Oddbean

Don’t insult me, I haven’t insulted you. If you’re not capable of having a civil discussion then I’ll just mute you. If there is no supply cap and the supply growth never stops, then the maximum supply is infinity. On an infinite timeline, the supply of monero trends toward infinity. Idk why that’s hard to admit. That doesn’t mean monero can’t be useful in other ways. USDT is a shitcoin with an infinite supply but is still useful.

fair enough I literally said exactly the same thing in the above note. i just pointed out that "trending toward infinity" isn't the same thing as "infinite supply." because at no point in time is the supply infinite.

to elaborate a bit to get the convo going An artificial hard cap is a knee-jerk reaction to fiat insanity it is not good monetary policy It isn't rational to criticize Monero for an inflation rate that's lower than gold. As if gold hadn't been a stable store of value for thousands of years...

I guess that’s where we differ. I think gold is a shitcoin too. Gold shares a lot of the qualities of other shitcoins. Obviously no maximum supply, we can find gold in the ocean and in space. You can’t trade large quantities of it across large distances efficiently. You can’t cross borders with your wealth in it. Its effective use needs a 3rd party. Gold was good at one point in the past on a small scale but it’s not great today.

bitcoin's effective use needs a third party. bitcoin developers have utterly failed to deliver scalable self-custody. now they are only able to scale via custodians. this is why you see so many people cheering for things like cashu, or institutions buying bitcoin and leaving it on coinbase. it is scaling via custodians. in a mass adoption scenario only ultra wealthy computer nerds and banks will be able to own their own coins, and everyone else will be forced onto a custodian whether they are responsible enough for self-custody or not. the custodians will have the power to nullify all the other benefits, even the fixed supply, because they are issuing IOUs.

fucking do it. I'm still waiting. please knock my socks off. I expect bitcoin to give me scalable self-custody that doesn't require a degree in installing gentoo, and I expect monero-level privacy at the same time. but it doesn't have that right now.

a lot of people are into cryptocurrency (yes bitcoin is one of those, satoshi called it that) because they expect returns. and they won't interact with anything that they are not certain will give them returns. they may even think that's all there is to it. if you are one of those people you are gonna be really confused when you meet someone who doesn't care as much. I don't need returns to convince me of utility. it's nice when it happens. ideally I should be getting both. but if I am getting returns but not the utility I want, I'm not going to think that's enough for me. if that still confuses you, too bad. I literally don't think that bitcoin is going down the path of scalable self-custody. I think most of the developers either don't care about that anymore or they are too chickenshit to do any opcodes that may be required. it's going to take a lot of shifts in the community to change my mind about this. if it happens, I will be very happy. but it is very frustrating for me to sit here and see people shilling ecash as a replacement for monero right now and bragging about all sorts of things that actually haven't been accomplished yet and might never happen at all. I'd love if bitcoin actually became good enough to replace monero. fucking do it.

I basically agree with those points regarding gold. but we're discussing supply inflation. and gold never became a poor store of value because of supply inflation iow a fixed and immutable supply isn't a requirement of money. doing so has tradeoffs like everything else but talking like its a necessary property of money is obviously contradicted by history.

Fair. So the tradeoff is that everyone on the monero network pays for maintaining the network through inflation whereas everyone on the Bitcoin network pays to maintain the network when they transact. The main takeaway is that everyone has to pay in some way.

yeah exactly the general game theory on this is usually expressed through the "free rider problem" basically when there's network security cost and only a subset of users pay for it (people making txs) everyone tries to be a "free rider", ie part of the group that *doesn't pay for security (hodlers). according to the theory, the security of such a network trends towards zero. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem whether it works out that way in practice is of course another story. but the point I want to make is that tail emission is a legitimate tradeoff. there are other tradeoffs Monero makes that can be criticized but its not reasonable to argue tail emission makes it shitcoin IMHO.

Sorry for butting in, but I think almost no one who supports and promotes #XMR is dumb, fanatical, or narrow-minded enough to not recognize #BTC. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the “BTC-only” crowd when it comes to psychological traits and intelligence.

I don’t really have a problem with monero. But a lot of monero shills come at me very aggressively and it’s pretty annoying lol I value privacy but I have concerns about whether monero is liquid enough to function as a p2p cash alternative when I’m ready to spend my bitcoin. Large bitcoin whales buying in and selling out of monero is not practical because it’ll make the price more volatile. I know bitcoin is volatile but that’s part of the feature of bitcoin. Monero being volatile isn’t a good thing since it is being strictly used for transacting. Monero staying a small project and flying under the radar is probably best. Mass adoption is not realistic imo.

I’m not worried about nothing related to cryptocurrency. Rest assured. Just the way you call a coin as “king” resembles me that song. Serious questions: When will be that? Is there a roadmap? No joke.

In today’s world, where we’re in a frenzy of technological evolution, it’s funny to see someone use “coming soon” (or something like that) to defend one technology over another for years. And these excuses get thrown around left and right with no shame. Some even use them with a bit of pride.

not really. maxis are much more prone to find opportunity to dunk and much LESS interested in discussing nuance. also they famously are widely NOT interested in using new code with new features and often are fans of premature ossification. nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqtr9jsrjtwl3p0am754hd3qkqe65gsfxfac860vuc882hpkh8ltlqyfhwumn8ghj7am0wsh82arcduhx7mn99uqzpq7zdh08nlq9fzldv80ntq5kqzulrhwq7lsmreaghvk0uhr94rqc7zdafe

legit concern i solve this by having a stack of monero as well and move between the two just a few times per year which means my fiat net worth is lower than it would be otherwise but I'm highly critical of the maxi attitude that everything should revolve around maximizing your fiat equiv buying power

it's both for monero actually. the network security budget is funded by both tail emission and transaction fees. but the fee revenue is not very significant. monero has about 20% of the daily transaction count of litecoin. if it gets used more then a greater share of the security budget will come from transaction fees.

Not everyone. Holders don't pay, but they benefit, and those that spend subsidize the security on behalf of those that don't spend. It's a big problem that will increasingly become obvious as it rears it's head in the coming decades. I wrote up some detail on it in the linked note and more in the thread it is in nostr:nevent1qqs84fr56hq6wzjcdmg6pu5s65v9a05duxejjytgj7jgk0jdf6zgheqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygxaypt42mug5ex2e5r46qrlr0jgp72fey0ad5xy6kfm4nxm924augpsgqqqqqqstyf93r

The holders paid to secure their wealth when they initially moved their funds to their wallet. It’s just that there isn’t an ongoing cost to holding it. But wealth that never moves is not beneficial. At some point they have to move it and pay a cost. I think that energy will become cheaper over time but also that bitcoin will become more valuable over time as well. The subsidy continues to shrink but Bitcoin’s value continues trending up while hash continues to rise along with it. Time will tell.

There is an ongoing cost to holding it. Your wealth is secured by the network, without that security, your wealth is worthless. That security you get is subsidized by spenders, and this has incentive/game-theoretical implications for the bitcoin network that are not good. You can have the rarest of assets and if it can disappear while you sleep it's not worth anything. Energy becoming cheaper... As energy becomes cheaper, people spend more on it by raising their energy usage. This is commonly observed everywhere in the world, and so far, empirically, this has held true for the bitcoin network as well. I explained all of this stuff the other day in more detail in the following note, as well as another note in the same thread, if you want to give it a read to get a good idea of my thoughts on the matter. nostr:nevent1qqs84fr56hq6wzjcdmg6pu5s65v9a05duxejjytgj7jgk0jdf6zgheqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygxaypt42mug5ex2e5r46qrlr0jgp72fey0ad5xy6kfm4nxm924augpsgqqqqqqstyf93r