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 this is the general theme, bitcoin has more considerations than just privacy, while monero has it as their marketing and can focus on it at the expense of everything else

for one, syncing a monero node takes ages, and requires fast storage for the entire block chain instead of only a UTXO database, do people generally run their own monero node? if not and they're using some wallet provider, that's not great for privacy either

also yes things like potential DoS attacks might fly under the radar for a more obscure coin, but wouldn't for bitcoin 
 Monero is also much simpler in many ways. Supporting L2's properly requires a surprising amount of work on mempool behavior, and of course, a script system that Monero just doesn't have. Of course, I think Bitcoin Core has overcomplicated certain aspects of mempool behavior. But even ignoring that disagreement it would _still_ be much more complex than Monero.

I have a Monero node on my laptop – running in Qubes of course. On top of it being slow, the database implementation fragments the hell out of the disk image file due to how it does so many writes to arbitrary locations. One of these days I might just give up on that node... 😂 
 LMDB is far better than Berkeley databases, I think youre just lying about your storage disk or using some primate HDDs lol 
 People in general run their own nodes.

Are you talking about syncing your wallet or downloading the blockchain and staying in sync with the P2P network? Those two are distinct things in Monero. 
 i meant syncing the block chain (for a local wallet)

how does the wallet-only sync work? is it some kind of SPV or electrum kind of mode, where it queries a node for transactions specific to it? 
 You scan through everything client-side, many monero wallets do this. There is no SPV and  headers are not checked either. 
 So by "everything" you mean any arbitrary spam sent to you by some random guy on the internet? And you're performing something like ecdh on it to see if you're being paid? 
 So these "lite" wallets connect to a remote node and, query the transaction data from them through a rpc interface and scan through it on their side. They trust the remote node to speak the truth when scanning to not feed it fake transaction data. So in the worst case you might calculate a faked balance and transaction history. 
 Well in the worst case you use 100% until your battery dies and find nothing?

Most bip158 light wallets don't do much checking either, their worst case is limited to downloading all blocks. Which in practice also means a dead battery an no transaction history. 
 * 100% CPU 
 Monero wallets are optimized to sync from the block height where the first incoming transaction happened. 

Even light mobile wallets like Cake will download block filters to avoid reliance on any Electrum-type of server. 

They also use a BIP39-style backup as default in all wallets including the full node/CPU mining one. 

Maybe you should give it a try, the amount of progress that they made is really impressive. 
 "really impressive"

Those are all things Bitcoin wallets do. Heck, Bitcoin pioneered block filters.

What's actually really impressive is implementing Lightning. 
 Speaking of implementing Lighting, Decred has built a much more reliable version of it which has nearly 0% failed payments. 

They also have base layer privacy. 

Haven’t heard anyone in Bitcoin speaking about it. 


https://www.youtube.com/live/jKDJ06Pgu9A?si=4XjrrWAgQYCCGfAs 
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 Bitcoin Silent Payment syncing is shit compared to Monero. Even after recent improvements. I attempted for the 3rd time to give it a chance. Extremely slow. 
 Silent Payment syncing on a full node, which you should have anyway, should add less than 1% overhead.

For light clients there isn't even a full spec yet on how to do that, so I'm not sure what mechanism you used. It should be comparable to bip158 sync.

In any case Silent Payments are just a way to avoid address reuse, they're not trying to achieve the same thing as Monero. 
 Sure, ideally, but realistically the vast majority of users are not going to ever run a node. There are millions of Bitcoiners, yet only ~50,000 node runners at best. And the privacy implications are not as detrimental to Monero users for using a public node as they are for Bitcoin since amounts and receivers are still not visible to malicious nodes. Monero syncing is relatively fast even when using a public remote node, so not sure why it's so much slower for Bitcoin SP.

Cake and Silentium are the only wallets that I know of right now that have Silent Payments

Silent Payments also allow you to post a public address and still prevent third parties from knowing what addresses payments/donations are going to. It's essentially the Bitcoin version of Monero Stealth Addresses. 
 > And the privacy implications are not as detrimental to Monero users for using a public node as they are for Bitcoin

Do you understand how BIP158 filters work? 
 Monero/Samourai/Red guys always just throw around podcast buzzwords they have no actual understanding of. No use argumenting, they will just throw more buzzwords. 
 The Joe-Roganization of technical discussion? :-) 
 Not sure about Joe Rogan, but the red guys are probably more offensive, as if you insult them directly when you introduce them to the concept of technical tradeoffs using their thing as example. 
 What "buzzwords" were said? 
 I don't know how Cake and Silentium work exactly. There is no standard yet for light clients, so claiming that non-standard experimental software is slow, is just not that relevant. Let's wait and see. 
 Isn't BIP158 for querying a node without exposing all your addresses? I don't think it hides sender/amount/receiver from the public node when you broadcast the transaction does it?

Correct me if I'm wrong 
 Transaction broadcast is a completely different issue than scanning. One shot Tor connections are a nice potential way to deal with that.

Dandelion would be nicer, but so far nobody has implemented it in a DoS resistant matter. Part of the problem there is that the Bitcoin Core mempool is already extremely complicated, though I'm still hopeful that will improve, e.g. with cluster mempool.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/29415 
 I mean it is still pretty relevant to the topic of using public nodes. Unless you're someone who plans on never broadcasting transactions.

But looks cool 
 im neither in marketing nor really a judgemental person, if you prefer monero then use monero 🤷‍♀️ 
i have zero interest in "my coin is better" arguments based on checkbox points, there's also no need to try to convince me of anything