Monero's Big Fat Problem

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In this video, I discuss Monero's growing issues with blockchain bloat (caused by ring signatures and other privacy features), as well as its vulnerability to an attack by a hired army of CPUs.

By contrast, Bitcoin seeks to keep the blockchain as small as possible, while still preserving security, in order to keep the node network as decentralized as possible.

If Monero ever achieved widespread adoption, the blockchain bloat would become intolerable. Commercial mining of Monero would also take off and eclipse Monero home miners.

When it comes to engineering and real life, there are always trade-offs. Bitcoin has chosen not to embrace better privacy at the base layer for very good reasons.

Monero will never catch up to Bitcoin. This suggests that more members of the Monero community should defect to Bitcoin (like Seth For Privacy already did), and help us build better privacy on top of Bitcoin.

Not investment advice! Consult a financial advisor.

"ASIC Resistance" Is Just Plain Silly (Bitcoin vs. Monero):

Monero monthly blockchain growth:

J&J Snack Foods:

Howard Chu (hyc):

My discussion thread with hyc:

Zcash blockchain getting spammed:

Binance admits that Zcash has a company behind it:

Looks like Electric Coin has been issuing unregistered securities to fund itself:

Crypto and the Howey Test:

I am not being paid or otherwise compensated by any company or cryptocurrency project that I mention in my videos.

My opinion is not for sale. Please do not contact me with any affiliate or advertising deals.

#monero
#bitcoin
#zcash

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[Bitcoin_University]

Here is a response to my video from Howard Chu (hyc):
Here is a response to my video from Seth For Privacy:

[michaelgirard]

You had me until you started throwing shade at it. Why would Monero be a threat to bitcoin? Only because you perceive Monero as superior. Otherwise, this whole video would be moot.

[monsieur.d]

Both Monero AND bitcoin are useful. I used to be a maxi... Now I admit that Monero is a useful technology. It will be necessary for the "then they fight you" period.

[higgsxboson]

Imagine “Anything not Bitcoin = Bad” being your entire personality.

[theonerds]

You will appreciate Monero more when you understand Technocracy.

[dohargain]

I'm confused...
BTC coins=~19 million
XMR coins=~18 million
BTC block chain=480 Gb
XMR block chain=180 GB
BTC block time=10 mins
XMR block time=2 mins.

[logarttreiton]

The first point on blockchain bloat has sort of been asked and answered many times. In short, Monero private txns take less space than Bitcoin private (coinjoin) txns. Therefore, it's more efficient at performing the same task. He actually hammers the nail on the head saying "there's no free lunch" - so let's view it from the opposite side: suppose Monero was developed first and someone says, "hey, there's this altcoin called Bitcoin which uses much less storage per txn." Oh, great, but to do so we have to completely expose everything in plaintext and sacrifice fungibility (hello tainted coins) and uniformity (hello ordinals)? Not a worthy tradeoff.

Back to more ASIC battles for the next point. "You can more easily rent CPU power". True, but you can more easily commandeer/confiscated/bomb ASIC power. Furthermore, rent to what end? You would have to sustain the expense of more than doubling current hash rate, for no permanent damage once you cease. ASICs were never part of the Bitcoin design. Their defence is entirely ad hoc. A lot of herrings to shroud the simple fact that specialised and easily identifiable equipment is a far greater centralising and censoring risk than consumer grade equipment found in nearly every home on the planet. Give your head a shake.

The constant little digs at Monero being so small, "like a snack food company" is ironic coming from a Bitcoiner who must have surely have had to suffer through the same kind of nonsense a few short years ago. How quick the ego grows to resemble the smugness of the fiat champions they once stood against.

Later again he says privacy can be solved by coinjoin, which, as mentioned above, bloats the ledger more than Monero transactions. Monero transactions also offer far more easy privacy than trying to perform mistake-free coinjoins.

In the summary, it comes down to blockchain bloat. The fundamental problem is that "bloat" hides a flawed premise: that there is no substance to the additional data storage, i.e. it is wasteful. But of course, with this line of reasoning, we could make Bitcoin simpler to sacrifice another fundamental property of money: just make the 1 BTC units non-divisible, in addition to being non-uniform and non-fungible. Simplified and less storage needed! See, Monero is not really building privacy tech. It's just building money tech. Bitcoin enthusiasts seem to have the pseudo-religious fantasy that they have in their hands the eternally perfected product, like modern day fundamentalist puritans, while Monero is hesitant to even move past beta status (v0.18...).

[rewe]

SSDs are getting so much cheaper every year. By the time monero reached 10TB low end people will already have the option to buy 32TB cheap SSDs.
I don't get why bloating the blockchain with privacy is bad, but bloating with monkey jpegs is acceptable.

[mylesgoodwin]

Less than a minute in: Monero's bloat is bad <cuts to claim Bitcoin's blockchain is five times as big>

Immediately concludes market cap = blockchain size

[Gonbatfire]

As Monero's marketcap grows, so will its security budget and thus so will the energy spent defending it.

Of course that right now the community alone would struggle against the full force of a gov attack, but so did Bitcoin when it was 200x smaller.

Also, you forget that regardless of the hardware being used to attack the network, it is still needed to spend energy, govs may print the money, but they still can't print electricity, this is the point of Proof of Work.

The advantage of CPU mining is on its distribution, countries like argentina already have restrictions on the import of ASICs, meanwhile it is much harder to prevent CPUs from getting to the hands of regular people.

The cost of entry to Monero mining is near zero, you could be mining it right now while reading this and it wouldn't even increase your power consumption by a significant amount, imagine if millions like you did this, it would far outpower any supercomputer, it just needs to continue catching on.

Regarding blockchain "bloat" it was you who said that "In a few years, a 2TB SSD will cost you $10" in a video about Bitcoin's blockchain growth.

Why can't that apply to Monero as well?

[milohoffman]

Market cap where all the newbs and normies dump their speculating money into the only name they have heard before means nothing in relation to technical design comparisons. Using this in a technical comparison is very disengeous.

[jad]

As the wise Thomas Sowell once said, "There are NO solutions, only trade-offs".

Another great one was when asked what he would replace the current Federal Reserve system with, he replied, "That's like asking what you would replace cancer with".

[johnshaff]

Comparing Monero market cap to a pretzel maker was all I needed to hear to know you’re coming from a disingenuous place. Note: I own zero monero

[Igor-qmzd]

You make a good argument in regards to bloat, but Bitcoin is not as decentralized as you make it seem. The people who own the ASICs vs those who owns the cpus is a weak argument. It's not that much harder to get an army of ASICS if you have a billion dollar budget. In regards to privacy, non-kyc bitcoin is not a strong argument for privacy compared to monero's system. You can't transact in Bitcoin privately, that's a very strong argument against it.

[lvdeluxe]

Monero will boom after CBDCs. When Governments have total control over digital money, Monero will all of a sudden come back to people's minds. Like Bitcoin it'll grow through time.

[emanifestation]

Imagine your phone and everyone can see your contact list photos and web searches, thats bitcoin

[bujin]

0:28 I am one 100% a Bitcoin maximalist, but with that said, MarketCap to BlockChain size is a profoundly useless metric. Storage usage does not scale with MarketCap, it's like talking about Bitcoin's energy use per transaction; a complete non sequitur. The metrics that matter are, BlockChain size to transaction volume, and BlockChain size to period of operation. The first one tells you how efficient the chain is, the second one tells you how fast the chain is going to fill your hard drive.

[youtubeswim]

Change the channel name to Bitcoin Maxi University. That fits better.

[PixPete]

You are 100% correct but Monero is my favourite coin due to its privacy. I will continue to invest in Bitcoin but we need privacy at the base layer because once the normies come onboard they will be susceptible to Government control and privacy invasion. You think normies are going to jump through all of the hoops to keep their BTC private? No, they will always take the path of least resistance and that will expose them. At the moment I see Bitcoin and Monero being useful tools that should be used together.

[samuelsiegart]

I disagree that XMR has not been "successful" or "caught on". Thousands of people use it daily to exchange goods and services in ways that cash or bitcoin can't replace.

It's only unsuccessful to the extent that you judge it against some fantasy ideal future where billions of people use the same cryptocurrency to pay for their coffee and groceries every day. Furthermore, its price compared to bitcoin, or value as an investment, is a completely separate measure from utility and improving people's lives in the present.

In terms of scaling issues, in addition to technical details others have mentioned, I would also suggest that there's room for multiple forks of PoW blockchains to work in parallel, serving the needs of different markets or communities with atomic swaps in between them.