The common thread I get from Monero bros that complain about bitcoin is that they undervalue bitcoin's replacing fiat by creating a massive network that is trustless and transparent enough to give people confidence in the supply as well as no tricks.
Its not surprising because most of the world is economically illiterate as well as pro government. Bitcoin's privacy problems are low hanging fruit when you do not consider the bigger benefits and larger goals. Privacy is possible and as the adoption grows will become easier.
One question we should always ask about anything that hopes to gain world wide adoption is what would that look like. I don't hear that from Monero people. Maybe its just because I haven't listened to their best and brightest. Most I run into online are very difficult to communicate with. Worse that your average bitcoiner which is pretty bad.
I think a large part of the divide between Bitcoin and Monero is that bitcoiners embrace NGU and understand that for something to replace fiat, it needs to be liquid, have volume and a large market cap. I.e. it can't be niche and it has to eventually intersect TradFi and be put on company's balance sheets etc.
Monero bros, on the other hand, focus on privacy, but I've never seen them discuss what money is, what role it plays in the economy, or anything Austrian economics related. I like the idea of ASIC resistance though, with their mining algorithm requiring a CPU, which disincentivizes industrial mining.
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Well said @SpaceHodler. This is the experience I have had. Their scope is to narrow.
With the ASIC resistance though... I do not have the technical knowledge to say for sure but something tells me that what they are doing can be routed around. I very well could be wrong but it sounds like something that could be figured out to me. I'm guessing the only reason it hasn't is due to a very low desire to do so. Which is the real issue for me with Monero. The network seems to small and no way it ever even comes close to bitcoin... so what's the point.
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The network seems to small and no way it ever even comes close to bitcoin
And this is also why we can't see how well it scales for example. Monero people are against L2's and believe the base layer should be enough, but it would take the age and popularity of Bitcoin to test their beliefs empirically. Conveniently for them it may never happen ;)
As for ASIC resistance, here is a video that talks about RandomX, and what approaches to ASIC resistance preceded it:
TLDR: instructions for a VM are generated randomly, then the miner executes them. So any 'ASIC' would have to be Turing complete, i.e. a full-fledged CPU.
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That's interesting.
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