#loveIZlogical +1

Good write up and fair points. 1. In your estimation who balanced the design trade offs better? 2. Where do you see things going in the next five years for each project?

Beautiful. Thank you Satoshi for proving that decentralization, security, and scalability can only coexist when truth is built in layers.

Some counter notes here to ponder on: "-Hash power, not even a state can attack it" Due to centralized ASIC mining, only a handful of companies control giant portions of mining power due to economies of scale. Companies are extremely susceptible to lawfare and state intelligence influence. Bitmain manufactures nearly ALL the ASIC miners used for Bitcoins simplistic sha256 algorithm. One backdoor in each can do anything to the blockchain remotely, and since they're proprietary black box chips you'd have no idea. US intelligence published an article stating concern about this I'll link it as a reply. Monero is mined most efficiently on gaming PC CPUs. Server CPUs are vastly more expensive relative to their hashrate, the most efficient is something you can buy on Amazon and any bro you plays PC games already has. Ryzen 9 series is crushing it now in price to performance. The egalitarian difference is clear here. Also regarding Moneros lower hash power, yes this is definitely true but only a result of price. I did an analysis a bit ago proving that Monero and Bitcoins hashrate is roughly equivalent when scaled for power expended per market cap, which is the real metric of security as energy is what's actually wasted in mining. RandomX is an intentionally inefficient algorithm so it takes an order of magnitude more energy to produce one hash than with sha256. So in synopsis, the energy spend on security would be equal for Monero as it would be for Bitcoin if market caps were identical. The difference would then be, with Monero you have an army of botnets and gaming PCs mining, vs an army of corporations mining all on the same chips from the same manufacturer designed to mine only Bitcoin. It's trivial to see which has the larger attack surface from state level adversaries. "-LN is very private when sending without extra configuration" I'd correct this to *LND* is very private when sending. Almost nobody uses their own LND node connected to a no logs peer behind onion connection etc etc. Most use either custodial solutions with worse than on-chain privacy, or LSP solutions like Phoenix which offer great sending privacy to the recipient but 0 to the LSP which is a huge centralized entity. This is a collosal issue with lightning. I'm not even getting into the hub and spoke centralization issue in routing paths which makes timing analysis way easier. "-Unlimited supply" this is deciding phraseology. More accurate to say, "No hard cap" or the like. The truth is Monero's supply is limited, it's limited to only 0.6XMR per block in perpetuity. This is about 0.6% supply increase a year at today's supply, and trails asymptotically to 0% given infinite time. Mathematically, this is by definition a limit. Search "Limits Calculus" or something to learn more about mathematical limits. "Not scaleable without losing decentralization" yeah you're kinda right in the sense that we'll get to a point if usage grows exponentially that nodes will run into bandwidth and processing limitations. I don't know when this is, most devs think it's far off, but still a methematical certainty. Still better than Bitcoin, though, which has successfully halted L1 scaling and moved it to L2s which I just discussed are extremely centralized with how almost all users use them. Monero has tail emissions and dynamic block sizes which eliminates the two biggest issues with Bitcoin L1 scaling: Fee bidding economy (more usage more expensive). Final point around hidden inflation. @Hanshan has been going off on this so I'll let him explain, but in synopsis: mathematics is either sound or it isn't. The simple arithmetic of adding up UTXOs to make Bitcoins total supply is no more sound than the Pedersen Commitments and Bulletproofs++ used in RingCT to hide transaction amounts in monero. Yeah you may not understand it, but your understanding doesn't change reality. These are mathematical proofs. Math isn't science, math is either true or it isn't. Not to say there can't be a bug, all software can have bugs, but any bug that arises will be found due to per transaction amount verification that occurs. This is all one verbal flow so excuse any typos I'm not gonna proofread this haha. I hope this helps and welcome your response.

both serve different purposes and both were created on basis of currency coexistence / competition.

The great triumph of the corrupt state is precisely that: getting us to fight each other instead of fighting against it. We must remember that many people, influenced by media that defend the system, tend to associate Bitcoin or Monero with illegal activities when they hear about them. This narrative serves to hide the fact that governments have tried to institutionalize what was once illicit; what becomes “illegal” is anything they don’t control. If they aren’t the ones directing it, they deem it immoral and subject to repression. Every time we argue with each other over Bitcoin or Monero, we’re doing the work of the system that wants to silence us. I encounter situations like this multiple times each week.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin-miner Bitmain Is Facing Federal Investigation Over National Security Issues

Bitmain, the Chinese manufacturer behind many of the world’s Bitcoin miners, has been under US national security scrutiny for potential espionage...

Article I was referring to. Still looking for my note on hashrates, that will take longer to find.

Found it. I'll recalculate for today's prices and hash rate if you're interested. It'll have to be later today after mass, though.

while @Daedalus brings up many points worthy of consideration, I am pleased that you seem to no longer be seeing it as a "us vs them" thing. as I mentioned to you before, almost all Monero users own bitcoin (and usually not a little, either). the reverse is not true, and there are many reasons, from myopic maxi culture to the sheer difference in magnitude between users of each coin, as well as the historic context (bitcoin is older). you are right that neither is perfect, although not exactly due to the reasons you mentioned here and which @Daedalus largely addresses); but the point still stands. and that's been our point all along: this is not us vs them, and this is not about religious dogms or football club fanboyism. it's about having sound money that can't be inflated away (bitcoin) and transacting privately (monero). ideally those would be one coin, and maybe one day they will be, or maybe not. either way, the future is uncertain, the present is here. and here we already have those two tools available. why not use both? I like & use lightning too (even run a few nodes, one of each eclair/lnd/cln) but it's just not the same context - always on 24/7, hot wallets, limited liquidity, channel probing attacks, and a thousand other things I have tested and many more I am sure didn't even occur to me. in that sense, Monero is simpler and more predictable. in other senses and for other contexts it's lightning that's simpler and more predictable. this is what we have been saying all along: use the tools. it's good even if you just use monero with small amounts for day to day needs. we're normalizing financial privacy again. it's no accident it's #monero that was banned/delisted almost everywhere. the privacy makes it a threat. in a system of complete mass-surveillance and constant 24/7 profiling, that is a breath of fresh air, but also an existencial threat to the control paradigm, which relies on the surveillance. so stick the middle finger to the would-be masters. spread monero far an wide, show them we can't be stopped. and stack sats and use lightning too. as you're now beginning to see, we all want the same things.

Nice really well said. I should have been more encouraging in my post, it can seem overly critical I kinda realized that after I made it. Overall it's great progress @Cyph3rp9nk, having an open mind and looking at these projects critically can be difficult when our own savings are involved.

kinda. bitcoin was crated to be p2p digital cash. it's right there on the whitepaper. but, it turns out, it could never really be that without privacy. on top of that we had the scaling issues too. so we see what we see today: people and institutions hoard bitcoin but don't really use it much (not a criticism btw, I do the same because it's logical). many are convinced it's the ngu aspect that makes people not want to spend. I'm sure that's a factor too, but speaking for myself it's 20% that and 80% the fact that I'm either doxxing my stash every time I transact, or I am employing inneficient countermeasures like coinjoins and then I'm passing the hot potato to the other guy, because now they own tainted bitcoin. so, I do one thing and one thing only with my bitcoin. sell it for #monero on retoswap when I need to make larger purchases. if bitcoin was properly private and anonymous, this would be a redundant step. but it isn't, so it isn't. in the mean time the bitcoin served its purpose, went up in value (not always but usually).

Bitcoin is clearly more balanced, especially for mass adoption, but Monero has a specific use case, which is dark markets on the deep web, and Bitcoin does not currently offer a good solution for that. In my opinion, I don't think they will ever compete because their principles are totally different and neither can offer what the other offers, at least in layer 1. That's where Bitcoin has an advantage because it can offer what Monero offers, but in layer 2, although for that we have to solve the liquidity and infrastructure problems posed by Lightning nodes.

Great post . My issue has been with maxis of either side. I think there's a lot of closed mindedness and arrogance when in reality none if us know for sure how the future will play out and what we will need in the future. Its good not to put all our eggs in the same basket. Bitcoin, monero, gold, land, salt, equipment are all important.

Correct

Having said that, of the things i mentioned, salt is my smallest holding, followed by monero.

basically I agree with homeboy here. there is a trivial, but non-zero chance that I could craft a transaction that creates Bitcoin out of thin air. but the moment I send it, someone picks up on the fact that there are more Bitcoin than there are supposed to be. therefore it isn't " hidden inflation ". there is a trivial, but non-zero chance that I could craft a transaction that creates Monero out of thin air. but because of the hidden amounts the transaction does NOT get immediately detected and we have to wait for some autist who's looking for non-standard transactions to notice it and wonder what it's doing. but to my way of thinking, are you going to spend your life worrying about really small probabilities? there's also a trivial but non-zero chance that I could come up with an exploit that allows me to spend satoshi's coins... are you going to worry about that? boomers don't trust Bitcoin because they're afraid somebody could " hack " their bitcoin. they don't understand about public pair cryptography and the DLP. Maxis don't trust Monero because they're afraid somebody could " hack " the range proofs that guarantee supply. same picture. everybody has to make their own decisions about where they place trust when they can't personally verify things.

The obvious problem here is that you're comparing an L1 and an L2 without including the obvious user difficulties in running their own L2 infrastructure.

that is because they serve different purposes as i said bitcoin became store of value; great for protection from inflation and for purchasing things that may require documents for protection (cars, homes, lands) and less privacy is what people search for this ones;

common misconception. you can buy all those things with monero too, you just need to be able to document how you have that wealth. see: https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Monero/comments/1qeabtn/guide_to_moving_large_amounts_of_monero_to_the/ as for the different purposes thing, that's what I meant by "kinda". bitcoin is only a sov and not really much of a moe because it turned out that without privacy no one in their right mind wants to use it. it aimed to be both, but failed.

you should contest my opinion and not the facts. The market already did what i said. If i were to say what bitcoin "can" be (and not what it is) i would be defending that it can be private and quote all layers and lightning and all that. Monero "can" be a great coin and be used to non-private stuff and even store of value, but it isn't what happened. But if you really want to keep going this way for "all purposes", then why not zcash?

the truth is I feel that both are equally necessary.

I disagree with the first part. While what you say about chips is true, this also applies to mining Monero on conventional software. The advantage in this case for Bitcoin is logistics. How much would it cost a state to gather all the hardware necessary to attack Bitcoin? The second part is true. You should add LN with your own node.

Well, this is progress on both sides. And as I say, I think things are getting too ugly out there for us to be fighting amongst ourselves.

I will include this in other notes later, admitting that this is why Lightning has no penetration in darmarkets.

Both parts are with misinformative conclusions but that is just their way to see their own false reality. On the first part he is saying about "army of botnets and gaming PCs mining" and "The egalitarian difference is clear here" but conviniently forgetting about the army of Bitcoin BitAxes and how every Bitcoiner Pleb can buy a BitAxe miner that is cheaper than a gaming pc and mine with DATUM and their own templates. This is egalitarian. On the second part, every time criminals are arrested after Monero leaks, they say that the criminals have been stupid and used Monero in the wrong way or wrong setup ... which is his conclusion about LN privacy that it depends on setup ... Anyway.

Idk how my point about ASICS applies to Monero mining software. Xmrig is the main software and its free and open source

GitHub

GitHub - xmrig/xmrig: RandomX, KawPow, CryptoNight and GhostRider unified CPU/GPU miner and RandomX benchmark

RandomX, KawPow, CryptoNight and GhostRider unified CPU/GPU miner and RandomX benchmark - xmrig/xmrig

its a very small codebase. Bitmain ASICS are proprietary hardware. Perhaps you could elaborate on that. Relating to attacks, I made the point that state adversaries don't need to outcompete the current mining market. They can use lawfare and regulations to control each giant mining company. This is extremely cheap for state actors, and in the case of taxation, can be profitable. Also hardware level backdoors via Bitmain are a genuine threat too, at least according US intelligence. Can't do that on Monero when most hashrate comes from gaming PCs and botnets. On Monero you'd have to outcompete the current hashrate, or convince existing miners to join a malicious pool as the recent Qubic attack did. You're right that this is a way cheaper attack on monero considering its like 15x smaller market cap, but we have to acknowledge that difference of scale when weighing either security model appropriately. I will also make an appeal to tradition here. Satoshi famously wrote "one CPU one vote". Monero uses RandomX for the sole purpose of making the CPU the most efficient miner. ASIC resistance came from Satoshi first, we just carry the torch. I don't think Satoshi would be cool with the current "Proof of ASICs" as Bitcoin currently is.

Bro just stop, the adults are talking here.

pfff

The riiiig 😍

You can't build bridges like that, Daedalus. Let's be constructive.

I got history with this guy lol, endlessly moving goalposts, strawmen and bad faith arguments.

I completely agree with this. Bitcoin mining is also defensible according to the Monero scheme with homemade ASICs, but even so, it has a competitive advantage, since the point is that Monero hardware is quick to acquire and abundant, whereas ASIC hardware cannot be acquired in quantities sufficient to attack Bitcoin.

I mine Bitcoin with my BitAxe. Also when talking about commercial Bitcoin mining companies I haven't seen anywhere their (financial) interests taken into account. Also the fact that they are in different countries and serve different jurisdictions. We even have countries like Bhutan that mine. The analysis needs to be deeper.

Commentable growth

It was never satoshis design to have bitcoin be a black-market currency. He even exposes the risks of UTXO change and the transparent ledger in the white paper. You can't beat a racehorse at art when the racehorse never wanted to do art in the first place lol. You can achieve a very high amount of anonymity with Bitcoin, even perfect if you really try. Thats not out of reach with Bitcoin. It just isnt there out of the box. I get it, poeple like iphone users, windows users, etc can benefit greatly from monero, but the privacy education ive given myself way before Bitcoin and all of it that came after bitcoin is priceless. Had I never used bitcoin, and only used monero, I would have never learned how to make Bitcoin anonymous. And that is most valuable of all...

Hard money and private spending solve different problems. Pretending one must annihilate the other is the real mistake.

🤝

agreed ❤ I'm just confused about what the maxi position is exactly. do you really think it's plausible that supply is NEVER going to be guaranteed by cryptography? I understand people feeling it's too early or too untested. but I don't understand thinking that it's okay to use cryptography to guarantee ownership and transferability, but that supply verification is something that is absolutely taboo. it's not an intellectually consistent position. I don't think it's any different than people at the beginning of the 20th century refusing to ride in cars. " I don't trust it because I don't understand an engine. show me the horse, I need my transportation to be easily personally verifiable. " and sure, I get it. people died in those early cars. but we figured it out and now it's normal. trust in technical advancements increases over time.

No more brother wars!

I'm still learning how the verification would actually occur and be verifiable. I'm too ignorant to have an opinion. I get how Bitcoin currently works in the sense that all the transactions can be traced and have basic math operations performed on them to get a total supply. I can say that I don't particularly like that anyone can see my holdings and transactions and trace everything I've ever done. And I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to never make even a single mistake at any point ever lest they dox their entire history. I've considered the implications of having sats linked to some crime or identity and getting wrapped up in something that had nothing to do with me. I get that side of the issue. I don't understand why verification can't occur in some way that doesn't put everyone into clear houses. And this is an issue for individuals as well as governments, if they're to adopt sound money like most of us non-anarchists probably want them to.

Of course non-transparency has some downsides in the context of governments, but I think the privacy of everyone else outweighs them. Especially when you consider how difficult status quo shenanigans would be on a sound money standard anyway.

🫂🤝

in this case we can't sum the UTXO set. so basically instead of being able to perform those basic math operations, on the consensus level each transaction must prove that the sum of the inputs and the outputs are zero. a blockchain is a chain of blocks. inside those blocks are transactions. there isn't anything else. if each transaction proves there's no supply inflation, where else could there be supply inflation? did you see my post about "unknown unknowns?"

Imagine if both communities realized they were on the same team. And you can use both.

Glad you've finally come around

Each one must be their own maximalist.

The first paragraph is the point a lot of people who do these comparisons often fail to get. Satoshi's intent wasn't to create a coin for dark markets, which I believe is why he didn't design "absolute anonymity by default" into Bitcoin. If anything, Bitcoin's anonymity was designed to support it's censorship resistance because if the powers that be cannot seize the network due to it's decentralized nature, anonymity helps protect individual users from being a direct target for confisication. So it was never about the dark markets. Dark markets usage in early days happened to be a side attraction.

I don't believe I did. I'll take a look.

This is where my mind was taking me but at least this sounds like we wouldn't need to know so much to see if double spending is happening (the only other source of supply increase I could think of).

My other concern is how nodes will be affected by all that extra data vs just using a second layer solution for day-to-day transacting. Theoretically, many people would spend most of their time in such layers anyway as time goes on. There are tradeoffs, of course, but doesnt Monero make tradeoffs by doing all of this at the base?

Man there are a lot of notes to include. tbh your list is essentially just cherry picked stuff that you care to talk about. what about transaction amounts? I can send any amount I want on Monero. Ln I'm confined by the channel sizes on the route to my destination. what about assurance? because Monero is an l1 it's designed to function in the open. with ln I don't know if my protection is broken because the routing nodes are colluding to share information. and about a thousand other things too. I think your intention here is good, but making a list like this is more the subject of an essay, rather than a short nostr post. we can and should compare these two tools, but because they're not of the same category of thing it isn't easy. and I do think the phrasing around mining and " unlimited supply " is misleading.

Good call. when you spend, a hash called a "key image" of each output is recorded. these are unique but don't reveal anything about the output itself. in this way we can verify that an output wasn't spent twice and still preserve privacy.

I completely agree with you on the first two points you mentioned, but I completely disagree with the last two. But for me, this war is over. Everyone will have different opinions, and I don't want to waste time with technical discussions, otherwise we'll be back to square one. Toxic maximalism has been useful. There are more than 30 million shitcoins listed on CoinMarketCap, and maximalism has protected us from this. However, I also admit that we were wrong about Monero. This is not something I haven't known for a long time. I have dedicated my entire life to privacy and have collaborated on many privacy projects, but in my case, I have taken the war to a personal level, as many people at Monero have done by criticizing Bitcoin, and that has obviously been a mistake. Monero's figures in the dark markets over the last year are one of the things that have made me reconsider ending this war on my part and also FCMP++. I cannot be more honest. We need each other. I have nothing against the Monero community. I think it's perfectly legitimate for people to want to use only Bitcoin, only Monero, or both, although I believe that the latter is the most useful in practice.

I'm not sure what the "last two" points you referring to. and your journey to Monero has been obvious for a long time. not sure what the bulk of that reply is about, seems like a you thing.

Very easy, I'm tired of these unproductive discussions. They lead nowhere. Do you want me to agree with you 100%? Will that make you happier?

really confused by your aggressiveness here but whatever , you don't want to talk about the complications in comparing an L1 and an L2 👍

I'm sorry but I don't really think it's "unproductive" to talk about the nuances in comparing these two technologies. I think it's a very productive discussion.

If I understand correctly, it seems that someone could theoretically try to double spend with a higher fee and get accepted into the block. But that would only harm the other party if they weren't the same. I figure it's no different than how Bitcoin is right now as far supply goes. Anyone with that much power can fuck pretty much anything up I think

I don't personally find value in a combative approach when it comes to Monero. I don't view it as a shit coin, which perhaps would cause me to be combative depending on the situation. If someone I care about is getting scammed, I'll offer a warm warning. If people want to shit coin, go for it. If someone tries to force one onto me (or anything really), that's when I think it's worth being combative. Otherwise I just don't see the point. I much prefer discussing ideas rationally and reducing my ignorance where I can. Certainly no one is forcing Monero or Bitcoin, so I figure we should all use whatever we think is best.

you mean they spend to one address and then immediately spend to their own address? using a higher fee to incentivize that the second transaction gets mined instead of the first? My understanding is that that won't work on Monero because the second transaction will also contain the key images from the outputs in the first transaction and consensus won't allow key images to appear twice. so there will be a race condition between the two transactions. memools that have seen the key images from one transaction won't relay the other one. and the first one has a head start so it seems unlikely that the second one would propagate across the network.

Yeah that was just a theoretical problem I got from research. It doesn't seem very likely unless someone controls most of the network anyway. At which point you're probably fucked no matter which chain youre using.

But even if it did go through, it seemed like the damage would be limited to one party. They wouldn't both go through necessarily so not exactly double spending. Only one gets accepted. I think it was just meaning that someone could potentially rug a transaction and get it mined first with a higher fee, but I don't see how one party could do such a thing to another party without controlling the network? It's beyond my understanding of how Monero even works to be honest. But it seems worthy of consideration at least.

Maybe it is a double spend somehow but I think the conclusion was that the signatures still exist and one would get rejected, potentially the non-malicious one. Not sure the impact of that though. Doesnt sound like losing fund but that's where my understanding of Monero transactions break down.