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Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by lawn on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @12:18PM (#32240289)
So I agree that transferring of value and for payments is where the usefulness is, but I think there are two reasons why the adoption is lagging:

1. Most people only care about speculation, and don't care at all what cryptocurrencies are or what they can do. And Monero doesn't do much for these people.

2. Monero is more inconvenient to use than Bitcoin is. SPV wallets aren't possible, so you need to rescan all outputs since you last opened your wallet which is very time consuming. Also you need to wait 10 blocks (~20 min) before you can spend an input, but with other cryptos you can spend a 0-conf transfer immediately.

It's unfortunate because Monero really is a better Bitcoin.

Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by wnevets on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @12:28PM (#32240427)
> Most people only care about speculation

You probably just described 99% of the crypto market. If the buyers of crypto actually cared about the features and usage you wouldn't have so many random shit coins getting pumped then dumped.

Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by tromp on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @12:53PM (#32240783)
Monero is not a better Bitcoin; it just makes different tradeoffs [1].

[1] https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html

Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by lawn on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @12:54PM (#32240803)
You're right that it makes different trade-offs, but in doing so it becomes a better currency than Bitcoin.
Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by tromp on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @01:05PM (#32240941)
Many of the properties listed in that comparison table make it a worse currency. The prime ones being poor scalability (not only large txs but also having to track all historical outputs, not just the unspent ones) and poor second layer support (no relative time locks).
Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by lawn on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @01:34PM (#32241258)
This list doesn't even list the important properties of a currency, such at it being fungible or it being cheap to transfer, both which directly disqualify Bitcoin.

Also, both of the ones you list are the same (scalability), whose purpose is to keep transfer fees low. Which, again, Bitcoin utterly fails at.

Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by tromp on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @02:34PM (#32242070)
Fungibility is split out into three separate properties: Hides amounts, Hides addresses, Hides the transaction graph (untraceability).

Bitcoin tx fees are near all time lows [1] although many people still overpay. And lightning fees are way lower still.

[1] https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight

Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by lawn on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @03:34PM (#32242869)
All time lows at only $2/tx... While the median Monero fee is at $0.0012. Even if LN transactions are free (they aren't) you still need to make hundreds of transactions before you recoup that one Bitcoin fee.

And the kicker is that Bitcoin's fees goes up when more people use it, while in Monero the fees get lower.

It's laughable to suggest Bitcoin scales better wrt to regular payments than Monero, despite Monero transactions being larger and the blockchain is harder to prune.

https://www.monero.how/monero-transaction-fees

Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by tromp on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @04:56PM (#32243891)
The chart shows many Bitcoin txs clearing (with some delay) at the minimal 1 sat/vbyte, which typically comes to a ~400 sat fee, or about 8 cents. This is also shown at [1]. Many people don't bother picking their feerate though, and go with their wallet's overestimate.

It's laughable to think Monero scales better when it uses much more resources (bandwidth and memory and diskspace) to support a given transaction rate.

[1] https://bitcoinvisuals.com/bitcoind-minfee

Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by charadeyouare on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @09:17PM (#32259298)
There's work underway for Monero to use the Lightning network, which scales to millions of transactions per second.
Re:Ask HN: Why are privacy coins like Monero not seeing wide... by tromp on Thursday July 28, 2022 @04:46AM (#32261842)
citation needed. i've only seen research proposals for one directional channels, or for networks with 3rd party escrow.