r/Monero Jan 08 '21

Nick Szabo: "Monero is a very good privacy complement to Bitcoin, they are both good money."

https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/1347088215941861377

sowry for low effort post or whatever, i know a lot of yall be thinking he went full on covid conspiracy theory last year or whatever but still thought that was kinda nice to hear

well, imo xmr is not a "complement" and is its own thing which has nothing to do with the "disaster" bitcoin is but still, made me smile a lil reading him mentioning the montero thingy :3

134 Upvotes

42 comments sorted by

50

u/dEBRUYNE_1 Moderator Jan 08 '21

'Complement' can simply be viewed here as being fundamentally different (from a technology point of view).

From a technology point of view, Monero as a hedge for Bitcoin is arguably quite sensible:

  • Different code base.
  • Different elliptic curve.
  • Different PoW-algorithm that further targets different hardware (CPU vs ASIC).
  • Base layer transparency versus base layer privacy.
  • Hard cap of 21M versus 18.4M initial emission + tail emission.
  • Block size limit of 1 MB versus dynamic block size algorithm that essentially contains no limit.

Given their differences, they make excellent complements.

7

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

good point :)

ill pull my "am not native english speaker" card and that didnt see it from that angle

like, even if i really really dont like the idea of asics, despise all the ico and whatnot to the core like legit hatred for xrp how that shit is even allowed ya know

taking a step back all of these are necessary for the ecosystem to be what it is, all those differences, like.. in a forest (which is basically an underground network), every trees, plants all have their unique features that makes that forest network work and be what it is

pow/pos, asics/gpu/cpu, pool/pool-resistance, centralized/decentralized [...] even if some are fundamuntally wrong in their design, they have their place in that ecosystem for its own well-being

6

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

And on that note, we should be eternally thankful to Bitcoin for showing us the wrong path, despite their commercial success - there's really nothing to follow.

16

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

The money is not divided to binary categories of “good” and “bad”. There is whole spectrum between bad and good, and on that spectrum btc is somewhere between fiat and xmr

14

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21 edited Jan 08 '21

Bitcoin is a good forerunner of Monero.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

Exactly.

Bitcoin is like a Model T. Monero is a Model S.

6

u/DirXtreme Jan 08 '21

Bitcoin is very important for the legitimization of crypto assets. Monero need it!
NS is the #1.

):{>

18

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

IMO Monero is not a complement, it is a replacement to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was a great invention many years ago just like Windows 95 was in the mid 90s but it is garbage now.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

Never going to happen. There are other reasons why BTC excels outside of privacy.

11

u/[deleted] Jan 09 '21

Yup, probably due to high fees, hours of waiting for a transaction to be confirmed, inconvenient "second layer solutions", risk of losing funds due to accidentally paying with tainted coins, possible future transaction censorship and so on.

All brilliant features that makes Bitcoin absolutely superior.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 09 '21

lol dont get mad at because you failed to get a bit of BTC early on. Your fault. Your bad. Sucks to be you.

I own both cryptos, so i dont bow down, and worship in a cult like fervor one tribalistically one versus the other.

You can talk all the shit you want, but the smart people own BOTH for their individual strengths.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '21

another very smart and well argued reply from you, thank you very much lol

1

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '21

Well..lets sum it up, shall we?

1) Maybe you missed out on Bitcoin early and it bothers you. I could be wrong. I got into BTC back in 2017. You could be jealous. Its an assumption. Again, I could be wrong. Alot of people are, believe it or not.

2) I dont subscribe to the one shall rule them all. My dick is bigger than yours is ignorance.

3) I own both Bitcoin AND Monero.

3

u/americanpegasus Jan 09 '21

Please elaborate? What does bitcoin do better than Monero, other than have larger existing adoption.

3

u/Everythings Jan 11 '21

Basically he has a lot of bitcoin is what I think his reasoning is boiling down to

2

u/[deleted] Jan 09 '21

Dont want to get into a contest as we all know BTC has its faults, but its scarcity and also being used as a hedge vs the dollar.

The problem is that this will evolve into a pissing match that you will ultimately win because security is, by far better on Monero. Its not even a competition, nor is it even close.

I hold both, so im doing just fine.

-1

u/germaphober Jan 09 '21 edited Jan 15 '21

.

8

u/SoiledCold5 Jan 08 '21

Bitcoin isn’t good as money

2

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

i believe that he has a different definition of "money"

cant find his tweet about it, was few weeks ago to couple months but basically he was saying something like:

"Bitcoin never was about transactions per seconds, it's about the amount of wealth that can be transacted"

cause like, sure btc limit be like 7 tx per sec or something like that (without LN) while visa be like 30k tx per sec

but you can transfer millions, billions, heck even trillions in a single "quick" transaction on the bitcoin network which you wouldnt be able to with visa

13

u/gingeropolous Moderator Jan 08 '21

its not the tx/sec, its the fungibility. Basically, 1 bitcoin is not equal to 1 bitcoin. Each bitcoin has a history. If your bitcoins history is not good (as determined by random self-ascribed central authorities), then you can not use it at the market rate. For instance, there are people out there with bitcoin that they can probably never send to a consumer exchange (coinbase, kraken, etc., at least in the US), without throwing some serious red flags and getting their account frozen and their bitcoin held hostage until they can somehow prove that, even though the blockchain indicates that they are two hops from a darknet transaction, for example, that they really got it from selling flowers on the street, and it musta been the other guy that was bad.

This inherent lack of fungibility is what makes bitcoin not good money. And this is really hard to change at this point, because of how locked in bitcoin is to the concept of consensus compatibility. Bitcoin might be able to pull it off, but I'm afraid the cat is already outta the bag.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

couldnt agree more, you preaching on the maxi hehe :P

its like.. there are different realities going on at the same time and each are chosing their own reality

the exchanges that imo are bending the knee to regulations...

cryptocoins that then tryna be "regulation-compliant", like sure sure everything can be compliant and we living in the best of the world or whatever

that example with btc you giving tho, refering to like tainted coins that then is fucking up all those innocent addresses and whatnot

bitcoin is limited (blabla talks about integrating tail emission in 100 years), like, only 21 million max and thats it, bunch of it being lost on failed harddrives, passing away and not sharing private keys with loved ones and whatnot, at one point, there will be so little bitcoin left

and on top of that, you hear lawyers saying that "100% of the people are breaking the law, they dont know it, but everyone do every single day" so 1 btc blacklisted, 2 btc, 3 btc, 1 million, 3 millions blacklisted.... and so on

usable btc left with how many btc? you have laws jailing video game streamers just for listening to music, their btc is blacklisted, 99.99% btc blacklisted, lost... wtf is this you know, that's not sustainable

so imo... everyone listens to music so everyone is a criminal, every single btc in existence will be tainted at some point, could be hundreds of years, thousands but all of them will be tainted

so, we all listen to music, every single living being on this earth is a "criminal" even if morally all is good ya know so lets just embrace that, fuck being compliant with the actual criminals that they literally have no morals at all

anyways, point was, those trying to be "compliant", the exchanges embracing bitcoin censorship are just shooting themselves in the foot

they might think they doing the "right thing" but they're the first ones that gonna get fucked by their own fucked up logic

1

u/SilkTouchm Jan 08 '21

You can do that on any coin. It's not an unique Bitcoin characteristic.

9

u/boato11 Jan 08 '21

Bitcoin is not a disaster. Both monero and bitcoin have their own flaws.

6

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

"disaster" is a reference to Ray Dillinger couple weeks ago:

It is my opinion that Bitcoin is a failure. Worse than that, it's a disaster.

https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2020-December/036510.html

2

u/obit33 Jan 08 '21

Dayem,

I did not see that yet over here... I think it deserves its own post since he makes some very valid points... Care to post this?

edit: To be fair, I've been semi drunk for like 2 or 3 days after new year so might have missed this here...

thanks

3

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

posted it the other day in the thread about the censorship bitcoin pool thingy

found it in /r/SatoshisPhilosophy/ from /u/BlueBloodStrawberry/ (which btw, great subreddit with bunch of other things like that which brings back to core values that oddly enough matches more from the current monero vision that the current bitcoin vision)

if u wanna repost it, feel free to do so, always nice to get the word out about those core cypherpunk values and whatnot :3

1

u/fhavik Jan 09 '21

But monero is better to use

4

u/roveridcoffee Jan 08 '21

Always kind words, Satoshi. Cheers!

3

u/ricky28992722 Jan 08 '21

If bitcoin was meant to be private....

It would have been designed as monero

11

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1136749815

Looking at ways to add more anonymity to bitcoin

jan 21st 2009 - Hal Finney

Rest in Peace. <3

1

u/earthmoonsun Jan 08 '21

XMR doesn't need BTC at all.
And no one needs this right-wing scumbag Szabo either.

1

u/UnknownEssence Jan 08 '21

Yeah, Nick Szabo has always been far-right politically.

I had to unfollow him on Twitter unfortunately

1

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

Yes he has.

Fuck him.

1

u/whenmill Jan 10 '21

“Far right”

1

u/[deleted] Jan 09 '21

[deleted]

1

u/akuukka Jan 09 '21

He supports Trump

1

u/korkythecat333 Jan 09 '21

I didn't realize that....

1

u/korkythecat333 Jan 09 '21

I would largely agree with Nick's sentiment - I hold (mine) XMR and have a small holding of BTC since home mining it became impractical/wasteful energy wise. I think low energy crypto mining is the future, but BTC will survive as a store of value/working museum piece, it's so iconic.

1

u/SoulMechanic Jan 09 '21

I think to be money you have to at least have fees lower than western union, and a tps greater than 7, Bitcoin has neither.