The monero community is building a lot of infrastructure to build a circular economy, and there is a lot of recent developments in that regard, such as xmrbazaar which is a sort of ebay and the sellers accepts monero. This is great. However, how can we penetrate markets outside of the monero economy? I fear that Monero still has the “dangerous hacker crypto which funds terrorism and north korea” reputation, and although while not true, could severely pause monero adoption and hurt us as a community as a whole.
We as a community value privacy, but i feel like we need to work together as a community to forge an alternative to the mainstream narrative about privacy coins. I’m thinking something revolutionarily positive, at least in the USA, such as making a charity that gives directly to homeless people, or setting up a decentralized network of people that work together to distribute life saving drugs for cheap (because drug prices are really fricking high here). Privacy coins tend to attract privacy minded people, and privacy minded people won’t even touch twitter with a 10 foot pole because of all the injected ads and the tracking, and i respect that. But, one of these days we gotta do something big to break the mainstream narrative.
I personally am locked in, I have a girlfriend and two pets and a full time job, but for those that have less to lose and more time and resources to spare for the cause, i say let’s fking do it. Anything, man. Let’s change society with this thing.
You can’t just keep increasing the block size. More block size = bigger blocks = more bandwidth and disk space to host a full node. It’s why the majority of Eth’s nodes are now hosted in one of like three corporate datacenter providers. Sure, disks keep getting bigger and more affordable but big pipes to move that much data haven’t kept up at the same pace. Bitcoin cash is now 16x Bitcoin’s original block size, and they are still calling for larger blocks to keep tx costs low. Eventually, with any block size, especially if you want to capture a good portion of humanity’s transactions, you will end up with massive competition for blockspace aka high fees.
Blockchain has a fundamental problem. If you put it on the ledger, all nodes have to store that forever. The more you put on the ledger, the bigger that ledger gets, the more resources you need to host it/participate, the more centralized your network becomes. Adding more block space is one solution, but comes at the cost of decentralization and doesn’t scale to all of humanity’s transactions let alone even just replacing SWIFT/IBAN. L2s are another solution, you get faster transfers and fees not directly coupled to chain space in exchange for slightly less trustworthiness (you may have to send a channel “back to chain” if a bad actor tries something, and you have to monitor that channel and chain to see if you need to do that, which is all handled automatically). With Bitcoin’s L2, I can send funds anywhere in under a second for pennies in fees. It actually works for buying coffee. In the space 1 transaction took on chain, I can now have billions of transactions. Not just between me and the person I opened the channel with, but between me and any other person who has coins on lightning. And you can run a lightning node on a raspberry pi or android phone. Lightning isn’t perfect, the inbound liquidity thing is annoying (though Ark and Fedimint proposals solve this in different ways), but it works really well and has been stable and usable for years. The inbound liquidity issue is being worked on as well through automated liquidity provisioning. Not perfect, but leagues ahead of Monero which has zero L2 and zero roadmap for an L2.
Tldr: Monero’s fees are low because there isn’t much competition for blockspace. And it’s slow. Because it’s all on L1. That space will run out as it scales, it’s up to Monero to decide how to solve that problem.
We’ll get there when we get there. Adoption is gradual. We don’t expect to see Visa level transactions overnight. And as adoption increases steadily, we can increase the capacity and infrastructure of the base layer steadily. The only real reason why Bitcoin needed an L2 was because ya’ll shot yourselves in the foot with the 1mb blocksize.