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10 sats \ 3 replies \ @yo2xncv0 21 Mar freebie \ parent \ on: Why aren't ecash solutions such as cashu being developed on top of monero? ecash
Yes, I agree Monero is fundamentally more unscalable than Bitcoin. I understand, but allow me to push back a bit and see what you think...
The claim that Monero is not technically sustainable rests on many assumptions:
-Monero will quickly grow many orders of magnitude in a short time
-General consumer tech will not continue to advance
-No more efficiency gains
-Complete protocol upgrades won't happen
-Every user has to be able to run a node or it's not decentralized. For a crypto to be sufficiently decentralized enough to avoid capture 1 node definitely isn't enough, but every single person is overkill. Diminishing returns are a real thing. Bitcoin had less nodes 5-10 years ago. I'm sure you would agree Bitcoin was decentralized enough back then. Bitcoin will have more nodes in the future. Is it not decentralized right now?
One can easily run a pruned Monero node at a fraction of the size, although technically it is closer to "sharding", so you are right I shouldn't call it pruning.
You assume Monero needs to handle such flows right now. But that is a hypothetical that is unlikely and will probably never happen. In the end Bitcoin would also break in a hypothetical scenario of overnight adoption. I don't think any serious Bitcoiners would claim that Bitcoin scales as it is right now. Lightning doesn't even scale.
Monero is handling a nice chunk of Bitcoin flow today (33%-40% daily tx count) and works fine
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-xmr.html#3y
That is interesting, it has really taken off in tx count this year. Maybe it doesn't need such flows right now.
I think my concern with opaque blockchains in general is that some bug will either:
a) make it much easier to map tx graph [thus challenging the users threat model, which maybe well considered in a transparent blockchain]. or
b) allow invisible inflation
several nasty bugs over the years have caused some problems with exchanges. can we be sure there were no undetected events?
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a) Is it realistically possible to map the tx graph on Monero if receivers are not visible? (unless you are using Monero on exchanges or have the private keys to a wallet) Every hop makes it exponentially more difficult to find a sender. After only one hop away from the original transaction there is less than one percent chance of guessing sender correctly (~0.4%), two hops (~0.02%) etc. (not even considering you could be chosen as a decoy for someone else too) But if this worries you I'm not sure why you would use Bitcoin as mapping a tx graph is 100x easier to do.
Also, if this is still your concern, Seraphis upgrade will bring FCMPs (Full chain membership proofs) that are replacing ring sigs. They are being worked on already. Every transaction will eventually be a potential member of every transaction that has ever occurred with FCMPs.
b) Fair concern, but Monero cryptographic commitments are based on relatively old tech from the 80s. Pretty well established and tested so invisible inflation is in realm of possibility but unlikely. If it still concerns someone you can just sidestep this by only treating Monero as a checkings account (having a small pool for transacting) and using Bitcoin to save until Bitcoin has better privacy tech (if ever?)
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A) I look forward to seeing newer tx encodings that increase the anonymity set for spends. Thank you for the reference as I have not been following.
B) actually happened, was exploited in Bytecoin. Patched in XMR.
Newer encodings like A) introduce risk of B).
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