mister_monster on Nostr: I can take a crack at it. The thing you're responding to, how bitcoin blocks are a ...

I can take a crack at it.

The thing you're responding to, how bitcoin blocks are a currently ghost town but Monero blocks are not, already refutes the first point made in the video, that bitcoins block size per market cap is bigger and so if Monero were to scale to that size it would have unmanageably large blocks. If that were true bitcoin would at the very least have full blocks right now. As rotten said, rubbish, and I'm surprised you didn't see it before linking us to the video. Using market cap as a heuristic for adoption is an incorrect premise.

(We have all seen this video before BTW, it's a go to gotcha and it has been torn to shreds many times before, "deboonked" you might say, you can find many other responses to it on nostr, on reddit especially, probably everywhere else that there is a presence of the Monero community)

There's no such thing as a free lunch... Nobody ever claimed there was a free lunch. We knowingly make the trade off: bigger transactions for fungibility and private finances. We know the cost of privacy and embrace it because it is a must have feature of money. But framing it that way assumes bitcoin is already perfect, that improvement can't be had over it without losing something. This is not true. I think bigger transactions in exchange for complete privacy is a worthwhile trade off, therefore I think I'm getting more than I'm giving, therefore I think I'm getting something for free, the marginal benefit over the marginal cost. That's nice.

Hasn't been that successful... Again, market cap is a poor heuristic for utility and adoption. Define success. I define it as peer to been electronic cash, the title of the bitcoin whitepaper.

Mining, this is all theory. Some of the arguments about ASICs vs RandomX have merit. But the idea that specialized CPUs will be made is ridiculous. They won't be specialized, they'll just be more powerful general purpose CPUs. The idea that the ability to attack Monero is easier than bitcoin because they're CPUs is also is not entirely ridiculous, but it's not well understood. The fundamental measure of attack ability is hash rate, and right now Bitcoin can be attacked with 10% of the yearly DoD budget, one company has a monopoly on production of bitcoin mining hardware and could attack the network whenever it chooses. It's easier to rent CPUs than ASICs, it's even easier to lean on a single company that produces over half the hash rate. "Bitcoin can just change it's mining algorithm" so can Monero, and in fact it has, something bitcoin probably couldn't do because it can't find consensus to change anything.

You can't call bigger transactions "blockchain bloat" when they're made that way on purpose for a reason. They're not bloat by definition, they're more useful to users. They're just bigger.

Coinjoin, payjoin, non KYC bitcoin, "things that make more sense", L2 this and that, this has been discussed ad nauseam on nostr, there's a meme somewhere of a girl doing gymnastics, you can find it in any of our histories if you're interested in how we tear that apart. It's total and complete rubbish.

I've got no disagreement with the criticisms of zcash in the video.

How's that?