> ...but compared to Bitcoin it sure seems fast and scaleable.

Every fully decentralized coin hits at an early point the ceiling and won't scale. Vitalik Buterin expressed this recently. So, why should XMR be faster?

Besides, the anonymity is nice but just pipe your <put any coin here> through some random exchanges and you have the same effect, so it's really not that killer feature to create a new huge ecosystem. I like XMR's tech a lot and I think it's not too bad to have XMR in your portfolio, the question is if it has the potential to be one of the next major coins in the long-term (3-5 years). There, I rather see other candidates with a much higher probability, there is just too much good competition which came up the recents months/years.

> just pipe your <put any coin here> through some random exchanges and you have the same effect

It doesn't have the same effect. Blockchain analysis would be able to see right through that.

> Blockchain analysis would be able to see right through that.

How?

Monero is less scalable because you have to store all tx outputs (key images) instead of just unspent tx outputs, since Monero does not know which outputs are fully spent (for larger ring sizes). And these must all be stored in fast random access memory for double spend prevention. That’s an ever-growing pile of data!

While in Bitcoin you can offload older utxos to a slower memory, because the access pattern is “utxos die young”. Also, utxo set grows much slower or even can be stable (“1 utxo per person”) while tx volume grows forever.

Bitcoin scales way better than Monero or Zcash (that has the same requirement to store all “nullifiers” to prevent double spending).

> fast random access memory

That term is misleading and implies actual RAM-type memory is needed, which is untrue. Monero scales quite well using a database on SSD up to transaction rates far in excess of anything Bitcoin can or will realistically handle now or any time soon (certainly hundreds and possibly thousands of tx/sec).

Likewise the total data that needs to be stored grows slowly at realistic tx rates, roughly 80 GB/year at 10 tx/sec. That's similar to the rate of growth of the bitcoin blockchain (unpruned) and well within the hardware capabilities of both existing cheap SSDs and even more so the visible trajectory for future cheap SSDs.

I'm not sure any blockchain scales "well," so it's like comparing turtle speeds. Likely they'll all be moving to lightening network for scalability, so it's a waste of time comparing them. The factors that are interesting for blockchains are immutability, fungibility and censorship resistance, and due to privacy, Monero wins 2/3. As for network security, that can change as more people appreciate how privacy influences cashlike properties--though I think Bitcoin will end up being a sort of digital gold going forward, which isn't a bad market to contral as far as price evaluation.

Nice, this is good in-depth explanation of why XMR isn't scalable.

this comment is somewhat tangental but from what I have seen the tech does not necessarily determine the value of a crypto. things like network effect and marketing seem to make a larger difference at least at first. do any end users care about the tech stack of myspace vs facebook? it will be interesting to see if technical merits win out over the long term in the cyptocurrency space because it was originally largely comprised of tech people.