Oddbean

Different (or overlapping) use cases IMO. Bitcoin’s purpose is to break and replace the fuckery of central banks (and protect individual purchasing power). Monero gives citizens a form of near-perfectly private digital money. Both are important tools/movements in today’s society. It’s a bit of a tired analogy, but gold bars and silver coins (except digital, decentralized, and unfuckable) always made sense to me.

True, but unlike gold bars, which citizens could hide under their mattress in the 1930s, after the government attempted to force people to turn it in, Bitcoin is perfectly traceable by anybody with an internet connection. And so, therefore, makes a very bad store of value because the government will know that you have it. You can of course claim otherwise, but the second you make a transaction after that lie you are fucked.

Assuming the sats were purchased KYC, yes. There’s nuance even there, but the issue with even your local business potentially seeing “the entire contents of your bank account” when you chip off a piece of a UTXO to buy a coffee is a concern. Protocol changes and privacy layers will continue to come to Bitcoin (the difficulty of changing Bitcoin now, where most noderunners are pretty hardcore about no changes, is different than it will be with millions or billions of nodes). In the meantime, I respect Monero as a privacy tool. They solve different problems, IMO