Oddbean new post about login | logout https://www.monero.how/why-monero-vs-bitcoin Why might #Monero see greater future adoption than Bitcoin? The most critical flaw in Bitcoin is its lack of privacy. If you give me your Bitcoin wallet address so that I can send you a payment, you immediately compromise your privacy. I can see as a matter of public record how much money you have in your Bitcoin wallet (there are messy workarounds to attempt to fix this problem, which we will address shortly). The same situation applies even if you are the one sending Bitcoin. Any recipient can then see how much money you have in your Bitcoin wallet, both now and in perpetuity. To understand how critical this privacy problem is, consider the following scenarios: 1. You are travelling through parts of a country with a medium to high violent crime rate. You need to use some of your Bitcoin to pay for something. If every person you transact with knows exactly how much money you have, this is a threat to your personal physical safety. 2. You are a business that receives a payment from a supplier. That supplier will be able to see how much money your business has, and therefore can guess at how price sensitive you are in future negotiations. They can see every single other payment you’ve ever received to that Bitcoin address, and therefore determine what other suppliers you are dealing with and how much you are paying those suppliers. They may be able to roughly determine how many customers you have and how much you charge your customers. This is commercially sensitive information that damages your negotiating position enough to cause you relative financial loss. 3. You are a private citizen paying for online goods and services. You are aware that it is common practice for companies to attempt to use ‘price discrimination’ algorithms to attempt to determine the highest prices they can offer future services to you at, and you would prefer they do not have the information advantage of knowing how much you spend and where you spend it. 4. You sell cupcakes and receive Bitcoin as payment. It turns out that someone who owned that Bitcoin before you was involved in criminal activity. Now you are worried that you have become a suspect in a criminal case, because the movement of funds to you is a matter of public record. You are also worried that certain Bitcoins that you thought you owned will be considered ‘tainted’ and that others will refuse to accept them as payment. Monero solves these privacy issues by automatically applying privacy techniques to every single transaction made. You can have confidence that it is not possible to own ‘tainted’ Monero. This is a concept in economics known as ‘fungibility’ and is historically considered an important characteristic for any currency to have. The Bitcoin community has attempted to solve these problems by introducing ‘mixing’ features. Their solutions have been described as ‘a band aid over a stab wound’.
How many monero will be mined?
#Monero doesn't attempt to recreate scarcity. A second argument for Bitcoin is that it has a fixed supply, whereas Monero has a tail emission. This is extrapolated to mean Monero has an infinite supply, so it is as unfit to be a store of value as fiat. On the surface, this is definitely the more persuasive argument of the two, so we would like to address this one in detail. While Monero does have a tail emission, this is to ensure Monero’s long term security. Once the last Bitcoin has been minted, there will be no more block reward, leaving the fee market alone to incentivize miners to secure the chain. There is already preliminary research that suggests this will not be enough, and the security of the chain will drop dramatically, leaving the chain vulnerable to 51% attacks. Ultimately, this means you have accumulated a store of value that you can never move for fear of an attack. Going back to gold, would gold be at all useful as a store of value if it was impossible or prohibitively dangerous to move around, sell, or exchange? What good is inaccessible value? What good is an accumulated millions of dollars in stored value if it can only ever sit in what might as well be a bottomless pit forever? https://localmonero.co/knowledge/monero-better-store-of-value
Why not use Liquid or lightning?
Valid question! I do use lightning. It's fast, it's great. Also the best lightning wallets are ones that custody your sats. The ones that ask the common pleb to run a lightning node in the phone are clunky and inefficient. I should not have to jump through hoops to receive or send sats. Layer 2? So fantastic they had to add a layer 3!
A bitcoin node, with a private channel opened to the node, works well. I could send you a payment, and you try and tell me which one was mine and where it came from?
No. But after sending me a payment or vice versa, I can determine how much BTC you have in that wallet. Bitcoin has an open ledger, data harvesting tools can determine a lot of information about that wallet and its TXs.
I’m going to send you a payment now for 10,000 sats. I want you to tell me how much I have in my wallet.
Perhaps I don't have those data harvesting tools to determine your wallet amounts? Pointless exercise. You are a skilled Bitcoin holder. You know all sorts of added tweaks and adjustments to obscure the TX. Does the common holder know all of that? Nope, not likely. Monero is private by default. Those TXs are obscured from the get go. If you still want to zap, I will gladly accept monero instead! 😎 8AcLM1sJUAtVKtvHTGn3vpiDAbuwbQVicPuZ8WuuWygeBpDNasaJyeXARHYPFgGxMACD17PMFht8C4fDgTTv6EgsKkZEgZL
I sent two. The first one is decent privacy. The 2nd payment is, IMO, very private. Even with me telling you that J am the one responsible, I doubt anybody could figure out where the payment came from. Privacy isn’t easy. Monero has challenges as well. And we still need to improve privacy on chain. Regardless, have a great day. Enjoy the sats, glad you are here.
Monero maxis haven't heard about lighting, even though the vast majority of Bitcoin transactions occur there. Sending a lightning tx does not reveal your wallet's balance. Lightning transactions are only known by you, the person you sent the funds to, and any intermediary routing nodes. BOLT12 and additional upgrades enhance privacy further. Bitcoin has a ways to go on privacy, but it's getting better.