Oddbean

Well, I'm talking more about the sheer number of nodes Bitcoin has. So many nodes, thus so decentralized that it's absolutely impossible to shut down. Monero could get to that point at some time down the road, though, to be completely fair. I just don't personally see that happening any time soon, considering the delistings and poor value performance.

The number of nodes is not as important as the decentralization of the hashrate and the money supply. First, non-minning nodes can be sybil-attacked so it’s not technically possible to know how many unique node participants a network has. Both #Bitcoin and #Monero have a healthy number of nodes, multiplying these numbers wouldn’t add substantial value to the network. When it comes to the hashrate, it has been concentrating in the Bitcoin network which is a concerning trend. The barrier to entry is now so high that mostly nation-states like actors enter the market hence, the future decentralization of the hashpower relies on those actors competing with each others. Due to privacy features of Monero, it’s hard to know for sure how concentrated the Monero hashrate is (which can be an argument against Monero by itself) but at least participating in mining remains accessible to anyone. Regarding the money supply, it seems pretty obvious that Bitcoin is seeing greater concentration of the its money supply than Monero. This is especially true since the launch of the ETF or the growing use of intermediary hubs to transact or store bitcoins. Again, hard to tell how concentrated the Monero supply is, but its growing use as a P2P payment method and desintermediation from the banking system decreasing favor its decentralization.

If it's not apparent by my posts, I'm definitely far from an expert on these things. I just go by the research I find and, well, it's difficult to find good research when there are genuine cultish resources on both sides. It's part of why I aim to use both if I ever find a way to obtain them without KYC (all of the no-KYC methods I've looked into seem to fall through for me). I also do plan to look into XMR mining to see if that's a possible option for me.