I’d call this a software dev perspective, but given we’re talking about a financial network, I don’t think it’s everything worth considering. A critical part of what makes financial networks resilient is ongoing activity in that network that is generally considered to have a legitimate intent and purpose. If we could establish that the privacy guaranteed by XMR would meaningfully improve the majority of legitimate network activity for current BTC participants in some way, then logically XMR would take dominance away from BTC over time, its sum purpose would be “justified” and it would therefore be resilient.
That doesn’t appear to be the case though. What appears to be the case is that there is not actually a meaningful difference between the obfuscation of funds via a “public” wallet address and the privacy guaranteed by XMR, at least for the majority of participants and the purpose of their activities.
I think what this comes down to is starting from a view with reference to the level of privacy enjoyed by using banks or TradFi. If you were to brainstorm all the different reasons why you would practicably need a transaction to be private and ordered them in terms of the assurance needed though, I think you’d find that the lower priority reasons e.g. “I don’t want person xyz to know how much money I have” is assured by BTC’s native obfuscation in a way that is fully consistent with that level of priority. And the higher priority reasons e.g. “I don’t want the government to be able to seize my assets” don’t really depend on whether BTC transactions are public at all. My read is that the main “gap” where XMR provides users a real advantage is limited to fulfilling purposes where the privacy it guarantees is essential, which is sure to overlap significantly with purposes that are persecuted by non-participants.
In this way I think BTC actually handles the matter of privacy in a more sustainable and practical way than XMR does - the public nature of transactions itself mitigates potential for attack. i.e. that in a vacuum, the potential for reduced resiliency as a direct result of privacy is likely to be the bigger “design flaw”.
I’d call this a software dev perspective, but given we’re talking about a financial network, I don’t think it’s everything worth considering. A critical part of what makes financial networks resilient is ongoing activity in that network that is generally considered to have a legitimate intent and purpose. If we could establish that the privacy guaranteed by XMR would meaningfully improve the majority of legitimate network activity for current BTC participants in some way, then logically XMR would take dominance away from BTC over time, its sum purpose would be “justified” and it would therefore be resilient.
That doesn’t appear to be the case though. What appears to be the case is that there is not actually a meaningful difference between the obfuscation of funds via a “public” wallet address and the privacy guaranteed by XMR, at least for the majority of participants and the purpose of their activities.
I think what this comes down to is starting from a view with reference to the level of privacy enjoyed by using banks or TradFi. If you were to brainstorm all the different reasons why you would practicably need a transaction to be private and ordered them in terms of the assurance needed though, I think you’d find that the lower priority reasons e.g. “I don’t want person xyz to know how much money I have” is assured by BTC’s native obfuscation in a way that is fully consistent with that level of priority. And the higher priority reasons e.g. “I don’t want the government to be able to seize my assets” don’t really depend on whether BTC transactions are public at all. My read is that the main “gap” where XMR provides users a real advantage is limited to fulfilling purposes where the privacy it guarantees is essential, which is sure to overlap significantly with purposes that are persecuted by non-participants.
In this way I think BTC actually handles the matter of privacy in a more sustainable and practical way than XMR does - the public nature of transactions itself mitigates potential for attack. i.e. that in a vacuum, the potential for reduced resiliency as a direct result of privacy is likely to be the bigger “design flaw”.