3. privacy by omission (e.g. Lightning) >> privacy by obfuscation (e.g. monero) in courts, as the latter is met with "why were you hiding?"
Discussion
Looking forward to LN on Monero post FCMP upgrade.
god fuck no
Unlike with Bitcoin it will be voluntary. Which is all the difference that matters.
there are many ways to do offchain scaling and payment channels are one of the worst ways. they are a very specific type of plumbing that only makes sense in specific situations, that coincidentally are almost always involving some kind of custodian
I think that makes sense if you consider them as essential but a payment channel on monero is at worse just a communication channel between 2 people, we get the bad taste from Bitcoin because it's seen as an essential scaling or payments solution and you have to get on it even inside a custodian, but XMR on-chain works just fine so no one would ever get pushed onto using solely payment channel networks for payments
Putting aside the problem with relying on government approval/legality to secure your ability to transact and what the courts currently permit (defeats the point of Bitcoin)...
If you're already in court they would ask the same thing about your Lightning transaction "why were you hiding?"
If you say to save on fees and think that will be a good argument, you can say the exact thing about a Monero transaction. That Monero offers the cheapest fees without sacrificing the trade-offs you prefer over Lightning or any other cryptocurrency.
> If you say to save on fees and think that will be a good argument, you can say the exact thing about a Monero transaction. That Monero offers the cheapest fees without sacrificing the trade-offs you prefer over Lightning or any other cryptocurrency.
Just not true. Monero has higher fees, and has to because it's all on L1.
"That Monero offers the cheapest fees ***without sacrificing the trade-offs you prefer over Lightning or any other cryptocurrency***"
You're ignoring the second half of what I said. Lightning is far more complicated and annoying UX if you want to do it in a self-custodial permissionless way. Fees alone aren't the only thing you can use for plausible deniability.
Judge: "why did I choose Lightning?"
> save fees
Judge: "why did I choose Monero?"
> because I wanted to maximize self-custody while maintaining my privacy and sovereignty
besides everything else, monero just isn't practical or appealing to merchants operating in public. too slow, and too expensive. and not to mention tainted with shadiness.
Judge: "Oh you like Lightning solely because you want to save on transaction fees? You can transact for free on Cash App, Paypal, Zelle, etc"
Come on. Your supposed deniability easily falls apart by even your own logic. You can't avoid this with either Lightning or Monero without adding sovereignty/self-custody/permissionless txns into the combination of reasons. Otherwise it makes no sense.
and when all 50 of your monaros are using it, there won't be any space for anyone else's transactions, so there's that