Buy Monero as an investment or use Monero as a tool?

To me it is clearly both. A store of value where everyone can potentially see what you own is pretty terrible in the long run.

neither. for private BTC payments use Liquid or Lightning. Monero is a shitcoin with high risk of 51% attack.

Monero Under Siege: Qubic’s Bold 51% Attack Strategy Using Economic Incentives

In a high-stakes power play, Qubic—a mining pool operated by IOTA co-founder Sergey Ivancheglo—is attempting to seize control of Monero’s net...

Trying to find the Qubic 51% attack can you help me out?

Monero (XMR) RandomX | Mining Pools

List of known Monero pools (XMR) RandomX PoW algorithm. Live hashrate distribution, pool fees & minimum payment comparison. Mining Pools & Block Ex...

xmrconsensus

Nice clickbait articles that are taking the word of a single shitcoiner (who you wouldn't take at their word, with no evidence, in any other scenario), but I'm asking you to point it out directly through known pool hashrate, leftover unreported hashrate, or orphaned blocks. It doesn't exist and didn't come anywhere close to what Qubic was claiming even before the supposed DDoS. You can verify yourself with my previous links.

I am not really interested in Monero and don't follow events around it. I found this news topic by chance. As I said, for confidential transactions I use non-custodial Lightning or Liquid BTC, so as not to speculate on other coins price or pay swap fees. BTC to L-BTC pegin costs just regular Bitcoin chain fee (plus 40 sats on Liquid side), and similarly does opening a channel. How much does BTC/XMR swap cost? BTC is the best asset to keep funds long term.

Liquid and Lightning have different trade offs to Monero, but if it works for you more power to you. There is nothing mutually exclusive about saving with Bitcoin long term, as you said, and using something else as digital cash for the short term. It's been a toss up at shorter time scales as to which performs better.

I see zero drawbacks to using Liquid and Lightning. Do you?

Come on now zero drawbacks? Everything has drawbacks. Well, let's start off with Liquid. No sender or receiver privacy (only amount privacy), virtually zero anonymity set because no one uses it, no p2p markets/merchant adoption, and custodial. It's a worse Monero on almost every dimension, besides longterm price, but if you care about that why not just hodl Bitcoin securely? UX on Lightning sucks. Inbound/outbound liquidity is unintuitive and clunky. The larger the payment the more likely it is to fail at routing. To acheive strong privacy (from both counter parties and third parties) and actually retain sovereignty you have to jump all these hoops which is why vast majority use custodians or LSPs that diminish your privacy, permission your transactions, and the former can rug you.

liquid's security model is worse than even solana

One solid channel to a large node like Kraken is enough for most cases. Or pay lightning invoice from a liquid balance via Boltz swap (we offer a choice of backends). Liquid's confidential amounts and assets offer adequate privacy after a couple of hops, such as trading BTC/USDT at SideSwap. But I agree, receiver's privacy is more of a challenge, hence darknet's vendors choose XMR.

If you’re holding Monero you are getting robbed. No one wants to Hodl XMR. And when you’re in and out of saving in bitcoin you’re gonna leak privacy. Monero is badass in so many ways, Just none of them actually hold it as a store of value.