you completely twisted what i said mate
what's irreconcilable is an unauditable supply and being hard money
UTXOs are anonymous until spent, and then are again anonymous
this is why i fucking hate monero people, you are just straight up lying
Discussion
Where do we disagree? I'm agreeing with what you originally said.
The problem might be you think the irreconcilable nature only applies in one direction.
You're conflating anonymity and privacy. And a weaker form of anonymity at that - pseudonymity
I agree that UTXOs are pseudonymous.
Anonymity is a stronger property, but I cannot see how anonymity can be implemented at the base layer without losing the auditability.
In my mind, that would be improving the Darkness by 1 step, but degrading the hardness by 3 steps, so totally not worth it.
And the market is showing that, Monero is losing against Bitcoin and will continue to lose over time.
Also, the Darkness of money depends on how big is the crowd you are hiding in.
And you cannot have a big crowd unless the money is the hardest.
Some people argue that saving in bitcoin and spending Monero gives you the best of both worlds, but I think that's BS.
Whenever you exchange Bitcoin for Monero, you decrease your privacy because the crowd you are hiding in is even smaller.
Lightning is the way to spend Bitcoin.
Agree that the crowd is important.
The mistake I then see Bitcoiners make is to imply all Bitcoin is their anon set. This is not true. Only a tiny fraction of Bitcoiners buy no-KYC and also coinjoin. This is optional, expensive, slow, and tedious. Introduces a lot of friction so no one does it which naturally reduces ur anon set.
You can essentially multiply every transaction that happens on Monero by 16 (1 true spend + 15 decoys that come from real transations that occured). All done by default. And your anon set grows over time with no involvement from you as your outputs are automatically chosen for other decoys.
Also consider that UTXOs don't exist on Monero, only TXOs. It is never known whether an output was spent. But that is known on Bitcoin. So every spend on Bitcoin reduces anon set of a coinjoin over time.
If you think Moneros anon set is small, it doesn't make sense to then say spend on lightning (tiny fraction of usage and liquidity than Monero)
Since you enjoy Giacomo you might like this 3 part critique of Monero.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
You're right it's a trade off.
More transparency/auditability means less anonymity/privacy and vice versa all things equal.
The market is a continuous discovery process. Monero adoption on darknet markets is massively growing over time. White markets are less relevant for the whole point of crypto imo. I also don't think Monero needs to be #1 to be useful in it's niche. Can easily see both existing in the future in their own domains.
https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Permissionless-Principle
the biggest delusion of moneroheads about "anonymity" is that it is an absolute, a mathematical limit, and in engineering, you aim to push things as close to the limit as possible but such limits are inherently impossible to reach
and the cost tends to show up elsewhere, like auditability, and in the case of monero, a high processing cost to validate transactions, some 10 elliptic curve verifications per transaction, or so, compared to just one for bitcoin, and then a hash to the address and a compare
humans confuse absolutes with the finite limitations of physical reality all the time
anonymity is impossible, but high levels of indirection in pseudonymity are easy, and as Tor's engineers determined by many experiments, 3 indirections of pseudonymity is enough, where Monero has more than this, and it's just not worth it, when tracing origins of transactions is still transparent, even if you don't know what it is, you know where it is, and most monero users don't directly validate the chain themselves, and thus querying for this transaction, and knowing the IP address, gone
you have a social graph link
yes, totally agree.
They promote the only aspect in which Monero is better than Bitcoin, without accounting for the 3 other aspects that needed to be sacrificed...
It's very simple.
All things equal, Monero will always be more anonymous and private than Bitcoin based on how both protocols work. Bitcoin will also always be easier to mess up.
The cost, like you said will be auditability and scalability challenges. I can accept that trade off with Monero. But it seems like you can't accept the weaker anonymity/privacy trade off of Bitcoin.
Monero uses Dandelion++ even if you slip up and arent behind Tor. So Bitcoin will still strictly be worse off when it comes to accidentally leaking IP address.