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There are no longer any cypherpunks promoting Bitcoin today. No cypherpunk ever needed to advertise Bitcoin for financial gain. Bitcoin took years to develop and failed to implement privacy, scalability, low transaction fees, or transaction speed. That is why Monero was created. And yes, Monero is 100% consistent with what we cypherpunks want. It's that simple.
What amazes me are the marximalists categorically stating that bitcoin no longer follows anything in the white paper, and that's fine with them. They support governments “regulating” bitcoin, claiming that this legitimises the technology. Bullshit. For open-source technology to exist, all it needs is for the source code to be available and for users to compile and use it. They also support conventional banks (sic) selling bitcoin and keeping those same virtual bitcoins in places where the “owner” of that bitcoin does not even have the key. It is completely bizarre.
Bitcoin also has, even today in 2025, a complete lack of fungibility. Each UTXO has a colour, smell, history, and can be rejected by CEX or wallets that perform chain analysis. This violates the basic principle of the digital cash system. Not to mention the fallacy of the so-called Layer 2. The sheer fact that Bitcoin's supposed “usability” relies on a buggy, poorly designed Lightning Network is an obvious admission that the base layer has failed miserably at being scalable, private, and fast. Monero and Litecoin solve this naturally with current technology. In case you didn't know, there are already thousands of UTXOs marked as “dirty” or “tainted” in Bitcoin that are automatically rejected.
Do you know what Monero is? The legitimate embodiment of the Bitcoin's original freedom intentions. It's that simple. Monero's core developers maintain cypherpunk ethics: all pseudonymous, no marketing funds, no institutional investors, no KYC. Bitcoin today is dominated by corporations, ETFs, and people with compliance scripts in their pockets.
Monero also does not have an option to “turn off” privacy. Either you are anonymous or you use something else. Monero also has 100% real fungibility because 1 Monero will always be 1 Monero. Obviously, the project has managed to make Monero legitimate digital money, and the complete absence of history makes it impossible for you to know the “past” of that money. No one will ever see your balance or transaction history and values without the private keys that only the wallet owner has. Thanks to what? Guess what? Privacy with Ring Signatures (hiding the sender) + Stealth Address (hiding the recipient) + RingCT (hiding the amount transferred) + Dandelion++ (hiding the IP address).
And the most valuable part of Monero is that it is anti-ASIC. Many marximalists confuse high hashrate power with “network security” . First, security does not actually exist; it is a feeling, a sensation. Second, a single ASIC Antminer replaces tens of thousands of conventional arm64 or x86_64 CPUs. In other words, each person who owns a single Antminer mining Bitcoin is equivalent to thousands of conventional computers or servers used by humans on a daily basis. The math is unfair. In other words, for ordinary users mining on their laptops or gaming PCs or servers to have the same processing power as Antminers, which are estimated today at more than 1 million machines sold by Bitmain alone since the first model, we would need a total of 3 devices for every living being on earth. Yes, do the math, you need a total of 25 billion computers mining bitcoin on conventional CPUs today to match the same hashrate of all Antminers combined. This is impractical, impossible and unfeasible. There is no incentive for this. And what can be done when there are still old Antminer S3, S7 and S9 machines mining in poor countries like Venezuela? The risk of a 51% attack by those who have Antminers is absurdly huge.
Do you really think that the Monero team made and will always make the Monero code anti-ASIC on a whim? Or is it the obvious attempt to mitigate a real risk that has already affected Bitcoin Gold, Ethereum Classic, Vertcoin, Bitcoin SV, Verge, Feathercoin and similar cryptocurrencies? It has already happened! There has already been a 51% attack, damn it, it's not just theory!
So in summary, Monero is what Bitcoin promised to be before it was sold in ETFs by banks to people who call outsourced custody “innovation”. Monero is the true realisation of the cypherpunk ideal, it is what bitcoin promised to be! Delivering genuine privacy, fungibility and decentralisation, staying true to the concept of secure and accessible digital money, while Bitcoin has deviated into a corporate and tracking system, far from what the original whitepaper promised.
To top it off, read what Nick Szabo wrote about a future where better digital currency technologies would come along to address the shortcomings of Bitcoin's code if it did not improve, which has not happened even in 2025:
Bitcoin, what took ye so long?
So asks gwern in a spectacular display of hindsight. The short answer about why it took so long is that the bit gold/Bitcoin ideas were now...
Yep. The Cypherpunk ethos is dead in the BTC community. They want daddy Klaus "eat ze bugs" Schwab to endorse them (or whoever is in power of the WEF now). They will control your BTC and your behavior by neutering the protocol, which has already happened through years of deliberate stagnation on privacy upgrades. Chainalysis and Cyphertrace keep getting more advanced, more affordable, and more widely adopted. CEXs are now experts at flagging "tainted" coins, freezing accounts, and treating users as guilty until proven otherwise. But even if you stick to purely p2p, you're still exposed. Anyone you trade with can see your wallet balance and full transaction history, making you a potential target for criminals. Even the 21M cap is no longer guaranteed as they slowly change the narrative.
