I am generally more aligned with Monero people than Bitcoiners, in terms of my opinions.
However, I really think you're swimming against the current.
If I remember correctly, we already talked about it being a people problem, not a technology problem.
I'll definitely do more research into Monero when I get the time.
My base case is that it will be extremely niche, unless a Great Taking type scenario is triggered, which is not likely to happen in the near future.
I have to do more research on the technology and attack vectors though, in the same way I did with Bitcoin.
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”.
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.
You’re not wrong, but the same thing can be said about privacy coins that can just as easily be labelled for “implied criminal use”. “If you got nothing to hide, why use this privacy tool, you must be a money launderer/terrorist/pedophile”. I’m sure you can imagine a future where this is “business as usual”. Which would immediately decrease the saleability of your coin by orders of magnitude. Normal people would never want to touch it. Neither Bitcoin nor Monero are immune to this kind of social attack, but in the case of Monero it will be much worse, because you can’t prove your innocence by simply doing a forensics test on your coins.
These things are quite obvious except to those who will prefer to see that old thing as a cult rather than understanding the reason why it was created.
Bitcoin isn't holy, monero isn't holy. Different technologies and approaches should be tested to make sure crypto currencies truly help people separate their money from governments and central banks.
Cash exists, the same can apply to cash.
The answer, the insight is, everybody wants private money. They just don't want *you* to have it. They don't ban cash, not because they can't, but because they want the option for themselves, they being the crooks in government. So, they'll always let something continue because they benefit from it.
A completely private decentralized network is a far cry from a mixing service, one is just a thing people use for whatever, the other stands out like a sore thumb. They're much less likely to go after the former than the latter, again, primarily because they need it as much as you do.
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.
Nothing to disagree with here. We can’t know the future, all we can do is go back to first principles and think adversarially. Monero was recently shown to be vulnerable to hostile mining attacks — something its supporters claimed was impossible. Bitcoin is being co-opted in real time by its own devs — something Bitcoiners were saying we can easily handle. Monero’s mining vulnerability shows you can’t engineer your way out of adversaries forever. Bitcoin’s dev drama shows you can’t governance-proof a human system.
I live in a country where cash is still the norm. You can’t rely on credit cards alone because many merchants only take cash. I can easily go months paying in cash, but that’s changing fast. A friend of mine recently went to the USA. He’s a cash guy, so he exchanged a bunch of our local currency for USD, thinking it would be the same there. When he came back, he said most of his cash went unused — every time he tried to pay with it, cashiers looked at him like he was a drug dealer or something.
