Lol. Honestly if they just tried Monero they'd feel so free from having to deal with the paranoia of staying private on Bitcoin.
Discussion
I’d feel paranoid about my xmr being vulnerable to a 51% and trending toward zero priced in sats. Tradeoffs.
Bitcoin has a mining centralization problem too buddy, it's a vulnerability to all PoW coins. Monero wasn't 51% attacked, it was about 37% at peak and was a selfish mining attack. If just two BTC pools colluded they could perform the same attack https://hashrateindex.com/hashrate/pools
Bitcoins mining has a larger problem due to ASICS. Only one manufacturer currently makes the most competitive chips to mine Bitcoin which is a major supply chain centralization factor and a backdoor vulnerability. Monero uses RandomX which makes all CPUs roughly as efficient as each other. You could mine on a 20 year old laptop, a VPS or a dedicated server.
Aren't half of monero being mined by malware? lmao
Yeah it's likely a big portion is. Not moral but it's a consequence of RandomX. It's actually good for decentralization oddly enough. What's the point?
But if those Bitcoin pools colluded to 51% they would both be abandoned immediately and go out of business.
If an intelligence agency cared enough about monero they could orchestrate a 51% attack bc the network is weak and vulnerable.
Monero is about proprotionately secure to Bitcoin in terms of energy to market cap. The hashrate is way lower because RandomX is intentionally less efficient. I had another reply I made weeks ago that does the math to prove this. This isn't a gotcha, that same major vulnerability of state intelligence exists in both. Actually I'd argue it's worse in Bitcoin due to the single manufacturer ASIC issue I previously discussed. It's such a security concern than the US has declared concern over China's potential influence on this ASIC manufacturing.
both chains are vulnerable if a state really wants to f*** with it, sure. difference is:
- btc’s *current* hash is ~600 EH, so popcoin can muster maybe 10-15% of that without burning a gigantic crater in their datacenter budget and nuking goodwill for years. they'd have to *keep* burning money *after* the stunt – hard sell.
- xmr’s current ~3 GH is just a few thousand h-equivalent epyc boxes seeded across amazon, linode, etc. intel spooks can spin that up in a weekend on black budget petty-cash and look like “independent hobbyists.” no botnet optics, no public paper trail, no angry rossman live-streaming the freakout.
is it “proportional”? kinda. but proportions don’t buy time when someone shows up with an *absolute* foot you weren’t prepared for.
anyway, pick your flavour – if you want the hard-to-kill glass cannon choose xmr, if you want the fat ossified city-state choose btc. both work, both crack eventually; it’s just a wager on *whose* crack is uglier.
Yeah it's not ideal but PoW is what we got. Devs are working on strategies to minimize the attack surface but it's still massive. Bitcoin is already being successfully attacked via custodial centralization, capital gains taxation, and regulatory prosecution which I'd argue are bigger threats to Bitcoin than the mining issue.
yeah the coercion surface mempool-of-fiat beats any hashrate math. al capone didn't get kyc’d at the tip, he got fucked on the form when “income” finds you.
custody taxation regs → honeypot at the exit ramp; no 51% needed, just subpoena the biggest bridge. meanwhile I'm over here stacking xmr locally and nobody knows the balance but me.
Yeah I love to hear that regarding the stack, I have the same perspective regarding off ramp taxation. It's one of my favorite features of Monero. The strong Monero economy makes off ramping and purchasing in Monero easier than its ever been and gives me great confidence in its resilience in the future.
+1. every local trade I do xmr→goods is another square I color on the “no-custody-needed” board. keep stacking, keep spending.