That said, I do think it's got the brightest future of any coin besides BTC for the very reason.
Are there scaling issues with Monero, similar/worse than BTC?
Technology quality is uncorrelated with market cap. This would be like saying Frontier Airlines should have a higher market cap than United because one uses Linux and the other is still on mainframes..
* node resources scale with the size of the UTXO set (unspent outputs), which in Monero's case balloons to the entire TXO set (all outputs, orders of magnitude larger)
* a typical 2-input 2-output transaction is 4 times larger
* wallets have to track all outputs to choose random decoys for transaction inputs
One can argue that this is the price to pay for significantly better privacy, but the largest benefits come from having no visible amounts or addresses, which can be achieved with significantly better scalability than BTC [1].
[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart/8114
Everything considered, I don't think that the risk of a monero inflation bug is greater than a bitcoin inflation bug when you consider the complexity associated with scripting.
MWEB is certainly an improvement over transparent transactions (and other methods such as coinjoin, coinswap, cashfusion, etc.), and I welcome the litecoin upgrade. I agree that decoy-based privacy is weak.
However, I don't believe that the mimblewimble meets the standard of privacy needed for most users. It's not the visible amounts and addresses, but the links between transactions that are the main problem. CTs on their own are just a "nice-to-have".
The end goal should be a zcash or firo style of privacy. I think you can scale that to a global network with an adjustable block size, payment channels, and atomic swaps between multiple cryptocurrencies. The problem is that zcash and firo have weak tokenomics compared to monero. Grin will have a hard time finding an initial niche that isn't currently satisfied by monero, and if it does take off, its changes could be merged into bitcoin (https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/imex/).
A constant rate of printing means the supply is uncapped but the inflation rate will approach zero.
Monero's choice is arguably better for actual use as a currency, as the printing will prevent deflation from lost coins. But it makes it less attractive as an investment.
For me that's a feature not a bug. The investor cryptobros have thoroughly killed the interest in BTC as a real payment method and made it just a vaporware pyramid scheme. They have accumulated a lot of influence.
Also they corrupted the whole idea behind bitcoin which was independence from the old centralised banking system where others control your money. To guarantee their investments they've rebuilt the whole old system in bitcoin with the exchanges and some regulators even demanding you use them to store your BTC.
The only way to get BTC-like guarantees of no double-spending for Lightning network transactions is to put every transaction on the BTC block chain ("close the channel" after every transaction). And then, of course, you get back all of the problems of BTC (minuscule TPS not enough for a small village, 0 privacy, huge energy costs).
(And sorry for going against the guidelines and talking about downvotes, but I'm really just asking for someone to either confirm what they said is right or explain why it isn't, I'm not caring about the votes themselves.)
if the chain swaps a month from now and drops my bbq purchase, the bbq shop isnt getting their bbq back, even though i get my BTC back on the new chain. the ethereum fork for ethereum classic also doubled everyone's wallets, which i'd consider to be a double spend
The double spend protection is quite limited, so whats the big loss from lightning?
So, assuming the BBQ supplier waited about an hour for confirmation, the chance that the money would be lost is minuscule with BTC transactions. With Lightning transactions, the same is not true at all - the customer could close their channel abruptly two months later when the BBQ joint is on vacation, and the money would suddenly vanish forever (assuming they don't catch the fraud in the time window before it becomes permanent).
Of course, in both cases, if you're the person who sent the money and the BBQ never arrived, you're out of luck entirely. Which is why the claim that BTC or Lightning enable trustless monetary transactions is mostly bogus, even with a no-double-spend guarantee. And waiting one hour for a payment to a BBQ joint to clear is basically unworkable (and the reality is more like two hours - one hour for the transaction to make it to be mined, and the other hour to confirm the block where it was included remains permanent).
While there are scaling issues with BTC it's severely worsened by the fact that BTC had refused to scale on-chain.
Monero is technically much harder to scale but since it doesn't have the same self-imposed restriction it can handle more transactions than Bitcoin can.
Consider that a lot of Bitcoin is assumed to be locked up.
If an old satoshi wallet started moving funds, the price would probably halve.
Brightest future in terms of what? Traction? Market cap? This is what I thought 7 years ago, and I beefed up my XMR position as a result. Meanwhile, Bitcoin an objectively inferior technology, has 25x since then.