A Monero mobile wallet has to do work proportional to the size of the blockchain (starting at the moment the wallet was created). The amount of a Bitcoin wallet's work doesn't depend on the size of the chain.
That and the inevitable dilemma of increasing either fees or the chain size means something like LN is necessary. Sethforprivacy sees it too.
If all Monero fans were more like Seth I would be a lot more optimistic for Monero's future. But I'm afraid that there's a deep-settled irrational anti-LNism in the community.
That’s actually a fair point
There are some deep-seated and irrational reactions on both sides but we try to ignore the irrational and pay attention to rational criticisms as both are awesome in their own way 🙃
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This one is indeed a valid criticism and any user will face these problems once they play a bit with it. I think Monero has its place and offers some important things that Bitcoin lacks, but no project is perfect and Monero has a lot of room for improvement.
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Agreed. any project that stays humble and open minded will always provide value. 🙃
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Looks like Feather Wallet will develop a "skip sync" feature. This is useful if you know you haven't received any TXs since the last time you opened the wallet (e.g. you didn't buy any Monero recently): https://ccs.getmonero.org/proposals/tobtoht-feather-dev-2022-1.html If this is successful, maybe it could be ported to mobile wallets (Feather Wallet is open source). If you receive TXs regularly (e.g. online store or donations) you would still need to fully sync, but upcoming "view tags" will make this faster.
Sync times is a trade-off for strong cryptographic on-chain privacy, that hides senders, recipients, amounts, balances and TX history from third party observers (by default and for all transactions).
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Sync times is a trade-off for strong cryptographic on-chain privacy
Indeed, and that's why I'm excited for Fedimint's off-chain privacy.
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True 🙃
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Thanks for the kind words :)
You're right on about sync requirements, this is an unfortunate trade-off to gaining perfect address-based privacy in Monero via stealth addresses.
It can be mitigated by running a lightwallet server like monero-lws and connecting with a wallet that supports it, allowing you to retain privacy while negating all sync drawbacks. I'm currently testing this out and it's very promising, and is very easy to use for anyone who already runs a Monero node.
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Oh! Hello Seth :)
I've listened to your Fedimint episode. Do you think Monero-enabled mints could take off?
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Hey :)
The biggest issue facing Monero-enabled FediMints is the exchange rate differences, as the "MSP" (Monero Service Provider, in place of LSP) has to be willing to take on exchange rate differences between Bitcoin and Monero.
On the "Monero-only" side, thankfully we don't need any of the "easy Lightning" or "strong privacy" offered by FediMints natively, so I only really see Monero being applicable in the MSP sense for Bitcoin-based FediMints in the future.
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