Oddbean

First off, it's not just privacy but also issues with custody on lightning. Most people aren't willing to spend the time or money (or can't afford) to self-custody lightning. We documented the issues with custodial bitcoin in an earlier post with Hayek. And how it mirrors problems with the fractional reserve banking system. Second, regarding this situation, they were able to rule out Monero outputs by running malicious nodes, but those outputs had no meaning if it stayed within Monero itself. As soon as someone swapped it for Bitcoin at a business that can be given a supenea, then it is a lead, and in this case, got a vendor doing XMR->Bitcoin in colombia. If they are running that many monero nodes, they are running that many lightning nodes, and custody is a huge issue then

Custodial LN is like leaving your bitcoin on an exchange. If someone is selling on darknet markets AND using custodial LN then they kinda have a death wish. Onchain fees are 2-3 sats/vb at the moment. Anyone can open a self custodial channel and turn on MPP so that small denominations are getting routed around. I think it would be naive to think they didn't have LN nodes up and running, but like I said, they're a black box. They make sh$t up like with the bitcoin fog guy and get away with it. Who knows what they really can or can't derive from the LN network.

Yes on-chain btc fees are crazy low now, which I assume is due to low use. If true, that is not a good argument for scaling. And no, I am NOT saying darknet market evasion is the reason for privacy. I'm saying if users have to actually calculate the capital gains/loss on every little purchase, they will avoid using Bitcoin for cash to not have to do that. The only way to make them feel that they do not have to, is if it's private against advanced adversaries. All the deep state has to do is to make an example of ONE REGULAR person for SMALL amounts, and the entire bitcoin lightning as cash concept will be killed. They can promote that person in the media all day.

That example isn't unique to bitcoin alone. It applies to all KYC'd "crypto" including monero. I mean, thats one of the reasons bitcoiners have this HODL culture. In most countries there IS a capital gains tax from spending bitcoin. So why would one spend it when they could spend their worse money first. There's an argument that this kind of thing might be good as it shows why noKYC often comes at a premium but its worth it.

Yeah but if all you do is HODL KYC bitcoin, then how's that really improve people's freedoms? It's not getting people off banks, which is the real issue. It's not private. It's just a new gold ETF. Cryptocurrency is unique to stop fractional reserve banking. Just helping with inflation can be done with anything. People could hedge inflation with gold ETFs and it would be similiar

>Onchain fees are 2-3 sats/vb at the moment why do people keep making this dumb "but it's not raining today" argument? we've both seen the fee charts many many times. $50 UTXOs have become unspendable more often than solana downtime. if maxis get the adoption they feel entitled to, $50 UTXOs will become unspendable all the time. everyone will be forced into a custodial lightning wallet unless they are wealthy enough to be the custodian.

Some of us didn't think we'd see fees this low ever again. That's what it is for now. Everything has tradeoffs. People who want to put in $50 will have to start with custodial LN, liquid or an ecash/fedimint IOU. If they don't continue to stack, then they will stay there. Hopefully they'll learn the benefits of bitcoin and continue to stack towards selfsovereignty by either transferring that onchain in a larger UTXO, or into a self custodies LN channel for spending. The stuff you argue about for Bitcoin is the same stuff your other block chains will need to deal with once they get significant adoption. Which is unlikely ever to happen.

"The stuff you argue about for Bitcoin is the same stuff your other block chains will need to deal with once they get significant adoption. Which is unlikely ever to happen." Not true. Even with the same traffic Monero would have similar fees as it does right now because of dynamic blocksize. The reason Bitcoin fees get high when more people are trying to use it is users are bidding on limited block space to get their transactions in.

So you're saying monero scales 8 billion people on the base layer? Why don't other block chains just put dynamic blocks and we don't need to argue anymore cause it works. Because it hasn't been tested yet.