Oddbean new post about login | logout I don't think a simple privacy protocol is enough to justify the value of an entirely separate money. The network effects and tendency toward consolidation in monetary networks is extraordinary. I highly suspect the value of #Monero as measured in #Bitcoin will fall indefinitely. Maybe some of its network value will be sustained long term, kind of like Tor vs TCP/IP (open internet), but hard to say at this stage. Monetary transitions take a really long time. I do stand by my comments that I think most of that community have cypherpunk values (rather than the outright stupid scams of the rest of "crypto"), and I think privacy is a very admirable value to be hyper focused on... but I genuinely don't think it keeps a separate monetary token alive on a long term time scale. I think privacy will simply be a feature provided by many layers and networks that use BTC as their monetary base.
it simply cannot be a store of value. I see 2 possibilities. 1 they create some tech that will be replicated in bitcoin and monero dies. 2 they create some tech that cannot be replicated in bitcoin and some people will still move in and out when they need to do some black market/illegal transactions. I hope monero grows so it becomes relevant enough to get a really adversarial environment, and we find out how private it really is.
That's all the point bitcoiners are missing, Bitcoin is stuck in regulations compliance, if you add real privacy on it, wall street will dump it or fork it. Bitcoin will become the enemy and bitcoiners don't want that, they want Bitcoin as a "digital gold" so let it be traceable with no privacy, you don't want to be that bad, Monero is here for that 😉
None of the either/or dilemmas you’ve listed here are actually either/or dilemmas. They need to be for Monero to have a long term value proposition at all, but they aren’t.