Thread
The problem with Monero is not the niche use and the lack of the network effect Bitcoin has. The problem is that it’s optimised for privacy and not for money. Money doesn’t get its utility from being private (that’s just a cool feature). The core feature of money is to be the most saleable good - the thing everyone will accept because they know everyone else will accept it. Monero’s tradeoff is that it sacrifices auditability, scalability, and long-term credibility of supply for privacy. It tries to be “private cash,” but it never becomes “global money”.
Replies (4)
I'd argue otherwise:
The first liquidity providers of bitcoin were cypherpunks and hackers, on the basis it was semi-anonymous and unstoppable money.
Now bitcoin has fallen into the hands of the powerful execs and feds, and we see exactly what your debatee was talking about happening (wrappers, ETF, kyc, etc...)
Yet it seems that now, most of XMR circulating supply is actually used for buying goods and services, privatly, by cypherpunks and hackers.
Plus, saying monero doesn't scale is missing the point, because it already has adaptive block size and bulletproofs.
It is true that privacy doesn't drive the value as much as scarcity in the long run, but your core pool (i mean not used to trade, and actually buying stuff) of liquidity does.
Privacy is a prerequisite for fungibility which in itself is a defining quality of money over (social) credit.
Society is currently in a state of confusion. People call things money that are far from it. It's based on decades of propaganda.
The only money I currently see is gold, silver, Monero and to a much lesser degree other privacycoins.
Cash is only fungible by decree, easy to counterfeit and not as hard to track as people assume due to serial number readers. Bitcoin, Ethereum, are non-confiscatable NFTs. USDT, USDC, bank accounts, stocks are all confiscatable IOU-NFTs.
People will claim that this does not matter NOW. Maybe they are not transacting enough in scenarios where fungibility is needed the most. Because any centralised entity be it a bank or a CEX will block or confiscate transactions or close accounts. It's daily business that affects 10s of thousands people daily.
Open your eyes!
Money with a history is less saleable, particularly when the person caught using it is held to account for past users' behavior.
Saying "private cash" is sort of redundant. One aspect of cash is fungibility, and on public blockchains privacy is a prerequisite for fungibility. You can make the argument for varying degrees of fungibility if you like, or say Bitcoin is "fungible enough", or lightning provides fungibility, but I'm just saying Monero is indisputably more fungible than Bitcoin for on-chain transactions if you take that point of view.
We can't really control what people choose to adopt as "global money". I'm more of the mindset that as long as governments exist fiat will always be king on controlled white markets. Bitcoin/Monero/etc will continue to grow for those on the outside wishing to opt-out or bypass restrictions via black/grey markets.
