Bitcoin and similar are computationally intensive to run because of a thing called decentralization.
Visa and Mastercard don't need consensus to perform payments, but they for sure don't have a single server running, I am sure they have more servers than bitcoin nodes, without counting on stripe, paypal, ... and other payment providers IN THE WORLD :)
There is something called lightning, which is p2p payments through bitcoin!
> Furthermore, a currency needs a government (or similar kind of body) to manage its stability, by printing (and buying) money. Otherwise, we'll see wide fluctuations in value like what happens with Bitcoin.
call the economists! a currency needs a government! But only from 1971 onwards, before that people didn't have currencies!
Oh, you don't want to use the US dollar? the best currency ever!? I guess we'll have to bomb your country and neighboring ones to change your mind.
> to manage its stability
aka lose 2-4% of purchasing power per year. Thank you central bank! you saved us!
> Otherwise, we'll see wide fluctuations in value like what happens with Bitcoin
Oh no! The horror! A currency that can also go up!!! I guess we need a central bank for oil! to keep the price of oil stable! And food too!
guy who doesn't know what peer-to-peer technology is, laughs at man who does!
please stop using the internet! it might be slow and expensive to run! it requires insanely big cell towers and submarine cables! it won't scale!!11!! kind of guy
They are both useful. Monero is a bit more tricky to use, there is no concept of Lightning network, you still have to wait around 7 minutes for the transaction to settle.
It's not bad, but it is different. The transparency in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug.
It very much is not. If I use cash to commit a crime but then deposit it into a KYC bank account which is then used as a side channel to get me caught does not mean its the cashes fault.
XMR privacy and anonymity can not protect you from going out of your way to convert it into inferior surveillance currency which then gets you busted.
That's basic logic and should be a obvious technical limitation.
If they've attacked it via netflow analysis, then it doesn't matter to a criminal whether or not it's a problem in the protocol because how is a criminal supposed to use it if not on the internet?
By "practical terms" I mean that a criminal sitting in prison isn't going to care whether the vulnerability that got them there was layer 7 or not. It doesn't fucking matter to them at that point.
Everything on the internet is vulnerable to netflow traffic deanonymization; it is a fundamental limitation with the design of the internet. The only thing that stops these attacks from being more common is the relative difficulty of obtaining the required data.
>Everything on the internet is vulnerable to netflow traffic deanonymization
that is not how they get busted, monero literally has protections against that like ring signature and dandelion. They get busted by leaving xmr monero ecosystem to cash out to surveillance currencies like btc or tether on a KYC CEX.
Again, the anonymity of cash (which isn't that anonymous actually but thats another topic) is useless if you deposit them into a KYC ATM.
It is what it is. You have to implement KYC if you want fiat rails. A merchant can't KYC every single person that comes to the store. But you could build a system to eventually ban wallets that could be tied to criminal activity.
The merchant can also pick to use Lightning and keep the Bitcoin instead of selling it for fiat.
You can use lightning with mixes funds.
There are ways to move your Bitcoin.
The main premise of my comment is that they can't *take away* your bitcoin. But they can take a way your USDC.
I sent a transfer from the UAE to Spain and another one to the Netherlands. They took 5 days and 7 days respectively.
The same transfer takes 10 minutes in Bitcoin.
You don't do transfers to pay for stuff at the grocery store, the same way you would not pay using the Bitcoin network. You would use lightning network, which takes less than 2 seconds finality.
That usage is not a generic payment usage. This is a use case it is good for. But if 8 billion people should use Bitcoin for their everyday shopping, that is a totally different case...
Well you wouldn't use Bitcoin itself to exchange on, you'd use side layers like Lightning payments for the near instantaneous exchange which then gets aggregated into one of the upcoming blocks.
MasterCard was around in the 1950's, in 2026 they do not still use the same method of exchanging money as they did back then and have had to make big changes to their systems as time has gone on, Bitcoin does the same thing except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
> except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
Bitcoin is absolutely not controlled by its user base, but by another cartel (made of mining pools and exchanges). You, as a user have literally no say in any decisions taken by bitcoin except voting with your feet, which is exactly what you're suggesting against Visa & MasterCard's (which aren't banks by the way…)
The exchanges and miners do have a large influence, but the node runners (the users) have a voice as well. The node runners can get together, and refuse to peopogate the blocks of of the miners/exchanges that are being bad actors (BIP 148 for example) and also (BIP 110) that's currently making the rounds.
If a large enough percentage of the node runners need refuses to propogate a block from a bad actor, then another miner can mine the same block and get the reward.
The miners don't need “node runners” to get access to other miners mined block. That's not how the bitcoin protocol works at all.
In an ideal world the best non-miners can do is prevent some transactions by preventing them to reach the mempool, but you're not going to block an exchange this way either.
The bitcoin protocol is actually very friendly to centralization, the only mechanism that was supposed to prevent it was the PoW, which failed because ASICs exist. And as a result, in practice it's been very centralized for more than a decade now.
There is something called lightning, which is p2p payments through bitcoin!
> Furthermore, a currency needs a government (or similar kind of body) to manage its stability, by printing (and buying) money. Otherwise, we'll see wide fluctuations in value like what happens with Bitcoin.
call the economists! a currency needs a government! But only from 1971 onwards, before that people didn't have currencies! Oh, you don't want to use the US dollar? the best currency ever!? I guess we'll have to bomb your country and neighboring ones to change your mind.
> to manage its stability
aka lose 2-4% of purchasing power per year. Thank you central bank! you saved us!
> Otherwise, we'll see wide fluctuations in value like what happens with Bitcoin
Oh no! The horror! A currency that can also go up!!! I guess we need a central bank for oil! to keep the price of oil stable! And food too!
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