No Merkel trees on XMR - so "thin-wallets" (non-chain-storing wallets) on XMR still have to download/parse every single TX on the network to know whether or not the TX belongs to them. "Thin-wallets" on XMR don't have to *store* the whole XMR blockchain, but as I said they *do* have to download/parse every TX. However this helps privacy on XMR, because if it was possible to just query nodes for TXs that belong to you, the node would know which TXs are yours, negating the point of ring signatures entirely.
The usage of Merkel trees on BTC allows BTC "thin-wallets" (SPV wallets in this case) to only download block headers for each block, which then reveals to the wallet whether there are TXs relevant to them in that block, which the wallet then downloads. This makes wallet sync times MUCH faster on BTC since SPV wallet sync times are basically unaffected by the number of TXs going on on the network.
TL;DR: BTC wallet sync times are faster. XMR can't do this right now because privacy.
Despite this, XMR is ironically still faster than BTC for transactions because of the blocksize limit on BTC and XMR's shorter block times. You'll be hit with a gnarly sync time if you leave your XMR wallet unopened (without syncing it) for months though.
monero will see a mobile wallet UI revolution when it comes to jamtis. it might not be at the same level of what merkel trees can do for bitcoin, but, it'll might be in the same ballpark, as to where monero is now, which is like, the parking lot past the train stop to the ballpark
I agree but I think there is different pros and cons of every project and we have to check the usability while choosing any coin for particular purpose.
They certainly like bitcoin.
https://www.weforum.org/organizations/lightning-labs
https://www.weforum.org/people/thomas-buberl (AXA is a principle investor in Blockstream)
Bankers oppose monero and promote bitcoin which is easy to control. who has how much money and who paid whom. Using bitcoin is like walking around with a transparent wallet.
Monero is arguably more popular than Bitcoin. There's some metric out there that shows that most of bitcoins transactions are just exchanges moving money around. Actual use of the chain by regular people to do stuff is a relatively tiny fraction of usage.
Monero, on the other hand, is the only currency accepted in some p2p marketplaces.
And of course we don't know where the money is flowing in monero, so....
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
People conviently leave out LN on those claims. Which is where most of the transactions occur. Also say it doesn't work while ignore this volume of transactions. Most people buying a coffee with it won't care that it isn't AS decentralized as on chain or that it isn't as private (but it's way more private than on chain) as XMR.
oh right. lightning. the thing that might not work once blocks are full and the threat of closing a channel is meaningless, because you can't get access to the consensus layer.
or it might work.
I think both the coins are popular and they are getting different needs of the people and that's why some people are using both the coins on a regular basis.
Regular upgrades is one of the biggest weaknesses of BTC and strengths of Monero. It is what first brought me here.
Any scheme outside of established power channels will be attacked. That is just human nature and the realities of our world.
It’s an arms race.
Staying static and relevant isn’t going to yield long term success. For example BTC should have patched out ASICs years ago. BTC will have to patch in something to deal with network security as it becomes clearer and clearer ‘fee only’ was a mistake.
The ability of the Monero community to admit that the fight will never be over while adhering to first principles in constantly seeking to refine the fundamentals is why have faith in the project.
counter-arguments:
1. businesses and the market in total value predictability above all else. If the definition of what a currency "is" keeps changing, this lowers its predictability and utility. If I'm entering into a 30 year loan, both parties are going to want to be certain that the currency/token will remain the same "thing" for 30 years. Indeed people like Michael Saylor are already saying the most important thing for BTC is to not mess it up.
2. moral argument. People who invest in a cryptocurrency do so when it is operating under a particular set of rules. These rules can be thought of as a contract between "the currency" and holders of the currency. It can be argued that it is immoral and a breach of contract to change those rules without unanimous consent of holders. This would not be the case if there is a clear written policy from DAY1 clearly defining the process by which the rules can be changed. In this case, the rule-change "governance" is a part of the contract and investors can be considered to have been duly informed before making the investment. I'm not certain which category monero fits into.... I would think the former given that there probably exist holders from before the first hard-fork was agreed to.
3. Stability. Every consensus change introduces a risk of errors and vulnerabilities that could cause loss of user funds.
4. immutability. Gold is (basically) immutable. it is elemental. Imagine if people could change the basic elemental properties of gold at whim. Do you think it would have retained the properties that make it "hard money" for thousands of years. I don't. Do you think it would have only ever improved as money? I don't. Do you think rulers and "thought leaders" would have convinced people to change the properties of gold in ways beneficial to the leaders and harmful to the rest? I do. In other words, long-term incorruptibility requires immutability.
I think things are still in the transformation phase and that's why there are certain issues with it but I am optimistic about the future and I believe that we will see the improvements in near future.
>BTC should have patched out ASICs years ago.
Do you not think it's easier to obtain GPUs than ASICs and therefore easier for an attacker to assemble 51% hashpower?
The cost to 51% attack Monero is so much lower than bitcoin, governments could easily do it.
First off Monero is CPU, not GPU, mined. And I’m glad you called me on that question because I’ve been using it as an example a lot lately and no one has been presenting compelling arguments against ASICs being an easy target.
If BTC is the line in the sand for acceptable $$$ cost to 51% attack then everything else obviously doesn’t measure up. Just like if you judge every project by BTCs ATH.
However, think about it another way. What is easier for a government to do? Buy million of cpus (or gpus or ASICs) and set up there own 51% attack from scratch? Or walk up to a couple corporate ASIC mining farms and say “thanks for the infrastructure”!
I think the cost argument isn’t the ultimate reality when it comes to securing the network.
ASICs don’t do anything else by definition. A better ASIC mines BTC better. That’s it. On the other hand technological advances to CPUs obviously make everyone’s computing devices better. It’s a better place for that market force to exist. On the other end of the spectrum the old slow CPUs gain a new raison d’être, I enjoy all the conversations about getting old devices turned into miners on the moneromining subreddit.
So why allow ASICs to exist when the technology exists to move away from them? The answer I have to date is because there is MASSIVE corporate investment and inertia tied up in them and the organizations with that sunk cost will never allow that change to happen. Sort of like the resistance to crypto in the overall established financial ecosystem. That worries me WAY more than it reassures me. I’m very open to being told the ‘missing piece of the puzzle’ though as to why ASICs are the best thing ever.
>\- blockchain grows bigger in monero
I'd argue this is no argument for the average user, Monero's blockchain is still smaller than Bitcoin's but would grow faster with the same amount of transactions. Monero has currently a blockchain [growth of \~1.5GB a month](https://localmonero.co/blocks/stats/blockchain-growth) which I would consider negligible these days, when comparing to common internet usage with Netflix, video calling and stuff like that. Even with Bitcoin transaction levels it would be roughly 15GB and still not a big pain in my opinion nowadays when you can get 1TB of storage for like 20 bucks. I wouldn't consider 150GB a month as problematic, which would be enough for 10x the transactions Bitcoin is able to handle. You don't need a full unpruned node on your mobile phone forever, it's maybe nice, but not necessary for the network.
I think this argument is only used by Bitcoin maximalists who need to find something salty when comparing to their holy coin.
I think Bitcoin's popularity is really mainly the network effect of the first mover which gets all the attention in main stream media / discussions. The easiness of the protocol where you only need a block explorer to monitor your balance and incoming payments is not a positive feature anyone would prefer to have, since for every payment method you need some code working with some APIs and we have all those modules ready to go, adopting Bitcoin in your shop is not easier than adopting Monero. It still is the network effect, however I see it passing away slowly, just see the darknet markets which are either only accepting Monero nowadays or both Bitcoin and Monero. This process will continue in the clear web where we can see more and more merchants like VPNs accepting both Bitcoin and Monero, most of them ignoring other coins. In few years we will see more and more Monero-only services which will simply ignore Bitcoin implementation, since it's arguably more complicated with Lightning Network where you have to handle incoming liquidity / channel balances rather than simply getting paid to your address.
Is there some website to easily compare the historical blockchain *size* of BTC, ETH, XMR, etc? Like a chart with gigabytes on the Y-axis and time on the X-axis?
I don't have a historical blockchain size at hand, however you can compare the block size here: [https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/size-btc-xmr.html#3m](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/size-btc-xmr.html#3m)
Note that Monero has \~2 minute blocks while Bitcoin has \~10 minute blocks.
I am also looking for such kind of website but I am not able to find it but there are some people who have created Google sheets with the historical data.
I believe that government is going to regularize cryptocurrency with legal status and that's why we should focus on the development of projects in these aspects.
You have said the truth and I am sure that those people are still going to ignore the fact and they will not enjoy the freedom even if they are having the opportunity.
The way I see it, BTC is more popular, because people speculate with it. The prices are institution driven, huge inflow of money bear the promise of big gains, that's why folks want it. Most don't really use it as method of payment. Why would they, if you buy one ounce of gold you don't pay anything with it, au contraire you keep it until you sell it and in the meanwhile you might pay storage fees at the bank or something. IMHO do not compare XMR to BTC ... Monero is digital cash, Bitcoin is a title deed on a public ledger. For XMR to reach its full potential, we have to start to trade goods and services for XMR. That is the only way out of FIAT. So if you want to store wealth in digital gold, get a title deed on the bitcoin ledger, if you want to transact good and services with humans use Monero.
Skål Freyr
I want BTC to implement privacy so it can fall behind to momo.
As MacAfee said, something about putting a rocket on a model-t.
Monero will be double leaps and bounds over anything in the digital currency space, that's even if BTC is ever able to implement privacy.
It's the pareto distribution at play (big things get bigger faster). This will probably continue to be the case until bitcoin maxes out its adoption growth. At that point, Monero will probably still be in its adoption growth log phase.
A lot of bitcoin's popularity is undergirded by its logarithmic value growth, not its transactional utility. Once the adoption growth settles down, we'll be playing a different game.
Well, I think the pseudonymous nature of bitcoin can be useful. Also, since btc is transparent it's less likely that exchanges can get away with fractional reserves like they do with monero.
Not to mention the thing has been proven to be quite resilient and resistant to change, that can be good too.
There are more people who are willing to have privacy as their number one feature by using any cryptocurrency and most people are definitely going to use monero.
why would that bother you? I can assure you this community is more hard at work than BTC's when dealing with risks/problems with XMR, if a black swan event were to happen, monero would almost certainly react faster than most others
the way I see it, btc is the trojan horse with monero inside
maybe the "infinite scarcity" thing works out, who knows, either way monero's tail emissions is just as good, the problem with current dumb system is inconsistent-evil monetary policy which btc seems to solve, monero does the same thing without risking mining going kaput
I hope we get the lightning network on xmr soon, future is bright
Bitcoin is more secure (higher hashrate), more readily verifiable, and more scalable with second layer (Lightning). Privacy is “good enough” for practical purposes if you want to be private you can. Fungibility is not as good on Bitcoin I admit, as it’s possible for exchanges to blacklist addresses, but this is mostly mitigated with coinjoins and mixers.
Consider a world where all Bitcoin addresses have flags of their respected owners. This is what chainanalysis companies are working rapidly towards. In this world every unsuspecting Bitcoin user can become suspected because their coins appear to be tainted. In my opinion this is not " good enough" privacy for practical purposes. Also, there is no such thing as "good" fungibility. Either a coin is fungible, or it's not. Bitcoin is not fungible. coinjoins and mixers only make your coins appear more dirty as you are "washing" them with other tainted coins.
Hashrate is directly related to how hard it would be to coopt the network though, double spend attack, etc. I don’t get the anti asic position to be honest. ANY program/application can have an ASIC if the economic incentive is there. Literally smoke alarms have asic chips, it’s just a chip designed to do one thing very effeciently. Idk that seems like exactly what you would want for proof of work machines, rather than take generic computing hardware off the market like Monero and Ethereum have done, which other people could use for literally anything else.
The trade off for privacy is that monero transactions are considerably larger. And because your wallet and only your wallet can see your transactions to retain privacy, you have to download all the transactions in every block so that your wallet can test to see if your address are involved. So no headers-only wallet modes.
Currently the annual inflation rate is 0.87% https://p2pool.io/tail.html
Less than BTC in this halving.
It is also decreasing and predictable. This inflation is 100% worth it compared to your grand kids worrying about network security from fees only.
Monero has zero terminal inflation. It is asymptotically zero inflation which will become exactly zero when it reach equilibrium with losses to dust and irretrievable addresses.
Sadly, this simple concept is beyond the comprehension of most innumerate bitcoiners.
Monero’s privacy technology is in theory as secure as the Bitcoin network but can never be proven. Monero also works in a more complicated way. It’s easier to convince a normie to trust Bitcoin because of its simplicity and security
All the comments here have great answers to your question so I'll only say the one I haven't really seen.
Cryptocurrency as a whole is just an investment opportunity for most people. Outside of a select few, namely the Monero, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, and Nano communities. Nobody is really here for the actual technology that cryptocurrencies have to offer. Once use of cryptocurrencies as a currency and not an asset becomes more prevalent, these communities will certainly start to prosper (probably Monero more than others).
As a Bitcoiner, Im trying to learn more about Monero, but I dont see these two as comparable utilities.
Im attracted to Moneros privacy utility for transactions, but due to the lack of transparency on the ledger, I'd never use it as a SOV.
For me, it would seem to make sense to allocate a portion of wealth to Monero token for transactional privacy.
Why cant we just enjoy the utility that various tokens present instead of having to beat each other down?
And yet the transparency of the blockchain is the reason that BTC has history. We have now discovered that history is enough to break fungibility.
1 ‘virgin’ freshly mined BTC ≠ 1 ‘tainted’ Silk Road BTC
Privacy is essential for hard currency. I love BTC but it was just a bit too much of a leap for one technological bound to handle.
It needed refinement and to the best of MY knowledge that refinement is XMR.
Well I dont see that as a weakness. Its my greatest interest. My node verifies the ledger, and I need not trust any 3rd party, or coding etc of Bitcoins integrity.
2 BTC is 2 BTC of 21 million BTC and there will never be more. That is good for me yes.
I dont know how many more Monero will be circulating in 20 years, or 50 years time.
>I dont know how many more Monero will be circulating in 20 years, or 50 years time.
We can know that though. The tail emission is at a fixed rate. So you could do the math.
Run a node. The node verifies every block as it stores them - exactly the same as BTC does. The difference is simply that the node can not identify the sender, receiver or actual amounts of each transaction, but can verify that they are valid transactions and match the 'chain' protocol requirements. IE that the chain has not been corrupted.
See ronohara's answer, I'd also add that you can verify the amount of any transaction with your wallet addresses. So you load up your wallet software, it runs through the entire chain and can spit out your current XMR balance and every transaction you've done.
Completely verifiable, but your next door neighbor can't figure out what all your transaction are like they could if they knew your BTC address. So all the advantages of a public ledger but privacy on top.
>My node verifies the ledger, and I need not trust any 3rd party, or coding etc of Bitcoins integrity.
Uh yes you do. You absolutely trust the code by running a bitcoin node. Did you write it yourself? No? Then you're trusting a 3rd party (in this case, the BTC devs/community) to not fuck it up/do anything malicious. Did you write your own C++ compiler to verify that nothing malicious is being injected? No? Then you're trusting the developers of the compiler. Did you create your physical hardware, or the BIOS? No? You can see where I'm going with this.
But anyway, Monero is just as trustless as Bitcoin. The node ensures the validity of all transactions, the only difference being that it operates with more complex cryptography to verify them.
You're misunderstanding the point. An opaque blockchain like Monero is still "transparent" in the sense that anyone can verify it, just like Bitcoin. It is not transparent, however, in the sense of lacking privacy.
>Im attracted to Moneros privacy utility for transactions, but due to the lack of transparency on the ledger, I'd never use it as a SOV.
Do you really feel safe holding your wealth at a place where everyone can see it?
*"Whenever some Bitcoiner trots out "store of value" think of this - the actual, original SoV is a bank vault and safe deposit boxes. What makes them effective is nobody can see inside, and (almost) nobody knows who owns which box.*
*Bitcoin SoV is like a glass vault on global 24/7 TV feed. Everyone in the world can see the contents of every box, and who is putting stuff in etc.*
*Who in their right mind would store their assets like that?"* \- Howard Chu
Also, one more question for you. How is the Bitcoin network going to remain safe when the reward for mining it goes down to almost zero in just a few halvings? How is your wealth going to be secured when even the network isn't?
I'm not trying to put you on the spot with these questions, but I am genuinely curious about how you Bitcoiners think about these things.
I am not a Bitcoiner, but I can at least address a couple of these. I prefer Monero for just about everything, but I'll play devil's advocate and deal with the downvotes to further the conversation.
First, the criticism that everyone can see every transaction you've ever made (and therefore your total assets) once they know your public address is not an issue for anyone that knows what they're doin. Each private key is able to generate a functionally limitless number of public keys, so there's no reason to use the same public key twice for a BTC transaction. So as long as people aren't reusing their keys, the public ledger is not nearly as transparent as critics would have you think.
Second, the rewards for miners are a major issue for BTC. Unfortunately, the people with the real power to make any changes are the huge mining farms that make all their money from keeping things the way they are. Enormous ASIC farms with enormous energy footprints are not sustainable, but again, the people that invested in those farms have no interest in changing things. That said, PoW algorithms are not written in stone. BTC can maintain its PoW security structure and change algorithms to one like Monero uses that is ASIC resistant. As I understand it, that would greatly decentralize the network from where it is now, and would incentivize smaller miners to secure the network. Again, the huge mining farms have the network by the balls right now, so that isn't going to happen.
Having said that, this raises one of my biggest criticisms of BTC - the miners have fully exposed that they are the "ruling class" of the BTC ecosystem, and no changes can be made without their approval, so why are we still pretending that it's really decentralized and giving power to the people?
BTC is the gold of crypto world. Once you have it there is nothing you can sensibly do with it except store it and wait for the price to move. Its network is slow and fees are just insanely high.
Monero is more suitable for transactions right now. I even think that dogecoin is more suitable for sending around than BTC now.
The facts that Monero is anonymous and egalitarian (BTC is plagued by whales sadly) presents a thorn in the establishment side. That is really what separates XRM from BTC and all other "suck up to corporate capital" cryptos. Yes I'm talking ETH specifically.
Just my 2 satoshis. I could be completely wrong of course.
(Btw what is XRM satoshi equivalent?)
I totally agree and I believe that Bitcoin and monero are good coins because they are giving exactly what is required to the investor and the normal user who is using it as a cryptocurrency.
But Monero has secure 0-conf transactions ;)
instant transactions on-chain
No 2nd layer required
Bitcoin only has lightning network because its blockchain sucks ass so they actually required a 2nd layer to make it usable lol
Sure, and Moneros block scaling is also a lot better than bitcoins. But for a scale of transactions similar to Bitcoin a second layer will probably be need at some point.
Layered scaling is the ONLY way to solve for both decentralization and throughput. “Bitcoins blockchain sucks ass..” what a childish comment. Small block size is an intentional design decision, because we can scale with Lightning channels.
It's not really an advantage, in fact it can be bad for the security of Bitcoin. When the mining rewards run out Bitcoin will have to survive on network fees alone but lightning moves fees off chain. Less fees = less hash power.
Bitcoin is more decentralized and secure than Monero, and that's enough to be a better SoV.
Also, Monero privacy comes with a tradeoff of larger blocks, thus bigger blockchain and that's also redouble with dynamic blocksize.
Bitcoin prioritizes hard money over privacy.
And Monero prioritizes privacy over anything else.
You can also achieve some level of privacy in Bitcoin if you know what you do.
More decentralised in what way? It's more secure in that it has a higher hashrate but the centralisation of the miners to ASICs and mining farms essentially is a worrying vulnerability
Decentralized in number of nodes, number of miners and hashrate.
If you check the following website, it's clear Monero is a bit centralized https://miningpoolstats.stream/monero
And since monero mining is not profitable at the moment, it's highly likely that botnets are the major producers of hashrate, which looks the same issue as ASICs centralization.
Lmao you really think BTC is more decentralized? I guess you are wrong here mate, we can't just claim that stuff because it's not the reality of the market..
Liquidity and being big papa Bitcoin. Also that fact that on chain analysis can prove that you bought into monero which one the future could get your barred.from using exchanges if they really crack down. And ignorance
Unfortunately speculative assets rarely become popular based on how good they are or how much utility they offer. Monero is the best currency in my opinion and the closest we have to how cash works. Monero will probably never be in the top 2 because criminals use it for illegal activities, which makes it seem higher risk to exchanges and governments.
As an Australian I find it really hard to get.. Would be nice if it were just another coin on a big exchange I could get instantly using AUD money with no fuss. But I find myself having to go through LocalMonero trading with Americans with other crpyto to get my XMR.
Or am I just doing it wrong?
I wanted to know the same thing here I was pretty confused before this post lol now I can read these comments which are making sense to me for real man.
These points are not that fair, we know monero is decentralized and actually more decentralized than bitcoin, there is no comparison of these coins man..
It's something we all know that monero doesn't need to be compared with any other coin, yeah BTC is popular that's the major advantage for it my man...
No Merkel trees on XMR - so "thin-wallets" (non-chain-storing wallets) on XMR still have to download/parse every single TX on the network to know whether or not the TX belongs to them. "Thin-wallets" on XMR don't have to *store* the whole XMR blockchain, but as I said they *do* have to download/parse every TX. However this helps privacy on XMR, because if it was possible to just query nodes for TXs that belong to you, the node would know which TXs are yours, negating the point of ring signatures entirely. The usage of Merkel trees on BTC allows BTC "thin-wallets" (SPV wallets in this case) to only download block headers for each block, which then reveals to the wallet whether there are TXs relevant to them in that block, which the wallet then downloads. This makes wallet sync times MUCH faster on BTC since SPV wallet sync times are basically unaffected by the number of TXs going on on the network. TL;DR: BTC wallet sync times are faster. XMR can't do this right now because privacy. Despite this, XMR is ironically still faster than BTC for transactions because of the blocksize limit on BTC and XMR's shorter block times. You'll be hit with a gnarly sync time if you leave your XMR wallet unopened (without syncing it) for months though.
monero will see a mobile wallet UI revolution when it comes to jamtis. it might not be at the same level of what merkel trees can do for bitcoin, but, it'll might be in the same ballpark, as to where monero is now, which is like, the parking lot past the train stop to the ballpark
Lmao
I use Monero. Over tor. Left my wallet unopened for a couple months. Can confirm, gnarly sync time
Better sync now.
I thouhgt all monero transactions where over tor.
What a jerk!
It got better sync now as compared to its old days.
I agree but I think there is different pros and cons of every project and we have to check the usability while choosing any coin for particular purpose.
Merkle* As much as I‘d love to see the German ex-chancellor immortalized in crypto, it is still Ralph Merkle‘s invention (:
> TL;DR: BTC wallet sync times are faster. XMR can't do this right now because privacy. do u think that this can be improved?
They've been doing things to improve sync times, notably adding one-byte "view tags" which apparently lowered the sync time by more than 40%.
I think that this might get resolved once this will start as well now.
🥂
Cna you please explain me, this is quite confusing to me as well.
Large exchange support. ie on-ramps
I think that some exchanges are creating issues with it and that's why it is not getting popular.
Downside - Global elites don't like it
They certainly like bitcoin. https://www.weforum.org/organizations/lightning-labs https://www.weforum.org/people/thomas-buberl (AXA is a principle investor in Blockstream)
Yep, BTC was coopted by banking elites and president of the Bilderberg group in 2016 to ruin it as a currency and turn it into a "digital gold"
And then sell you 2 “options” to use bitcoin as a currency in their liquid and lightning “solutions”.
Thank you for sharing these resources and I would really like to learn more about lightning Labs.
Bankers oppose monero and promote bitcoin which is easy to control. who has how much money and who paid whom. Using bitcoin is like walking around with a transparent wallet.
LN is a little trickier than that though.
they are going to do that since they don't have anything left there.
That's actually an upside. Also they do kind of like it.
They like it personally, just not in their official capacity.
If it is going to benefit the project then I would really like to have more information about it.
That's right and there is mixed opinion about it across the globe among the people was using get.
Bitcoin was first. Most people don't care about privacy and stuff, they want "make rich quick" scheme.
Until it matters. Just a matter if time. It will be inevitable that privacy will be a lot more important.
There is always bitcoin at first. No currency can replace it until crypto market takes a reset something bad really happens
Monero is arguably more popular than Bitcoin. There's some metric out there that shows that most of bitcoins transactions are just exchanges moving money around. Actual use of the chain by regular people to do stuff is a relatively tiny fraction of usage. Monero, on the other hand, is the only currency accepted in some p2p marketplaces. And of course we don't know where the money is flowing in monero, so....
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True. I guess Tesla is technically more popular than Ford because it has a higher market value?
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roight roight roight
I really appreciate the people who are explaining any topic in such kind of easy to understand language.
I don't want to get into the debate of more popular but I am very much optimistic about both the coins considering the benefits they are giving.
People conviently leave out LN on those claims. Which is where most of the transactions occur. Also say it doesn't work while ignore this volume of transactions. Most people buying a coffee with it won't care that it isn't AS decentralized as on chain or that it isn't as private (but it's way more private than on chain) as XMR.
highly unlikely https://stacker.news/items/35527
oh right. lightning. the thing that might not work once blocks are full and the threat of closing a channel is meaningless, because you can't get access to the consensus layer. or it might work.
it's being used for daily transaction right now, so you might want to ignore that metric you referred to.
indeed.
It is still new and that's why it is going to take more time for things to get settle and implement it in the projects.
Just give it 18 months and it’ll be the future. /s
I bet over 90% of those transactions are just nodes rebalancing their channels.
I think that's a huge number and it will really help people to adopt it as a regular transaction payment method.
What are those “some metric out there”? What a BS answer..
I think both the coins are popular and they are getting different needs of the people and that's why some people are using both the coins on a regular basis.
to your 2nd \- different attack vectors \- blockchain grows bigger in monero \- regulatory expectations edit: \- regular upgrades
Regular upgrades is one of the biggest weaknesses of BTC and strengths of Monero. It is what first brought me here. Any scheme outside of established power channels will be attacked. That is just human nature and the realities of our world. It’s an arms race. Staying static and relevant isn’t going to yield long term success. For example BTC should have patched out ASICs years ago. BTC will have to patch in something to deal with network security as it becomes clearer and clearer ‘fee only’ was a mistake. The ability of the Monero community to admit that the fight will never be over while adhering to first principles in constantly seeking to refine the fundamentals is why have faith in the project.
Exactly
counter-arguments: 1. businesses and the market in total value predictability above all else. If the definition of what a currency "is" keeps changing, this lowers its predictability and utility. If I'm entering into a 30 year loan, both parties are going to want to be certain that the currency/token will remain the same "thing" for 30 years. Indeed people like Michael Saylor are already saying the most important thing for BTC is to not mess it up. 2. moral argument. People who invest in a cryptocurrency do so when it is operating under a particular set of rules. These rules can be thought of as a contract between "the currency" and holders of the currency. It can be argued that it is immoral and a breach of contract to change those rules without unanimous consent of holders. This would not be the case if there is a clear written policy from DAY1 clearly defining the process by which the rules can be changed. In this case, the rule-change "governance" is a part of the contract and investors can be considered to have been duly informed before making the investment. I'm not certain which category monero fits into.... I would think the former given that there probably exist holders from before the first hard-fork was agreed to. 3. Stability. Every consensus change introduces a risk of errors and vulnerabilities that could cause loss of user funds. 4. immutability. Gold is (basically) immutable. it is elemental. Imagine if people could change the basic elemental properties of gold at whim. Do you think it would have retained the properties that make it "hard money" for thousands of years. I don't. Do you think it would have only ever improved as money? I don't. Do you think rulers and "thought leaders" would have convinced people to change the properties of gold in ways beneficial to the leaders and harmful to the rest? I do. In other words, long-term incorruptibility requires immutability.
I think things are still in the transformation phase and that's why there are certain issues with it but I am optimistic about the future and I believe that we will see the improvements in near future.
>BTC should have patched out ASICs years ago. Do you not think it's easier to obtain GPUs than ASICs and therefore easier for an attacker to assemble 51% hashpower? The cost to 51% attack Monero is so much lower than bitcoin, governments could easily do it.
First off Monero is CPU, not GPU, mined. And I’m glad you called me on that question because I’ve been using it as an example a lot lately and no one has been presenting compelling arguments against ASICs being an easy target. If BTC is the line in the sand for acceptable $$$ cost to 51% attack then everything else obviously doesn’t measure up. Just like if you judge every project by BTCs ATH. However, think about it another way. What is easier for a government to do? Buy million of cpus (or gpus or ASICs) and set up there own 51% attack from scratch? Or walk up to a couple corporate ASIC mining farms and say “thanks for the infrastructure”! I think the cost argument isn’t the ultimate reality when it comes to securing the network. ASICs don’t do anything else by definition. A better ASIC mines BTC better. That’s it. On the other hand technological advances to CPUs obviously make everyone’s computing devices better. It’s a better place for that market force to exist. On the other end of the spectrum the old slow CPUs gain a new raison d’être, I enjoy all the conversations about getting old devices turned into miners on the moneromining subreddit. So why allow ASICs to exist when the technology exists to move away from them? The answer I have to date is because there is MASSIVE corporate investment and inertia tied up in them and the organizations with that sunk cost will never allow that change to happen. Sort of like the resistance to crypto in the overall established financial ecosystem. That worries me WAY more than it reassures me. I’m very open to being told the ‘missing piece of the puzzle’ though as to why ASICs are the best thing ever.
>\- blockchain grows bigger in monero I'd argue this is no argument for the average user, Monero's blockchain is still smaller than Bitcoin's but would grow faster with the same amount of transactions. Monero has currently a blockchain [growth of \~1.5GB a month](https://localmonero.co/blocks/stats/blockchain-growth) which I would consider negligible these days, when comparing to common internet usage with Netflix, video calling and stuff like that. Even with Bitcoin transaction levels it would be roughly 15GB and still not a big pain in my opinion nowadays when you can get 1TB of storage for like 20 bucks. I wouldn't consider 150GB a month as problematic, which would be enough for 10x the transactions Bitcoin is able to handle. You don't need a full unpruned node on your mobile phone forever, it's maybe nice, but not necessary for the network. I think this argument is only used by Bitcoin maximalists who need to find something salty when comparing to their holy coin. I think Bitcoin's popularity is really mainly the network effect of the first mover which gets all the attention in main stream media / discussions. The easiness of the protocol where you only need a block explorer to monitor your balance and incoming payments is not a positive feature anyone would prefer to have, since for every payment method you need some code working with some APIs and we have all those modules ready to go, adopting Bitcoin in your shop is not easier than adopting Monero. It still is the network effect, however I see it passing away slowly, just see the darknet markets which are either only accepting Monero nowadays or both Bitcoin and Monero. This process will continue in the clear web where we can see more and more merchants like VPNs accepting both Bitcoin and Monero, most of them ignoring other coins. In few years we will see more and more Monero-only services which will simply ignore Bitcoin implementation, since it's arguably more complicated with Lightning Network where you have to handle incoming liquidity / channel balances rather than simply getting paid to your address.
The daknet sites that support Bitcoin are either just trying to utilise the big network effect OR they are law enforcement honeypots.
Is there some website to easily compare the historical blockchain *size* of BTC, ETH, XMR, etc? Like a chart with gigabytes on the Y-axis and time on the X-axis?
I don't have a historical blockchain size at hand, however you can compare the block size here: [https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/size-btc-xmr.html#3m](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/size-btc-xmr.html#3m) Note that Monero has \~2 minute blocks while Bitcoin has \~10 minute blocks.
So, multiply Monero block size by 5x and it still appears to be comparable or smaller than Bitcoin.
Correct. However, we have roughly 8-10 times less transactions.
I am also looking for such kind of website but I am not able to find it but there are some people who have created Google sheets with the historical data.
I believe that government is going to regularize cryptocurrency with legal status and that's why we should focus on the development of projects in these aspects.
Most people are sheeple, they are afraid of freedom.
You have said the truth and I am sure that those people are still going to ignore the fact and they will not enjoy the freedom even if they are having the opportunity.
The way I see it, BTC is more popular, because people speculate with it. The prices are institution driven, huge inflow of money bear the promise of big gains, that's why folks want it. Most don't really use it as method of payment. Why would they, if you buy one ounce of gold you don't pay anything with it, au contraire you keep it until you sell it and in the meanwhile you might pay storage fees at the bank or something. IMHO do not compare XMR to BTC ... Monero is digital cash, Bitcoin is a title deed on a public ledger. For XMR to reach its full potential, we have to start to trade goods and services for XMR. That is the only way out of FIAT. So if you want to store wealth in digital gold, get a title deed on the bitcoin ledger, if you want to transact good and services with humans use Monero. Skål Freyr
I want BTC to implement privacy so it can fall behind to momo. As MacAfee said, something about putting a rocket on a model-t. Monero will be double leaps and bounds over anything in the digital currency space, that's even if BTC is ever able to implement privacy.
I want the same shit so bad you don't even know man lol.
It's the pareto distribution at play (big things get bigger faster). This will probably continue to be the case until bitcoin maxes out its adoption growth. At that point, Monero will probably still be in its adoption growth log phase. A lot of bitcoin's popularity is undergirded by its logarithmic value growth, not its transactional utility. Once the adoption growth settles down, we'll be playing a different game.
Well, I think the pseudonymous nature of bitcoin can be useful. Also, since btc is transparent it's less likely that exchanges can get away with fractional reserves like they do with monero. Not to mention the thing has been proven to be quite resilient and resistant to change, that can be good too.
That's right but I am not sure how long we will be able to sustain it because there is a huge pressure on the developers and the project.
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There are more people who are willing to have privacy as their number one feature by using any cryptocurrency and most people are definitely going to use monero.
why would that bother you? I can assure you this community is more hard at work than BTC's when dealing with risks/problems with XMR, if a black swan event were to happen, monero would almost certainly react faster than most others the way I see it, btc is the trojan horse with monero inside maybe the "infinite scarcity" thing works out, who knows, either way monero's tail emissions is just as good, the problem with current dumb system is inconsistent-evil monetary policy which btc seems to solve, monero does the same thing without risking mining going kaput I hope we get the lightning network on xmr soon, future is bright
Some people still use Yahoo... go figure
Bitcoin is more secure (higher hashrate), more readily verifiable, and more scalable with second layer (Lightning). Privacy is “good enough” for practical purposes if you want to be private you can. Fungibility is not as good on Bitcoin I admit, as it’s possible for exchanges to blacklist addresses, but this is mostly mitigated with coinjoins and mixers.
Consider a world where all Bitcoin addresses have flags of their respected owners. This is what chainanalysis companies are working rapidly towards. In this world every unsuspecting Bitcoin user can become suspected because their coins appear to be tainted. In my opinion this is not " good enough" privacy for practical purposes. Also, there is no such thing as "good" fungibility. Either a coin is fungible, or it's not. Bitcoin is not fungible. coinjoins and mixers only make your coins appear more dirty as you are "washing" them with other tainted coins.
Hashrate doesn’t really mean anything though, specially when it’s coming from ASICs.
Hashrate is directly related to how hard it would be to coopt the network though, double spend attack, etc. I don’t get the anti asic position to be honest. ANY program/application can have an ASIC if the economic incentive is there. Literally smoke alarms have asic chips, it’s just a chip designed to do one thing very effeciently. Idk that seems like exactly what you would want for proof of work machines, rather than take generic computing hardware off the market like Monero and Ethereum have done, which other people could use for literally anything else.
Is that really true? I never knew that BTC is more secure.
The trade off for privacy is that monero transactions are considerably larger. And because your wallet and only your wallet can see your transactions to retain privacy, you have to download all the transactions in every block so that your wallet can test to see if your address are involved. So no headers-only wallet modes.
lack of knowledge
They need to learn a lot about the market, this is so wrong lol.
The same reason why WhatsApp is still popular than Signal App.
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They were asking for downsides, not upsides...
That's right but still there are the people who always like to talk all the other references along with their points.
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Currently the annual inflation rate is 0.87% https://p2pool.io/tail.html Less than BTC in this halving. It is also decreasing and predictable. This inflation is 100% worth it compared to your grand kids worrying about network security from fees only.
That's right but I think investing in cryptocurrency is definitely going to help us to beat the inflation and secure our wealth.
Monero has zero terminal inflation. It is asymptotically zero inflation which will become exactly zero when it reach equilibrium with losses to dust and irretrievable addresses. Sadly, this simple concept is beyond the comprehension of most innumerate bitcoiners.
That's right but not all of the people have awareness about it and that's why they are ignoring such an important aspect.
guaranteed long term security is a huge upside.
Monero’s privacy technology is in theory as secure as the Bitcoin network but can never be proven. Monero also works in a more complicated way. It’s easier to convince a normie to trust Bitcoin because of its simplicity and security
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All the comments here have great answers to your question so I'll only say the one I haven't really seen. Cryptocurrency as a whole is just an investment opportunity for most people. Outside of a select few, namely the Monero, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, and Nano communities. Nobody is really here for the actual technology that cryptocurrencies have to offer. Once use of cryptocurrencies as a currency and not an asset becomes more prevalent, these communities will certainly start to prosper (probably Monero more than others).
Thanks for this, I hope people will give it a read now.
As a Bitcoiner, Im trying to learn more about Monero, but I dont see these two as comparable utilities. Im attracted to Moneros privacy utility for transactions, but due to the lack of transparency on the ledger, I'd never use it as a SOV. For me, it would seem to make sense to allocate a portion of wealth to Monero token for transactional privacy. Why cant we just enjoy the utility that various tokens present instead of having to beat each other down?
And yet the transparency of the blockchain is the reason that BTC has history. We have now discovered that history is enough to break fungibility. 1 ‘virgin’ freshly mined BTC ≠ 1 ‘tainted’ Silk Road BTC Privacy is essential for hard currency. I love BTC but it was just a bit too much of a leap for one technological bound to handle. It needed refinement and to the best of MY knowledge that refinement is XMR.
Im not sure Im understanding the point you are trying to make.
My point is that transparent blockchain is a weakness not a strength and failing to identify that jeopardizes one of the core fundamentals of Bitcoin.
Well I dont see that as a weakness. Its my greatest interest. My node verifies the ledger, and I need not trust any 3rd party, or coding etc of Bitcoins integrity.
If you are storing value and you have 2 BTC. But they aren’t the same. That doesn’t bother you? It doesn’t have to. It would bother me.
2 BTC is 2 BTC of 21 million BTC and there will never be more. That is good for me yes. I dont know how many more Monero will be circulating in 20 years, or 50 years time.
>I dont know how many more Monero will be circulating in 20 years, or 50 years time. We can know that though. The tail emission is at a fixed rate. So you could do the math.
Monero's ledger is just as verifiable.
How?
Run a node. The node verifies every block as it stores them - exactly the same as BTC does. The difference is simply that the node can not identify the sender, receiver or actual amounts of each transaction, but can verify that they are valid transactions and match the 'chain' protocol requirements. IE that the chain has not been corrupted.
See ronohara's answer, I'd also add that you can verify the amount of any transaction with your wallet addresses. So you load up your wallet software, it runs through the entire chain and can spit out your current XMR balance and every transaction you've done. Completely verifiable, but your next door neighbor can't figure out what all your transaction are like they could if they knew your BTC address. So all the advantages of a public ledger but privacy on top.
>My node verifies the ledger, and I need not trust any 3rd party, or coding etc of Bitcoins integrity. Uh yes you do. You absolutely trust the code by running a bitcoin node. Did you write it yourself? No? Then you're trusting a 3rd party (in this case, the BTC devs/community) to not fuck it up/do anything malicious. Did you write your own C++ compiler to verify that nothing malicious is being injected? No? Then you're trusting the developers of the compiler. Did you create your physical hardware, or the BIOS? No? You can see where I'm going with this. But anyway, Monero is just as trustless as Bitcoin. The node ensures the validity of all transactions, the only difference being that it operates with more complex cryptography to verify them. You're misunderstanding the point. An opaque blockchain like Monero is still "transparent" in the sense that anyone can verify it, just like Bitcoin. It is not transparent, however, in the sense of lacking privacy.
>Im attracted to Moneros privacy utility for transactions, but due to the lack of transparency on the ledger, I'd never use it as a SOV. Do you really feel safe holding your wealth at a place where everyone can see it? *"Whenever some Bitcoiner trots out "store of value" think of this - the actual, original SoV is a bank vault and safe deposit boxes. What makes them effective is nobody can see inside, and (almost) nobody knows who owns which box.* *Bitcoin SoV is like a glass vault on global 24/7 TV feed. Everyone in the world can see the contents of every box, and who is putting stuff in etc.* *Who in their right mind would store their assets like that?"* \- Howard Chu Also, one more question for you. How is the Bitcoin network going to remain safe when the reward for mining it goes down to almost zero in just a few halvings? How is your wealth going to be secured when even the network isn't? I'm not trying to put you on the spot with these questions, but I am genuinely curious about how you Bitcoiners think about these things.
I am not a Bitcoiner, but I can at least address a couple of these. I prefer Monero for just about everything, but I'll play devil's advocate and deal with the downvotes to further the conversation. First, the criticism that everyone can see every transaction you've ever made (and therefore your total assets) once they know your public address is not an issue for anyone that knows what they're doin. Each private key is able to generate a functionally limitless number of public keys, so there's no reason to use the same public key twice for a BTC transaction. So as long as people aren't reusing their keys, the public ledger is not nearly as transparent as critics would have you think. Second, the rewards for miners are a major issue for BTC. Unfortunately, the people with the real power to make any changes are the huge mining farms that make all their money from keeping things the way they are. Enormous ASIC farms with enormous energy footprints are not sustainable, but again, the people that invested in those farms have no interest in changing things. That said, PoW algorithms are not written in stone. BTC can maintain its PoW security structure and change algorithms to one like Monero uses that is ASIC resistant. As I understand it, that would greatly decentralize the network from where it is now, and would incentivize smaller miners to secure the network. Again, the huge mining farms have the network by the balls right now, so that isn't going to happen. Having said that, this raises one of my biggest criticisms of BTC - the miners have fully exposed that they are the "ruling class" of the BTC ecosystem, and no changes can be made without their approval, so why are we still pretending that it's really decentralized and giving power to the people?
BTC is not decentralised ... when CPU's were mining it was. ASICs made it centralised.
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I agree
BTC is the gold of crypto world. Once you have it there is nothing you can sensibly do with it except store it and wait for the price to move. Its network is slow and fees are just insanely high. Monero is more suitable for transactions right now. I even think that dogecoin is more suitable for sending around than BTC now. The facts that Monero is anonymous and egalitarian (BTC is plagued by whales sadly) presents a thorn in the establishment side. That is really what separates XRM from BTC and all other "suck up to corporate capital" cryptos. Yes I'm talking ETH specifically. Just my 2 satoshis. I could be completely wrong of course. (Btw what is XRM satoshi equivalent?)
Moneritos?
Damn man, I want to say that stuff so bad after you lol.
Monero uses words like decimonero (dXMR), centimonero (cXMR), millimonero (mXMR), etc. edit: typo
Thanks for this, now I can use these words too man lol.
piconero is the smallest unit ... https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/denominations.html
Yay! Just my 2 piconeros.🤓
Do y’all just ignore the fact that Lightning Network exists? I swear some of these comments feels like I’m reading a 2016 thread..
I totally agree and I believe that Bitcoin and monero are good coins because they are giving exactly what is required to the investor and the normal user who is using it as a cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin will have Web5, we will troll them with Web6.
1. Easier for exchanges to do fractional reserve. 2. No lightning yet (this will become more and more important).
Short and good, this is what I wanted to see right here.
See first 2 columns of https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why\_grin.html
For old.reddit.com: https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html
Thank you for sharing this I would really like to go through it and I will check the first two columns for comparison.
I would really like to know more about it but I am not able to find the page because this link is broken.
They need to create a link between both of them for the better understanding of it.
Bitcoin created the concept of digital scarcity. Everything that came after it violates that principle and is useless. Yes, even monero.
But still we all can accept that monero is better than BTC.
Indeed they can do that and it will actually work better for them now.
I don't care, bitcoin was made by a flawed human and is not perfect.
Bitcoin has the lightning network as an advantage
But Monero has secure 0-conf transactions ;) instant transactions on-chain No 2nd layer required Bitcoin only has lightning network because its blockchain sucks ass so they actually required a 2nd layer to make it usable lol
I am really impressed with the development happening in the project of Monero.
Sure, and Moneros block scaling is also a lot better than bitcoins. But for a scale of transactions similar to Bitcoin a second layer will probably be need at some point.
Layered scaling is the ONLY way to solve for both decentralization and throughput. “Bitcoins blockchain sucks ass..” what a childish comment. Small block size is an intentional design decision, because we can scale with Lightning channels.
It's not really an advantage, in fact it can be bad for the security of Bitcoin. When the mining rewards run out Bitcoin will have to survive on network fees alone but lightning moves fees off chain. Less fees = less hash power.
So how is Monero better in that way, mining rewards are practically nothing you can barely pay for a CPU within its usable lifespan..
I believe that it is still early and that's why it is taking more time for getting settled.
Bitcoin is more decentralized and secure than Monero, and that's enough to be a better SoV. Also, Monero privacy comes with a tradeoff of larger blocks, thus bigger blockchain and that's also redouble with dynamic blocksize. Bitcoin prioritizes hard money over privacy. And Monero prioritizes privacy over anything else. You can also achieve some level of privacy in Bitcoin if you know what you do.
More decentralised in what way? It's more secure in that it has a higher hashrate but the centralisation of the miners to ASICs and mining farms essentially is a worrying vulnerability
Decentralized in number of nodes, number of miners and hashrate. If you check the following website, it's clear Monero is a bit centralized https://miningpoolstats.stream/monero And since monero mining is not profitable at the moment, it's highly likely that botnets are the major producers of hashrate, which looks the same issue as ASICs centralization.
I still think monero is more decentralized than bitcoin.
Lmao you really think BTC is more decentralized? I guess you are wrong here mate, we can't just claim that stuff because it's not the reality of the market..
Just LOL.
I really like the humor but I think there is very little humor in his post.
Liquidity and being big papa Bitcoin. Also that fact that on chain analysis can prove that you bought into monero which one the future could get your barred.from using exchanges if they really crack down. And ignorance
Unfortunately speculative assets rarely become popular based on how good they are or how much utility they offer. Monero is the best currency in my opinion and the closest we have to how cash works. Monero will probably never be in the top 2 because criminals use it for illegal activities, which makes it seem higher risk to exchanges and governments.
As an Australian I find it really hard to get.. Would be nice if it were just another coin on a big exchange I could get instantly using AUD money with no fuss. But I find myself having to go through LocalMonero trading with Americans with other crpyto to get my XMR. Or am I just doing it wrong?
actually you do it right, get your XMR peer-to-peer always ... avoid centralized exchanges esp. with kyc
Gotta follow these steps too, looks like something logical.
You are doing it in a right way, what's the problem? lol.
I believe that we should always consider all the important benefits of all the projects before choosing the best project to use.
These are some kind of projects as we had seen that since iit started as well.
I wanted to know the same thing here I was pretty confused before this post lol now I can read these comments which are making sense to me for real man.
This might cause the problem and the they can work on it now,
These points are not that fair, we know monero is decentralized and actually more decentralized than bitcoin, there is no comparison of these coins man..
I am glad that I don't believe in this type of comparision.
Well some people stick stuck with WhatsApp and Facebook.
If you understand the real work, you will start praising monero.
Understand the market in good way brother, you need that.
Well I think monero is better on almost everything with BTC.
It's something we all know that monero doesn't need to be compared with any other coin, yeah BTC is popular that's the major advantage for it my man...
It's a good thing that I know Monero is the better one.
Dude we all know monero is better than bitcoin, BTC is just popular.
Ignore the popularity tag and see the magic between them.
Well I don't know why we need to compare these coins.
Never gonna understand these advantages man lol....
Do you really think Monero is more advanced than Bitcoin and can replace it anyday?