Monero has replaced bitcoin as the default digital currency. Outside of nostr you can't really spend bitcoin, it's mostly used for buying gift cards that can be spent

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I bought coffee with bitcoin I mined via square via lighting at some hipster coffee shop that knew nothing of bitcoin
Roger's avatar
Roger 5 days ago
What separates them is not spendability but what a payment exposes. Monero hides sender, receiver and amount by default, while bitcoin leaves every transfer visible forever. That cuts both ways with merchants: some refuse traceable coins, others refuse untraceable ones because they cannot show where the money came from. The gate that decides real-world spending is the fiat conversion at the end, and both chains pass through it. Two structural differences matter for the longer run. Bitcoin has a second layer with its own liquidity, so a payment can settle in a second without waiting for a block. Monero has no comparable overlay and its payments land in minutes. The other is the security budget: Monero pays a fixed tail emission to miners forever, while bitcoin has to replace a shrinking subsidy with fees, and nobody knows yet whether that fee market will be big enough.
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