We're so early.
Discussion
Bitcoin has larger adoption (network effects for monetization), clear monetary policy, and with layer 2s strong privacy protections. What advantage does XMR give?
Saying this as someone who held XMR for the past two years or so for privacy reasons and decided to exit. I just don’t see the drive today.
Which Layer 2s are you talking about in particular?
Lightning is the one I'm most familiar with (though admittedly not deeply familiar). I think Cashu and other protocols are providing that too. To my knowledge, no one has been able to "break" Lightning's privacy yet.
The IRS bounty was the first time I heard of this. There may be more recent information than this (in which case I'd love to hear about it), but this 4-year-old article implies that Monero and Lightning are around the same level of privacy.
Lightning is perhaps more private than on-chain transactions but lightning has many issues, even the most dedicated of Bitcoin lightning users have complained about it.
Whereas monero cuts that all out, and makes it easier for average users to transmit value.
I prefer Monero simply because I don't need major amounts of it to transact, it has an easier barrier of entry, and because I don't have the potential to lose funds like lightning does with improperly shut channels.
Now if I had a lot of sats, I would do so through something like Zeus maybe but I don't have that much BTC, so I'd rather use the more accessible tool to me.
(^ That's just my thoughts, and opinion, I haven't used Lightning enough to really say)
I think this article below is a fair summary.
I've been getting onboarded to Nostr over the past week, and the pain of Lightning and especially non-custodial wallets is really. I'm not disagreeing with that. However, it's not like Monero is trivial and easy either, I very nearly couldn't recover my XMR when I decided to liquidate.
Point being: I'm not really trying to judge the systems based on today's usability, which IMO sucks fairly universally. It's based on which technology has the best potential. For me, BTC as wealth, store of value, and ultimately unit of account, with Lightning providing medium of exchange capabilities, seems like a great combination of monetary design and privacy.
All I can say is may the best currency win, I want to enable a future where both options are allowed to compete in markets, and we will see which one wins ultimately.
I may have my biases in favor of Monero, that being said I support Bitcoin as well because I realize it's a tool that will help Cryptocurrency at large get adoption.