Oddbean

I have some old xmr wallets it's an interesting protocol but I don't think it can scale the way Bitcoin captured the energy grid because xmr is sustained by FPGAs and hidden ASICs/botnets. To properly go Moore's law asic would be a decade of disruption. To fork Bitcoin would be more than anyone wants to deal with. idk what do you think? I'd support monero more of they abandoned asic resistance

Bitcoin fails on all promises from the early days, sadly. - it is not decentralized, 12 mining pools have control = it is not usable as p2p currency - lightning is moving most users into custodial wallets = not your keys and not your coins - 1mb blocks are a joke, we have 2024 and a 12tb hdd costs $120 - fully transparent with zero privacy - mints and etf's will dilute the 21m cap Asic resistance is one of the key arguments for Monero . Also mining by botnets creates a truly decentralized infrastructure. Botnet miners will not bend their knee to a tyrannical government. Apart from that it is censorship resistant, has adaptable block size and fees are low. You can use it as a p2p currency. The longer i think about it, the more it is clear to me: Monero is the real Bitcoin and represents everything why i went into Bitcoin in the first place. Most people will only understand its value when the government mandates to connect your digital ID to your BTC transactions.

Mainchains do not scale even with 12tb drives. If zaps had to be written on everyone's node that would fill up quick. Monero works as a niche, but with a large amount of success it'll crumble. The ASIC resistance will be regularly cracked when there's market incentive to do so. The blockchain size will be stupid and unpredictable if it became popular. I used to be on the ASIC resistance side back in 2017 but learned how difficult it is to keep fair. I'd rather the rules be set and the market competes. I run Bitcoin the og way, its possible with a few hundred dollars and hours.

What happens when tomorrows 12TB is how we look at 12GB today? All of what you say heavily depends on the rate of adoptions and if it remains a niche doesnt it? Consumer tech is not static and technological development is not static either. i.e. implementing bulletproofs shrunk Monero transaction size by ~80% You're basically saying Monero will suddenly become so successful that it will break (a problem that is also possible for Bitcoin and more likely for it's popularity). What a great problem to have. And if it doesn't gain that crazy level of success (most likely case) then what is the problem? It still remains a useful tool for many. https://image.nostr.build/f3d4dc2a45d469b1ba3c7f7dad2ec4fb47303d7f53cae9e671f774c31d2ea379.jpg

Also nobody said you need to make the blockchain 12tb now. Just holding on to the 1mb block size because somebody wants to be able to run a node on a $50 usd raspberry pie or his apple watch and every user on the network needs to suffer from high fees, slow transaction times, terrible self hosted lightning onboarding etc. is just a completely retarded argument. Just like Bill Gates said in the 80s, 640kb of ram should be enough for everybody... Scaling the block size to 10mb or so would solve so many problems, help the bitcoin adoption tremendously, make it cheap to open lightning channels, move away from custodial wallets etc. But, when a majority of the developers is paid by companies which have direct incentives to keep the blocksize small so they can sell their solutions ( Blockstream, Lightning Labs etc. ), this obviously does not happen. That people say Bitcoin is decentralized when it is actually controlled by a few entities is a mystery to me.

It is 2024 and we still have a ridiculously small block size which gets treated like the golden cow which can not be changed. There was a lot of discussion in 2017, a lot of it was false promises, vaporware and lies.

0% improvement on that specific metric. Are you saying TPS has increased? And if it has increased, has it kept up anywhere even close to advancements in tech and and consumer hardware/bandwidth? We can emphatically say HELL NO

yeah wallet format, segwit, batching, etc. all mainchain throughput increases done with a soft fork. This isn't even talking about the different layers which unlock a whole lot more. Trying to keep up with hardware through hard forks was never going to work. There's a reason why Bitcoin mogs everyone else. Keeping data for frivolous transactions doesn't scale. Eth was smug as hell until they ran into a wall. If xmr ever gets going they'll do the same.

Was obviously talking about on chain (which greatly affects lightning being usable as we always see when blocks get full onchain). Layers don't carry over the same fundamental properties that make on chain great. You always sacrifice some form of sovereignty like self-custody or permissionless txs so far. You say that, but still havent explained why. Why couldn't Bitcoin even increase it conservatively based off whatever metric was it's bottleneck (just behind bandwidth for example?) If that is your worry, why hasn't Bitcoin adopted MimbleWimble? MW is even more scalable on chain than even Bitcoin itself. Litecoin already did all the work.

The different layers are either overpromised as hell, like self hosted Lightning (neither has the low fees which were promised, nor is it easy to use when you need to manage your own channels) Or they are owned by companies which take all transaction fees, like Liquid and they will censor your stuff when the Government wants them to. So it pushes users into custodial wallets and custodial sidechains. There goes your freedom to transact, censorship resistance and self custody. Welcome to the new bank, just like the old bank but with a new brand name.