Here is the "Bitcoin Killer"
Monero is the new Bitcoin killer.
Not really. Bitcoin > Monero. I could end the post here. But I will explain why for everyone wondering or having some doubts.
I don't think Monero is set up to be a global success because it doesn't scale. In the real world of engineering, there are always trade-offs. decentralization, privacy vs. security, speed, etc. If you want speed, all you have to do is use a centralized database. You'll have to give up privacy and decentralization, but you'll get speed. So, for example, FTT, which was the token of the now-defunct FTX exchange, and BNB, which is the token for binance, are much faster than Bitcoin. Their blockchains are much faster, but they're centrally controlled, so their settlement procedures are kind of fake because the parent company controls all the validators and has a lot of power over them. You can see what happened when FTT when FTX failed, or maybe it was Zero-knowledge proofs and stealth are used for private transactions, but as we've said before, there's no such thing as a free lunch in engineering or even in engineering currencies.
People who use Monero will tell you how great it is for privacy, but they won't tell you about the downsides. Monero makes concessions when it comes to decentralization and security. It's great that Monero has privacy features at the base level, but this has led to blockchain bloat. As we'll see, the Monero blockchain has grown quite large over the past few years, even though it's not used as much as Bitcoin. Monero nodes, for example, need to keep a growing list of spent coins because they can't see or know if those coins have been spent or not. If I'm saying that right, if you're in Monero, please correct me.
Let's do a simple example though. Let's compare market caps as a sort of proxy for usage. I know this is a very rough way of doing it, but I think it does give an indication. Monero's market cap is about $2.3 billion. About $348 billion is how much Bitcoin is worth on the market. Now let's compare the size of the blockchain. Even though Monero's market cap is small, its blockchain size is 150 gigabytes. This means that Monero's market cap is about 151 times bigger than Bitcoin's, but Bitcoin's blockchain is only 3.32 times bigger. Bitcoin has also been around longer. It has been around since 2009, while Monero launched on the main net in 2014. Why does any of this matter? Well, if you want a decentralized network with lots of full nodes, you need to make it cheap and easy.
Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized cryptocurrency, and it shouldn't even be called a cryptocurrency. If you look at the nodes, they are run by different people and groups. This isn't like one government running a million notes and having control over just those nodes. If Monero had the same amount of usage as Bitcoin, and Bitcoin itself is nowhere near full, then Monero would be the most decentralized cryptocurrency. Most Monero users and almost all Ethereum users already don't run their own full nodes. This is a strange contrast because Monero users care a lot about privacy, but they don't run their own nodes. There's a technical reason for this that you can find if you search for it. For example, this person says that because of pruning and the API's limited capabilities, it's almost impossible to know how big the Monero block is right now.
General problem is to be able to do all of this yourself, and if you go online, you can see how hard it is to run a full node. You can run a smaller node by pruning, which gets rid of 78% of the unnecessary ring signature data, but then you don't have the whole history of the blockchain and all of the transactions. So, if you go to the getmonero.org website, which is the official Monero website, you can see all of the transactions. A full blockchain is about 140 to 150 gigabytes, but a pruned blockchain, where you give up some of the transaction history, is only 50 gigabytes. This is the trade-off that Monero will have to keep making, and more and more people, if they can even figure out how to run a node, will be running pruned nodes. Unlike Bitcoin, Monero puts privacy ahead of decentralization and security, and I think that's the wrong trade-off to make.
Most exchanges don't list Monero because governments don't like privacy coins, which I understand. This shows that maybe Monero is a good thing because governments don't like it, but if you can't get widespread adoption, it won't do you any good. Also, because Monero adoption is lower, there are fewer people using it.
Monero Network is great and private right now, but it is doomed to stay a small niche coin or risk centralization due to blockchain bloat if it ever becomes popular and takes off. Either way, Monero will never be a global reserve currency, and it should continue to lose value against Bitcoin as it has been doing since 2018. Check on trading view or any other platform a XMR/BTC (Monero versus Bitcoin) since 2018. When the chart goes down, it means that Bitcoin is getting stronger against Monero. When it goes up, it means that Monero is getting stronger against Bitcoin. Since 2018, this chart has had a series of lower highs and lower lows. Again, I'm sure I'll hear from a lot of Monero users in the comments section: "I do value privacy. I think it's a very, very important thing. It's hard to have wealth if you don't have privacy. If you have a hostile government, even if you have a lot of money and don't have privacy, it doesn't do you much good." I can't really talk about coin join and non-kyc Bitcoin for obvious reasons.
There are many, many different ways to buy Bitcoin without being seen, so there's actually no need to go into Monero.
