Oddbean

You cannot put the same savings in both Bitcoin & Monero. They are mutually exclusive networks. You can put the same savings into Bitcoin & have it on a privacy layer built on top of Bitcoin. This, plus Monero's higher inflation rate & the larger scaling challenges, is why it doesn't make much sense to hold Monero at all. It's not about religious devotion. It's about the unforgiving nature of monetary network effects.

Money is “winner take most” and the best money gains disproportionately. I’m expecting Monero to lose usage over time because bitcoin is the better store of value. This reduces monero’s privacy because you have a smaller group to hide in. This is why I believe we have no choice but to build our privacy into Bitcoin’s L2s like Lightning and federated ecash.

You know ecash wouldnt be one unified anonymity set right? It would be a fracturing. Opposite effect of what you want. Each mint would have it's own separate anon set. and regarding on chain bitcoin small dark pool >>> large transparent pool how large a group is irrelevant for anonymity if it's users can be picked out thru KYC or weaker pseudonymity of non-coinjoiners (majority of users)

Ecash seems like a single anonymity set because you can freely transfer in and out of mints using Lightning. i.e make a deposit to one mint, then transfer to one or more other mints. If sats can seamlessly and privately flow throughout all mints then it appears to me that they share the larger anonymity set. Unless I’m missing something, it seems receiving ecash would be the same as receiving monero.

Tokens are unique to each mint. Every time you leave a mint over lightning you reveal amount + destination to the original mint (a potential point of de-anonymization/reduced anonymity). You're also narrowing down your anon set the larger value of tokens you hold (ecash tokens have "buckets" of 1,2,4,8,16, 32...etc, increasingly fewer denominations exist the larger the bucket)

I read somewhere that you can just give the ecash token to a second mint and they can fetch the amount from the first mint. In this way you could move funds between mints, and even spread funds around, without revealing your identity or amount held.

Not sure how you could do that without revealing amounts to the 2nd mint because they'll know the amount they receive in lightning from the 1st mint (and know it's from the 1st mint since they're redeeming it's token), and the 1st mint will know the amount they're sending to the 2nd mint even if they're not colluding. And it still wouldn't solve the reduced anon set from "larger bucket" ecash holders unless you spread funds around like you said or never send/receive larger payments.Still better anonymity and privacy than Bitcoin, but coming back to my original point...ecash doesn't necessarily have a larger group to hide in just because it is ecash. I was kind of surprised the other day to find out that mints can tie IP addresses to specific tokens (maybe that should've been obvious), so I like what Mutiny is doing with Harbor running everything behind Tor

Yes, the second mint would know how much they’re receiving but not how much you have in total. The first mint would know how much they’re sending but wouldn’t know who’s sending it. Sounds like tor is crucial for this to stay private and also important to transact in relatively small amounts. I thought this was helpful: https://docs.cashu.space/faq

Bitcoin is not a better long term store of value than Monero. This is actually a much more interesting one than most arguments on this topic so I'll go in depth as to why. In game theory, there's a problem called tragedy of the commons, and within that concept there's the idea of the "free rider", I don't know how in depth you dive into game theory stuff but you should understand it intimately because all networks involving multiple agents are pure game theory and you can't understand peer to peer networks without it. Anyway, in Bitcoin, there's a cost to maintaining the network, without which a sat has no value whatsoever. This cost is entirely borne by those transacting in it, ultimately *the recipients* of it (just like how business taxes are borne ultimately by the clients of said business), and in this game, hodlers are free riders. This is, of course, assuming a capped supply of just under 21 million coins. And so, the incentive pressure is for everyone to become hodlers, you get to store your value at the expense of more frequent users, and the logical conclusion of course being that very few people transact and those that do pay for maintaining the security on behalf of those who don't. The only possible outcome of such a scheme is that nobody transacts, miners don't get paid, they quit, security drops and the network, and therefore your holdings, lose value. This is, of course, entirely a consequence of the hard cap, and Monero on the other hand with it's tail emission means that hodlers pay through debasement of their holdings for their share of the security of the network that gives their coins value, and since it's debasement, they pay in proportion to the value they get from the network. In the long term, Monero is the better store of value counterintuitively precisely due to the tail emission, the thing that is cited as the reason it is inferior as such. As far as the anonymity set (reducing Monero's privacy because you have a smaller group to hide in) this is not really a problem because of the fixed ring size, but it can be exploited in certain ways, but with full chain membership proofs which are Coming Soon™ to Monero, it will no longer be an issue.

Bitcoin doesn’t need monetary debasement to be a better store of value. Even if everyone were a hodler, there would still be transactions because hodlers need to eat too. (And businesses would need to buy supplies and pay workers. Etc.) It strikes me as this line of thinking is looking to solve a problem that doesn’t yet exist. The mining industry is growing nicely and bitcoin is already the best long term store of value in the way it has protected people’s saving compared to everything else.

You don't understand clearly what I've told you. This is a system of incentives, a "game" in the parlance of game theory. The outcomes are very much predictable, I'm not guessing here or making an argument on behalf of something or against something, I'm only making an educated observation. You can take what I've said and try to understand it deeper, or you can default to defending something you're emotionally attached to, but the incentives are the incentives and the outcomes are predictable.

@mister_monster I blocked the OP long ago. Can't remember why, but I don't block unless there is a very, very good reason. Not saying you should, just letting you know this convo may be an exercise in futility.

Lol oh I see call me upset to see if you can get a rise out of me. Honest people don't resort to childish tactics, they approach about topics from a place of veracity and attempt to delve into them with genuine curiosity. There isn't a serious bitcoiner that doesn't accept Monero.

That could be. It’s Gresham’s Law. People spend their worse monies first and hoard their best money. It’s the reason that, if I have both fiat and BTC, I prefer to spend fiat first. You always keep the money that preserves your purchasing power the best.

Thanks. Do you have your btcln node? Because in some countries custodial btcln wallets stopped to work https://bitcoinnews.com/legal/wallet-of-satoshi-quits-us-market/ A monero fullnode selfhosted is easier to mantain

Do you write checks from your savings account? Monero's current inflation rate is lower than that of bitcoin. Check for yourself if you don't believe me. The scaling challenges that Bitcoin faces, Monero mostly resolves. I say mostly because I'm a firm believer that in order to completely solve them you need the same security guarantees that bitcoin and Monero offer without the necessity to save all historical data. The dynamic block size though does a great deal to alleviate it. People actually spend Monero. Network effects in the long term are in it's favor if your goal is peer to peer digital cash.

No monero's scaling problems are much worse than bitcoin's because of the txn size, block size, cost of full validation, & the lack of a layered approach. Combine that with the need go battle bitcoin's multiple economic & social network effects & monero is a really bad bet.

Lack of a layered approach? What does that mean? What's the cost of full validation? You mean syncing the chain? What's wrong with the transaction size, and what is the Monero block size? Monero has it's own network effects, with blow and hookers.

Broadcast networks don't scale. Bigger txns mean the computational load, data transfer, & storage costs of securing the network are higher per txn. As all of those grow (if the block size isn't small & limited) mining becomes more of a race than a fair lottery. In a lottery, winning is random based on % of contribution. In a race, those with more resources always win.