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Always having something better is good, because so does the enemy, so if something is better for Monero, it can just implement it. There is no reason to ignore new anonymity enhancing techniques if the end goal is the same.

Contrary to Bitcoin which is forever cursed with the ideology to never change, when in reality this causes even more trade-offs in regards to usability, privacy, censorship-resistance, decentralization, & security than if it had already implemented confidential transactions, or dynamic blocks for lower fees & on-chain scaling, which the positives very outweight the negatives at the current point in time, but instead you have a chain that is hard to use efficiently, lacks proper privacy, which in turn poses your security in risk + makes it less resistant to censorship, and then it can't sufficiently decentralize as the hotspots can be treated as regulated entities

Joda 1y ago

Andreas gave a talk a long time ago about this. Title something about bubble boy and sewer rats, if you want to find it. His argument is that Bitcoin's openness means it is the most battle-tested. All of its "flaws" are out in the open for anyone to exploit, to enormous financial gain.

It also makes it "look" like a clean and safe thing that governments can regulate. This means it doesn't get removed from exchanges like Monero does. Meanwhile there are private second layer solutions currently and in development for Bitcoin. So it's like freedom tech wolf in regulator-friendly sheep's clothing.

I do wonder about the "hotspots" argument you make. It really depends on how incentivized people are to comply with regulations versus just changing jurisdiction. But when it comes to censorship, I just can't imagine that there will be *no* node in the world that will validate any given transaction.

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Discussion

5c077d22... 1y ago

One thing that bitcoin is failing in the sewer rat analogy is privacy. People who choose to exercise privacy are being attacked. Chain Analysis is playing a guessing game with those who choose to use moderate privacy. People are misled into thinking that using this tech with kyc coin is a good idea. I'm not sure that it is. Using the sewer rat analogy, what is perfered for dark net markets? I know that if you play by the rules, then you don't get privacy, and a 6102 can be performed with a swipe of a pen.

rafael_xmr 1y ago

There are many "hotspots" in the current Bitcoin design, that if you are not careful enough you may fall into prey's hands, you like to mention L2s but they are the biggest cluster of those for example, as we've seen Wallet of Satoshi even had to stop serving USA costumers, bitcoin mining as well has majority being regulated entities rather than rogue, independent, off-grid operations (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/is-mining-censorship-a-threat-to-bitcoin), and then exchanges where people on-ramp and off-ramp into Bitcoin, which are custodial in nature, so you are right it really depends on incentive vs changing jurisdiction, but this is exactly the problem as there is little incentive for the upfront const and time the "little guy" needs to compete with the giants.

Monero does these things rights as, we still don't have L2s so I'll skip that, but mining being CPU only has shown significant resilience, with P2Pool growing in rank ever since its inception which is a pool designed with no centralized operators. The other point is getting delisted from custodial exchanges pushing users to hold their own keys and run P2P trading only in order to on-ramp and off-ramp, either using escrowed trading or new atomic swapping approaches. So we see that the incentives on Monero are rather different where not only you benefit but some times it is crucial to run your own infrastructure, never give out your custody of funds, and always go P2P.

But I also agree with agree with the freedom tech wolf in regulator-friendly sheep's clothing, but I think that Monero is the freedom tech and Bitcoin, and also its L2s, are the regulator-friendly sheep's clothing, and that you can use that to atomic swap into Monero and back and forth.

Joda 1y ago

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/braidpool-a-second-competitor-in-decentralizing-mining

There are some promising attempts at decentralizing Bitcoin mining.

I think it's inevitable that with every "stamp of approval" Bitcoin gets, the harder it will be for governments to control it later on. There will always be people working for that.

I don't know if Monero has HTLCs, but it would be very cool to have decentralized atomic swaps with Bitcoin.