Where Monero Shines

And the case against it.

As a privacy advocate you can’t unsee the public nature of the bitcoin transactions that’s why the privacy narrative of monero is attractive but bitcoin has to learn from monero & implement new useful stuff and I have to make a case against storing wealth in xmr.

As security of monero chain is compromised, your wealth if stored in it will erode.

Bitcoin transactions even boosted are slow, and block confirmations feels to take ages when we are accustomeed to instant settlements to the likes of visa networks. Monero is faster than bitcoin in this sense.

The consensus algo (the rules by which bitcoin exists) makes sure that bitcoin’s ultimate supply is capped at 21 million coins which means its scarce, hence has value. But just scarcity means nothing alone, we have to transact in it and we have to store our wealth in it. (collective hunger for a scarce something makes it valuable)

Monero has no such scarcity. I have yet to hear any argument of why that scarcity is not needed or how the chain enforces scarcity, if it does it in any way, I am not accustomed to.

1 xmr = 1 xmr, monero is fungible, this is not true for bitcoin, because of soft forks and where the coin originally came from (what I call taintness) due to the public nature of the chain. Each bitcoin is not equal to the other.

Monero’s price is stable (almost flat) because people are not keeping it, hence we can transact in it without feeling uncertain & without the untrustworthiness of the volitlity. (Anxiety of future value, makes buying stuff with a currency difficult)

By my calculations, monero mining is not profitable even when you price the whole equation of inputs and outputs in the coin itself, hence security of the chain is compromised.

Monero only has one consumer friendly self custodial mobile wallet I could find that is well maintained - monero.com by cakewallet.

Monero has had regular hard forks to maintain the privacy and since inception of it, the node operators have no choice but to obey.

Bitcoin core is gradually adopted and each node operator can decide to upgrade or not. There is no abononment in bitcoin, while monero hard forks makes the previous versions of the chain obselete hence any node operator that decides to keep that version will have numbers that mean nothing.

One should study Zimbabwe hyperinflation, the government has tried to introduce time and time again “new” legal tendors, but those bills have lost value faster than they were printed, because people refuse to transact in it and refuse to store wealth in it, as they don't trust it.

Dollar bills became famous there as a result.

This will happen to monero eventually, the privacy narrative is attractive and I use monero from time to time but I never store more than anything that I can not afford to loose.

Solution?

Solution is ofcourse using bitcoin, but in the current state, you have to follow certain habits to maintain hygiene, below I lay down the exact things to keep in mind.