Those who know, know.

I admittedly have a lot to learn about #monero. It seems superior to #btc in many ways. What reasons do you attribute to it having such a small market capitalization compared to #btc ?

Removed from major exchanges?

Coded years later?

Network effects?

Other?

cashu with professional “bitcoin banks” LN operators facilitating the money transfer is the privacy future.

Don’t like the custody trade off? Run your own node. Too difficult? Use a trusted mint.

It scales, it’s private, and it works right now.

Given your infosec background, I'm sure what I am about to say is nothing new for you, so I am mostly speaking to "the room" here.

Yes, Lightning offers better privacy than Bitcoin when set up properly, but it also has a more complex system, equating to a larger attack surface. LN's privacy features are not automatic; users must understand and manage their privacy settings actively, which can lead to unintentional exposure of transaction details.

A fundamental privacy weakness persists in the asymmetric nature of Lightning transactions—the sender learns extensive details about the receiver's node, channels, and liquidity, while the receiver learns nothing about the sender. Plus, there's the persistent hassle of maintaining channel liquidity.

Even with proper setup, Lightning faces critical privacy vulnerabilities against global adversaries who can monitor network traffic—while individual participants can't see payment details, entities capable of monitoring internet connections can track payment flows by observing message patterns between nodes, making its privacy guarantees fundamentally weak against sophisticated surveillance.

Lightning falls well short of the anonymity provided by Monero with its stealth addresses, ring signatures, and RingCT—and soon, Full-chain Membership Proofs (FCMPs) will fix current vulnerabilities like the Exchange Attack Everywhere (EAE) attack. With FCMPs, every input will have a 100-million anonymity set, up from the current 16 Ring Signatures.

Where privacy is a concern, I still recommend Monero over Lightning for most people, as Monero's privacy features are built-in on the base layer and work by default.

I believe SSH is somewhat underrated as a Freedom Tech protocol.

It is stable and reliable, features built-in pubkey authentication, does not require certificate provisioning, and can establish multiple secure data channels for almost any purpose.

It sounds like an excellent protocol to build on.

A couple things to consider here… #bitcoin was designed to be transparent, it’s a feature. While I 💯 agree that privacy in financial transactions is imperative for private citizens, if a money is going to take over the world economy/financial system then public entities and people in the public sector should not be afforded the same privacy.

If the most secure monetary layer (BTC L1) is the settlement layer and also the most transparent, then transactions of political and public interest can be and will be subject to review by all. This means corrupt politicians, governments, donors, banks, lobbyists etc can’t hide their bullshit anymore.

As for the private sector, there are L2 solutions that enhance/provide scalability and privacy for the everyday pleb transactions that should remain anonymous and private.

Everything has trade offs, you can’t create a neutral, global, digital monetary network intended to subvert the global currencies without considering everything. If an L1 public ledger is necessary to root out government, political, and financial corruption, and then adding a feature-rich L2 for smaller players is necessary for smaller/private transactions…so be it.

This is my perspective and opinion, I’m not saying #bitcoin from a technical standpoint is better inherently than #monero. I’m just considering the entire macro viewpoint of what it would look like for a sound money to infiltrate the world’s banking and geopolitical systems. To me, it looks more like L1 and L2 #bitcoin.

Yes, Roger Ver is a dubious character with dubious motives.

Indeed, #bitcoin has trade offs. Scale/scaling has been a fun buzzword for #btc critics for a long time now, I understand.

Definitely give “Softwar” a read and go from there 👀

Another day, another exchange I am suspended from.

All of my funds are conjoined or swapped between LN/XMR for privacy before sending to exchanges, triggering all sorts of nonsense AML flags.

The exchange I am with now is requesting proof of funds, meaning it wants to see fiat coming into my bank account from an entity I have a business relationship with, asking me to "kindly assist them" in surveilling me.

Except that all of my business relationships are handled in bitcoin – meaning that it is impossible for me to show proof of fiat funds.

Alternatively, the exchange says, I could send them “the address” to which I received payment in the last year, matching the amount of money I have exchanged on their platform.

Obviously no such address exists as I create a new address for each transaction (and so should you). Additionally, much of my money comes in through donations, for which I simply do not have an invoice.

I could now send them every single zap I ever received on nostr in the past year – for context, that would be over 250 zaps in the past week alone, s/o to all the zappers – or I could move my business to Switzerland, where I can exchange up to 1000 CHF per day KYC-free (for now), which is what I’m going to do.

However, since I’ll be more heavily relying on peer-to-peer exchanges from now on, I’ll likely have my bank account flagged for receiving weekly payments from randos on the internet, making it fairly foreseeable that I’ll be losing my bank account in the coming months as well.

Fundamental rights violations aside, the amount of complete nonsense work – and with that costs – this system creates both for the Government and private institutions is absolutely astonishing. If there ever was a true bullshit job, compliance officer would no doubt be it.

It’s time we end the global discrimination complex inherent to the financial system in which we are all guilty until proven innocent, only to upkeep an inefficient system that is useless in preventing crime but formidable for imposing mass surveillance on the people.

So no, I will not "kindly assist you" in surveilling me, and if I die on this hill.

Until then, shill me your favorite tools to pay my bills in bitcoin 👇

Is that why you have to coinjoin before opening a Lightning channel and after closing one? 🤔

Or is that just for fun?

Bitcoin Lightning is Bitcoin's "p2p cash" layer, and is very private.

Yes. I'm in Bitcoin for the original cypherpunk ethos (personal freedom, privacy, and decentralization) outlined in the white paper—which is why I also use Monero.

There is a large sell-out, highly-regulated price to pay for government adoption and "money go up." If Bitcoin is not used as a currency, and only as an historically well-performing, highly-volatile asset/commodity, it will still likely be a good investment, but it will have been neutered as a global cryptoCURRENCY, and have failed in its original vision.

Snowden has been warning the Bitcoin devs for years to bake in privacy on the protocol level, and the clock is ticking. Cash can be used privately. Everything will be tracked when we go full digital on a public blockchain. When AI is put to the task of on-chain analysis, all the hoops Bitcoiners have been jumping through for years to try and use Bitcoin privately will have been of little use.

There is a reason Bitcoin is being co-opted by the powers that be, while Monero is being delisted from the CEXs.

open source will win

Can we please restart the Internet?

If you know who this is, we want to follow you! 💪