Oddbean

Outside of Bitcoin, Monero is the only crypto coin I have a real soft spot for. I don't want it to fail—they’re at least trying to solve a genuine problem. I also think Bitcoin and Monero can coexist well. Each serves a distinct purpose: Bitcoin as an ultra-sound store of value, and Monero for quick, private transactions. Also, if you don’t mind, feel free to share your biggest criticisms of Monero. I’d love to hear them. #AskNostr #Bitcoin #Monero

Not really, at least in my mind, e-cash privacy is great, but it doesn't really solve any form of custodial problem. So if someone is using custodial lightning on top of custodial e-cash, then it's just one big custodial potential rug clusterfuck. And Monero, as much as people hate on it, is easy to use, and doesn't rely on so many layers of Potential rugs.

moneros node gui is incredible, absolutely shits on bitcoin you can like download, have a full node running in a day, have a wallet setup in the GUI, be mining in the GUI to that wallet...basically full contributor to network all without barely much insight to what you are doing.

I don't think ecash is trying to solve custody, it's trying to be the best form of custody. Any custodial service is just a credit system. I think it's well established that some form of credit system will have to exist in a bitcoin world since not enough utxo or block space for the whole world. Privacy aside, the credit system that is the most decentralized, or allows the most amount of people to manage small communities of credit on top of their bitcoin would be preferred over a centralized issuer of that credit imo. That's how I view cashu and fedimint, it allows many small Bitcoin community banks (custodians) to exist and issue credit that's interchangeable. (Not to diminish the privacy and cost savings benefits also)

ECash is undoubtedly a breakthrough, but currently, it doesn't seem that decentralized, individual mints have too much control. The current direction also seems very centralized, though this might change in the future. Or perhaps I'm completely misunderstanding some critical part.

Ecash is custodial so it's not a full replacement for Monero. Ecash also has a major catch-22: Public mint runners are potentially more trustworthy but easier targets for the state to shutdown (and would be considered money transmitters). Anon mint runners are more diffcult for the state to shutdown, but can rug it's users with little to no consequence.

I respect this. There are plenty of people living under regimes where the ability to transact with near-perfect privacy *by default* is of greater importance than a doubtless guarantee of supply cap/supply auditability, socially-approved transaction rails, NGU, etc. I’d rather hold Bitcoin. It feels like Bitcoin will change (and fix) much of what’s broken in our society around money — the hard supply cap and transparent blockchain work to prevent a lot of the government+corporate+central banking fuckery that got us into this mess in the first place. I want to be a part of that movement. A private digital cash might not solve those problems as well (nor is it intended to). Privacy yields its own benefits — the argument for using Monero is a solid one, and in certain circumstances, the tradeoffs strike me as acceptable. My two sats.

Monero is important to remind us that we need to fix fungibility in Bitcoin. eCash is great but custodial. Lightning is of questionable benefit to one's privacy. I don't know where Monero stands right now but its price vs. Bitcoin's price is a direct indicator of relative fungibility issues.

Just out of curiosity, I think it would be interesting to build a transaction bridge between Lightning and Monero. Maybe something like: you enter the Monero address you want to pay with your Lightning wallet, it generates a Lightning invoice, and once settled, seamlessly converts those sats to Monero and sends them to the recipient's wallet, vice-versa Not sure if there’s a real-world use case for it, but it could be an interesting experiment.

lightning can be extended to all other assets, including lines of credit between parties that trust each other so there is nothing stopping devs from building a monero wallet that can receive from bitcoin lighting wallets via some exchange nodes. Mixing on-chain with lightning is the problem here, as on-chain payments are not final, so the one exchanging lightning payments for monero pay-outs needs to be trusted.

Putting together a basic prototype, and while it's very sketchy but, it's functional. There's definitely room for improvement, and I still need to explore other approaches. nostr:nevent1qqszx4tmp2tdpxkk9wrj5ed2udt3ngk802vpxejw24gg5mvz69lzyzgpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuvrcvd5xzapwvdhk6tczyrr0wpmlz6va2r8e92t990ltl7kqtlrgg2u7uwgs38v4nw9dt4y06qcyqqqqqqg785rx2

ive used monero for a while now. my biggest critique is that it is quite hard to use quickly. unless my node has been on and the wallet im using is synced to my node, and even then gotta wait for confirmations. it works for simple online things where im not in a hurry and just need to nake the payment at some point that day, but monero as-is feels far less usable than lightning in the wild. i think monero needs some sort of batched multi sig lightning esque payment layer to solve for syncing and confirmation delays 🤙

You don't need monero You can transact privately with bitcoin and that makes monero redundant. The monero community is good for hearing criticism of bitcoin and also for dunking on every now and then.

Legit criticisms of Monero in comparison to Bitcoin: uncapped total supply, potentially undetectable inflation bugs, smaller community, smaller liquidity, more difficult to acquire, easier to attack, large tx sizes so the chain grows far quicker and potentially harder to run nodes (there are also counter arguments for all of these) vs Lightning: Not instant, not as cheap, it's blockchain is a public global ledger that is forever (FCMP upgrade will change this) vs other privacy tech: Although ring signatures have worked well enough so far, they aren't good enough for edge cases and in the longrun (FCMP upgrade will change this)