Oddbean new post about login | logout There’s no second best. As it is people don’t give a shit about the privacy improvement BTC represents over traditional banking. Trying to convince people to use XMR is just not gonna happen. It will continue to remain a niche within a niche. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s NGMI in the main stage
Eventually when people are actually using and earning bitcoin P2P there will be even less of an incentive to use monero, especially if the using and earning happens over lightning or ecash
lightning uses onions! they don't make enough of that point nor do they really exploit it enough in their protocol design part of the reason why payments fail is because they are client side onions and a hop in the path is ded or unresponsive temporarily
The massive centralizing routing hubs of LN reduce and sometimes even negate the benefit of onion routing. But this is besides the point because 95% of LN users are on custodial wallets or LSPs that give them none of that privacy anyway.
Lightning does not have the default, well-rounded, strong privacy of Monero. It's designed around fast and cheap payments for retail with privacy as an afterthought. ecash is custodial and mints can print unbacked tokens, so it's dodging 2 out of the 3 major pillars of Bitcoin
The guy who said that also said "Maybe you need a Monero" so pretty funny If Monero remains a dark market niche that would be fine. Any crypto use on white markets is asking permission by definition, no matter how popular it becomes, defeating the entire point of it. You're right though people really don't give a fuck about privacy. But they also don't care about sovereignty that Bitcoin offers either. Both of which are taken for granted until it affects them. All that potentially matters for the general public is Bitcoin price exposure and custodial instruments which means easy price manipulation.