Why don’t you use Lightning instead?
Save in #bitcoin and have a separate #lightning wallet which you use for payments. Lightning is instant, almost zero fees, more anonymous than btc. Why use monero? Monero has nice tech but what are you going to do with it? Are you going to transfer the money back to btc? And just use it as a tool? Why would it gain significant value as a currency, I just don’t see it.
Because Monero is better than lightning in both jobs, privacy and low fees!
sovereign UX too
Here's a few reasons of why Monero over Lightning
Usability:
-you need to have sufficiently funded channels to be able to even receive or send to begin with (very inconvenient, unintuitive, and annoying)
-limited in the amount you can send without your transaction failing
-can't transact without both parties being online at the time of transaction
-can be force closed onto the base chain against your will negating the benefits
Security:
-can be rugged if your node is offline
-ability to grief honest users with zero cost
-recent unresolvable critical security issues discovered that cannot be fixed without base layer changes
lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2023-October/004154.html
Privacy:
-bad receiver privacy, IP is exposed by default, and hidden balances can be discovered by a passive adversary
-centralization of massive routing nodes negates/reduces any help from onion routing
-relies on large centralizing middlemen nodes for succesful routing and cheapest fees (incentives opposite to decentralization and privacy)
Any solution to these so far usually come down to custodians or trusting someone else.
Worst of all lightning isn't even a real solution for scaling bitcoin for all the downsides you take on:
Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
In my experience until now, I can easily just download muun wallet on my phone fund it with some real bitcoin and start spending using lightning immediately.
So the usability case is not a problem for me at all. Also I don’t think it’s true that you need the other party to be online to receive a payment, I never saw that mentioned anywhere.
As for the security and privacy, it always depends on your threat landscape, I’m not so worried for the ultimate security and privacy as I’m not doing anything illegal. So we always need to compromise between security and usability according to our situation.
But anyway, how do you use monero? Do you buy it directly using fiat? Do you buy bitcoin and exchange it to monero? And after you are done with your private transactions do you convert back to bitcoin, fiat or you keep holding monero? I would like to ask you if you believe that you lose security and privacy at this stage when exchanging back and forth with monero.
Thank you
FYI Muun wallet is not a real lightning wallet. It uses submarine swaps and batches transactions on chain. It's cheaper than transacting on chain, but more much more expensive than lightning.
Both parties definitely do need to have a node online to transact with Lightning (if you are not doing it then someone else is running that node for you like with Phoenix or Breez. That means you're trusting them and they also have vision into all your transactions)
Fair, but if security and privacy don't matter to you, and you prefer convenience and usability, why not just use Paypal, Cashapp, Venmo, etc for spending? Way more people use and accept those than lightning too.
-Onramp to Monero directly with fiat noKYC and P2P using LocalMonero.
-Buy it using Bisq - Monero is their largest volume trades by far after Bitcoin.
-Simply swap Bitcoin or another crypto for it using a swap aggregators like trocador.app
-Buy at big exchanges like Kraken if you must, but I don't recommend since they require KYC. But at least once you withdraw they lose the trail similar to withdrawing cash from an ATM.
You can constantly swap back and forth if you want, but I don't do that and wouldn't recommend doing that bc its bad for privacy and also would be expensive to do that all the time.
Only buy the amount of Monero you're planning to use over X amount of time you're comfortable with (just say 3 months worth). The timeline you hold Monero is too short and the amounts are too small to be significant vs long term price action of BTC. For example, all of 2022 if you held Monero instead of Bitcoin during that year you would've made ~2.5x more. I'm not saying to do this, but just an example that these timelines are too short to matter.
Places to use Monero directly:
monerica.com (massive directory)
kycnot.me/?type=service
moneromarket.io
And freenet markets of course
Giftcards and virtual debit cards:
coincards.com
buy.cakepay.com
stealths.net
Thanks that was great info!
I’m good with my setup though and I don’t see a problem with the submarine swaps, looks like a very clever way to settle transactions on and off chain! Brilliant!
I don’t see a use case for monero in my life but I’m happy that it’s a tool useful to many people. I’ll be sticking with btc and lightning for now but great discussion! Thanks again
Mathematical Proof That the Lightning Network Cannot Be a Decentralized Bitcoin Scaling Solution
Why not both?
Monero has advantages that lightning doesn't have (and vice versa). Two basic examples:
1) all of lightning is one big hot wallet, and there is risk of loss of funds if your wallet is offline for extended periods of time.
2) It would be very difficult if not impossible to pay for a very large item (car, house, etc) on Lightning, unless you open a channel directly, which begins being cumbersome, reduces privacy, etc; with Monero, you just send it and forget about it.
For on-chain payments, honestly Monero just takes the cake, while for quality long-term savings, imo Bitcoin takes the cake.
Both are great tools, both have advantages and disadvantages, as well as a lot of overlap, and imo both tools are useful to freedom lovers.
No need to be tribal about any of this.
Eventually bitcoin will move to a privacy model. There is no requirement for it to make that move before mass adoption. For now, simplicity is the more valuable feature. If the average programmer can't explain how it works to the normie, all bets are off for mass acceptance. In the meantime, blockchain transparency provides the right mix of trustworthiness and auditability that it makes it very politically difficult to outright ban.
Or all this transparency and the masses of people failing to see why keeping digital privacy end up normalizing a world where transparency and full traceability is a requirement for legal services and in the eyes of the government.
It seems to me that by and large we are already there. And it was precisely the normalization of mass surveillance along with general apathy and ignorance that got us here.
In light of the above, more transparency-by-default seems to me like a very bad idea.
Why do you think all the KYC stuff is such a pain in the ass? Legacy banking got progressively blanketed with it, cash became less prominent, more/most payments became digital-traceable, and all of this was normalized.
Then along came transparent blockchains and now it's a whole new level. Whereas before you ostensibily needed some kind of warrant, now all the financial data is there for the world to troll for the rest of time.
And listen don't get me wrong, I'd be the first to cheer Bitcoin having always-on privacy like Monero, but I just don't see it happening.
Glad to be proven wrong about this one - I'm happy as long as there is some system that allows me to keep financial privacy, not because I have somethinf to hide but because it's my right.
Right now the best system for that particular purpose is Monero (I use Lightning a lot too). The important thing is that such a system exists.
Full financial transparency is dehabilitating. Privacy is absolutely necessary to conduct business, its impossible to negotiate without it and would break competition, trade secrets and interefere with price discovery. Full privacy in the future is therefore guarantred. Regardless, that is not what we have with bitcoin. Firstly, the more bitcoin is used, the easier it is to break tracability of individuals. Secondly, we already have many privacy mechanisms and practices that assure privacy. Eventually base-layer privacy will be demanded, but at this time its unnecessary. We are still early, and the current state of the art does not reflect the future reality that innovations bring with them.
In my opinion, the base layer money should NOT be the latest and greatest state of the art and should not be regularly upgraded. When you update systems you tend to include bugs and increase the attack surface. I think the best is to scale in layers, I’m 100% pro privacy, but not in base layer. Let’s scale like the internet did in layers. That’s how we keep a stable reliable money (Bitcoin), and still add innovations and privacy and fast payments and everything in layers on top.
