I agree with some of the critique. Yes, Bitcoin is not used for commerce as much as I would expect relative to 2013-2017 era.
But this data has a heavy selection bias. It's like pointing out that people don't pay more with USD in Europe.
The latest trend among bitcoineirs is asking monerobros how many transactions happen on LN or "give me a LN transaction", the issue there is of course no one can tell if there is a script kid sending millions of LN payments back and forth to itself, making this a useless debate that does not measure any meaningful economic activity, nor its privacy.
What you can do on the other hand, is actually provide them real world data of real economic activity, which we do have, like shopinbit's latest volume data:
https://x.com/shopinbit/status/1889584085057896498
You can easily see that Monero :default: takes the lead on January 2025 at 56.3% of their volume of payments, while LN ⚡ does a mere 0.4%. That's a really low tx count for real economic activity, plus a really low anon set and not much privacy if you think those users either use custodial wallets or are connected to a large LSP, or even if doing LN perfectly, they are still a small crowd.
Next time a bitcoiner challenges you, challenge them to create a real world business, take LN and Monero as payment, and tell us how it goes! We already have the data, now it's their turn to complete the challenge.
If you want to try a Monero-based nostr client, check out nostr:npub1m0std0zlg4d9gldykfjys342lz85ve2rvpqnpk86vcnzts02m68sl502vt and if you want to get some XMR KYC free, I recommend robosats or retoswap. And share this with a bitcoiner friend
Discussion
Anyone can create a Monero wallet and anyone can use LN, this data shows what people voluntarily pick the most, also the shop I picked is literally called "ShopInBit" so it should be biased the other way?
The name doesn't matter.
No offense to them, but what do they stand out with for the consumers? Average small businesses resaler accepting crypto.
Sure, it's niche, but there are dozens of these.
What do they really stand out with?
- they accept also XMR
-> hence, they attract a lot of XMR traffic.
It's like that rare candy food truck famous for selling mac and cheese ice cream, alongside other standard candies. -> customers from all over the town will line up there to enjoy the famous ice cream.
I'm happy that they accept it, more stores should. But I find these metrics having a limited use.
XMR have a smaller e-commerce universe (on clearnet). Its logic to think they should have bigger market share on those who accept them.
XMR users can shop anywhere using an instant swap exchange where they send XMR and the other end receives another coin, this is just a pattern that keeps repeating, the whole crypto and even bitcoin itself is still a niche in the clearnet unless you live in El Salvador so always that a new merchants appears the data is always similar with XMR at the top
plus more merchants would actually increase it even further since the current XMR users would have more places to shop, and new users could learn about XMR and have plenty of options to use it
I don’t understand your point about swaps. Every crypto can do it and (imo) it does not sum to the conversation.
Yes crypto’s are niche but Moreno is even more because (sadly) is restricted from a lot of ramps and commerce (BinacePay, Bitrefill.. and so on).
My point: we can not say Monero is more used because in the few market that accept both, monero users spend more there. I could use another crypto market and compare Bitcoin payments against USDT and say “see bitcoin is more used that USDT”. Maybe it’s true, maybe not. But that does not look like the best measurement.
whats the selection bias here?