmatic

All the fears some Bitcoiners have of Monero (real and not) can be greatly negated or nullified by simply continuing to save in Bitcoin and only spend with Monero

You get the best of both with little to no downside

pebble (b/acc) 2y ago

Rewrite your argument with the assumption that most people are inherently good.

Weatherall 2y ago

dont you mean wownero ?

they clearly have the best whitepaper since satoshi's:

https://wownero.org/whitepaper.pdf