Oddbean

I have been involved in privacy, security, pentesting and virtualization all my life and more than 25 years of self-investment (trial and error), I consider myself an investor rather than a computer scientist. I know something of both worlds. I have used monero, believe me, I appreciate its technical qualities, I consider it a privacy tool, but I don't consider it a place to put my money. Face it, I need private ways to spend my Bitcoin, not monero. https://m.primal.net/KyyV.png

If you can atomic swap in and out, I guess its cheaper and less painful than coinjoins, but yeah I don't see why id' give up the purchasing power appreciation rate, the verifiability and the access to liquidity just for privacy I know the drivechain peeps were big on shilling a zcash chain for privacy but yeah that didn't go anywhere

I like swaps but to be fair there are some things to keep in mind. You have to protect yourself against the other peer (tor) otherwise it will know your ip. Also the swap protects you very well against the chain analysis of a third party, but the other peer knows what you have done, depending on the threat model is useful or not. For a normal user it is more than enough, but not for a spy. On the other hand, centralized atomic swap services such as boltz can be a problem because of the information they can collect. This problem is mitigated by using decentralized atomic swap tools like UnstoppableSwap (btc-xrm) although unfortunately nothing like this exists for bitcoin. A blind coordinator for example does not know to whom the mixed bitcoins go, if we add a good use of tor circuits (not the case of samourai) (wasabi does it better without being perfect) gives an almost perfect privacy beyond the statistical problem of correlation. That is why it is important to consider the use case.

I have been involved in Bitcoin long enough to rank it's abilities in new ways. Back in 2010: 1. Make me more "money" (purchasing power) 2. Render effects of inflation irrelevant 3. Being private enough for everyday transactions. Back in 2017 at the height of the market cycle my priorities changed. That's also when I took a deep dive into Monero. 1. Ever since I've been looking for the most private way to store my wealth after gaining substantisl amounts of purchasing power. 2. I still prefer my investments to increase my purchasing power, but it's less relevant 3. I started to understand that taxes are an even bigger problem than (indirect tax/inflation) 4. As an active trader I know I will always be able to protect myself from inflation. Though I see the huge toll inflation has on society. As you can see many Bitcoiners from ten to fifteen years ago have all stacked some Monero. It's the newcomers who believe Bitcoin will solve all their problems. Slow and steady wins the race. And in that regard no cryptocurrency is currently better as a USD replacement than Monero. It's slowly rising in purchasing power but much less speculative than Bitcoin which is a great tool for investors to hedge against certain risks.

Every time I look at Monero, I get reminded by the VHS/betamax feud. The superior technology lost. In Monero's case, the superior privacy technology lost. Tough shit. I think Bitcoin is superior in other ways (no tail emission, for example). I also think, bitcoin can be made equally as private if not more; but I'm no expert.