Why I'm Switching From BCH to Monero

I first got into Bitcoin in late 2016, back when transactions were cheap and the community was united. One day I made a resolution to use Bitcoin as money, bought a Bitpay card with Bitcoin, and there was a transaction fee so large it ate my entire payment and I got no card. This started my journey into looking into alternatives. I tried other coins like Ethereum and BCH (Bitcoin Cash), and eventually decided to go with the latter. I tried many different cryptocurrencies but BCH is the one I kept coming back to, as being most aligned with my values and principles. Price-wise this did me little favor though.

After three plus years of seeing the fork play out, I can say with confidence I have zero interest in ever participating with BTC, but I'm not so satisfied with BCH either. I like BCH but I don't feel the same energy as what I did in the early days, and the increase of crypto competition, branding wars, and the corruption of the crypto scene is probably why.

After much research and critical thinking however, I think I've come to the conclusion that its actually Monero that most aligns with my values and principles, and why it may actually have the best chance at being a legitimate peer to peer cash system for planet Earth. My case here isn't to trash or disown BCH, but state my preference for Monero above it. I would say BCH is my second choice, in the same way I formerly would have said Monero would be my second choice. I will list my reasons in greatest importance to least.

### Reason #1: The Privacy Is Not Comparable

Back before I had actually used Cashfusion for myself, I assumed BCH "solved" privacy using Cashfusion, and Monero was simply made obselete by it. What I didn't understand was, well, a lot. Theres actually a list of things that make cashfusion inferior, and not just inferior, but unsuitable for all the same privacy usecases.

1) Cashfusion partially runs on a central server (still non-custodial), as is standard for many third-party coinmixing protocols: Many people do not realize this. But the ability for Cashfusion to scale with its current liquidity is dependent on some arbitrary person's server. And there have already been examples of small bugs in the server that passes down to those implementing it, which can disrupt usage. This is also a single point of failure that could be attacked by entities such as a government. Monero privacy is fundamentally better in this area because the privacy is managed by the blockchain itself, which has no single point of failure.

2) Cashfusion can be slow and unreliable: This kind of thing varies greatly on liquidity and whose fusing, and can vary between a successful mix in minutes to waiting hours to days with or without a successful mix. My first experience cashfusioning actually resulted in failure; I let it run all day and nothing was fused. Turns out I had too many coins, and that prevented a successful fuse. Rather than break my coins up and spend a lot of time getting everything mixed once, I just gave up. This is another area where Monero's privacy shines: Mixes are fast and reliable, it doesnt matter how many coins you have, and it requires no extra effort from the end-user.

3) The scope of Cashfusion's privacy is one-time, rather than every-time: If the purpose of the privacy is just to break a link between your wallet and a KYC checkpoint, then Cashfusion might be good enough for your usecase. However if you fail to use good OPSEC or you buy from merchants who want to track you or sell your data, then they can perform chain analysis on your future transactions and possibly deanonymize you. If you for example buy from a merchant who knows or can guess your identity, who may see your face on camera in the store, or who may require metadata when you make a purchase (a name, email address, home address, etc...), then they can deanonymize you, sell your data, and your future transactions can be tracked. The only way to prevent this is to mix your coins every time you send or receive them, which is usually thought of as unduly burdensome. Monero has the clear advantage in this area as well, because every act sending or receiving is anonymous and distinct from one another.

With these reasons combined, I simply cannot recommend Cashfusion or any coinmixing protocol as a solution to privacy, except as an obfuscation technique for skilled and professional users, and not the end-user.

### Reason #2: The Automatic Blocksize Limit Is A Necessity

The whole reason Bitcoin Cash broke off Bitcoin was because of the arbitrary blocksize limit, which the developer community decided not to raise. Yet the Bitcoin Cash resolution wasn't to get rid of it, it was just to raise it a little bit. Many in the BCH community called the blocksize limit an example of central planning, yet BCH has a static blocksize limit. The problem with this is theres no way to fundamentally prevent the community from deciding not to raise it again, because raising it requires consensus, which requires positive action and expenditure of energy.

Its easy to imagine a situation where BCH might not raise the blocksize limit again. After seeing BSV take it to the extreme quickly, as an effort to differentiate and disassociate themselves from BSV, many in BCH decided to think of themselves more as "medium blockers" rather than "large blockers" and may even support a decision to suppress blocksizes at some point if it was thought that things are scaling too fast or if its hurting nodes too much. Former rhetoric on removing the blocksize limit entirely or replacing it with some kind of automatic limit has also quieted since then. And if agreement is not met on blocksize, history may repeat where theres a contentious fork over it.

Regardless, I simply do not think it should be the role of developers to make economic central planning decisions on the blockchain. The economic properties of a blockchain should be stable, and its management should be autonomous and decentralized. Economic policy, which is to say, changes to the economic properties of a blockchain, brings corruption, contention, and centralization. Relying on the promise of developers to raise the limit, or on the prowess of loud redditors complaining about it, is a strategy thats already failed once.

Monero fixes these problems by having an automatic blocksize limit. It gives us the best of both worlds, by preventing "spam" (or unnatural spikes in usage), without putting a potentially permanent upper limit on onchain capacity, which would threaten the chain. Monero achieves this, in part thanks to its tail emission, where miners are docked some reward if they increase the blocksize, incentivizing them not to unless transaction volume is sustained.

I see the automatic blocksize limit as absolutely necessary, and honestly I was tired of waiting for it in BCH. Decentralization is important, and this is maintained by developers not centrally planning economics onchain and by keeping the blocksize at an appropriate level where transactions are not pushed to custodial/L2 solutions and spikes in usage don't exclude access to the smaller nodes who haven't had time to upgrade.

### Reason #3: Mining Is Decentralized On Monero, And This Gives Us The Economic Properties Of Early-Day Bitcoin

I see two things going in the way of decentralized mining on Monero. This would be 1) The Asic-Resistant hashing algorithm Random-X which decentralizes hardware, and the more recent utilization of 2) P2Pool which can help with pool distribution (I heard that its technical redesign was very recent and Monero is already at 3% adoption).

BCH as a coin is still run by Asics and big miners, probably because the perception is that if they change that then they lose bitcoinness. Also another argument I see is that Asics are more efficient for scaling, due to the effect on centralizing nodes. Personally id rather not accept a small scaling tradeoff that accepts blatant centralization, and also not accept a small branding tradeoff for it either.

I would argue adoption of P2Pool is being made easier by the Asic-Resistant algorithm, because more enthusiasts will be able to fire

it up when they are able to mine in general and dont need to buy expensive Asics to do it. Barrier to entry is a centralizing factor, and it also consolidates to a finer point of failure.

Decentralization of mining is important, because mining is at the center of governance and more decentralization actually means more security. Its also important not to use the same hashing algorithm as a coin bigger than you, which BCH is pretty much doing, and this is a security risk.

### Reason #4: Monero Is Winning Black Market Adoption And Anarchist Mindshare

In terms of adoption, Monero dominates the deep web underground and is displacing BTC as the go-to black market currency. I thought BCH would take a slice of this pie with the advent and eventual adoption of Cashfusion, but as far as I know, it's never really happened. This is probably because Monero remains the option which is both easier and has stronger privacy, and with the power of network effects it may be very hard to replace it.

Anarchist minds still seem to rely primarily on Monero for their acts of rebellion, and of polls I've run they all largely still prefer Monero. If discussion of BTC or BCH is brought up, it usually devolves into price for the former, and branding wars for the latter.

Being a tool for free markets was the whole original purpose of cryptocurrency, so seeing the role get taken by Monero suggests to me this is where most of the grassroots energy and press for change resides.

If I have to choose between darknet and clearnet adoption, but it would be the same number of merchants either way, I'd choose the darknet ones, because those tend to underpin strong usecases with strong demand, which means they are economically more valuable. You've got to be able to do both, and its easier to convince a clearnet merchant to use a private coin than to convince a darknet merchant to use a not-very-private coin.

### Reason #5: Branding, Community Relations, Track Record, Price History, And More

This one will probably seem like the most superficial of all the reasons I give, which is why Im listing it last. And this is multifaceted, so bear with me.

1) Branding: "Bitcoin Cash" is a terrible name. It rings with many enthusiasts, but when another person hears it, it confuses them because Bitcoin is in the name. And then many enthusiasts claim it's the "real" Bitcoin. Im not saying that its not, but this does confuse people, and it loses them too. Trying to argue with yourself/the other person or explain a bunch of history to someone, *just* to explain the name, is just a pointless level of effort. And then this causes a lot more effort to be spent in bickering with others.

Monero's branding is straightforward. Its a single word, it saves us a syllable, it doesnt sound like another cryptocurrency or related topic, but it is a play on the word "money" which makes it a name that sticks with people. And its a pretty appropriate name too.

2) Community Relations: Its hard to deny this one needs some work. BTC, litecoin, forks like BSV and XEC, and just scores of other coins have badly burnt bridges with BCH. Ethereum is a more recent one too, arguably. What causes this, though? People feel negative about BCH, probably because their communities have good relations with BTC. BCH constantly attacking BTC may be the reason why others feel affronted by BCH. It might also be the overly antagonistic atttitude a lot of BCHers have too, just due to the constant fighting.

Contrast this with Monero. How many people will shill you their favorite coin, and then say Monero is also good? Or how many people say Monero is their second-favorite coin, or their favorite privacy coin? Its a lot of people. The reason for this is probably because Monero provides a useful service to all these other communities: Strong privacy; And because Monero isn't in the same state of constant fighting and trying to fight BTC in particular. People in Monero do poke fun at BTC and other coins, but theres a difference between stating the fact that BTC lacks privacy (which lots of people can and do accept), with fighting them for their entire name and legitimacy head-on.

3) Track Record: BCH has a bad track record with products being abandoned or being misleading. I really don't know why BCH in particular has such a bad problem with this. Maybe BCH is trying to do too many things at once, or maybe its a leadership thing, or a culture thing, I'm not sure. But let's go over some examples:

- The Memo Protocol: This one's fresh on my mind because i tried desperately to use it this entire last month. Memo.cash wouldn't let me post and wouldn't let others deposit, and the developer refused to help anyone figure out what's wrong, he simply denied that the problem exists. Memo also changed their key format, so i couldn't put my keys into Member, the other interface for Memo. I finally found my keys, and then one day after using Member i couldn't post there either, something about the UTXO server was corrupted and I couldnt fix it. Couldnt contact the developer, waited a week for it to be fixed, then i simply gave up. I would consider the Memo Protocol essentially abandoned, that's how its been treated.

- Bitcoin.com and Roger Ver: The Bitcoin.com wallet went closed source, and deprecated tons of features. Also tons of really awesome Bitcoin.com tools, were either abandoned or sold. Local.bitcoin.com was sold to a third party multicoin company, exchange.bitcoin.com sold, and dozens if not hundreds of other features, they just come and go. Roger Ver promised a 500m ecosystem fund, made it sound big and important, and years later he's barely a few percent of the way into doing anything with it, with no updates.

- SLP tokens: Im afraid this one is on its way out. With SmartBCH, not many want to use SLP anymore. Some of the best SLP minting and distributing tools also died with the Memo protocol. And not all wallets have adopted it either, i remember an occasion where i accidentally burned all my SLP coins by loading my seed into a wallet that doesnt support SLP.

Those who have been in BCH a long time know what I mean by things being abandoned in the long run. It seems like its a recurring problem.

4) Price History: I used to think this one was just a meme, but after the recent drop from $1500 to $280 i changed my mind. That was painful, and it all happened in the last few months. For the record, the price drop here was almost 2x as steep as what Monero and BTC dropped, just in the last few months. For some reason, BCH has a bad volatility problem.

BCH is one of the only coins with a price history that slides straight down at practically a 45° angle. BTC maxis make fun of BCH every other week for hitting new lows. Im not sure how this price is even possible, unless people are exiting BCH?

Monero is more attractive to me due to its greater stability, which is what ive seen so far.

## Possible Problems With Monero, And My Rationalization For Them

Nothing is perfect, so theres some things that may be lacking here. But some of these things also have an arguably good side.

### 1) No Op Return, No Tokens, Lacks Smart Contracts (On Base Layer)

Let me just start by saying that all three of these things have disappointed me. The Op Return doesnt have any useful data in it, tokens aren't tokenizing anything meaningful and long-term valuable, and smart contracts if used at all are just creating things to gamble with. Most of these applications have been diluting the value of the ecosystem with money pits.

Although, Monero doesnt fundamentally lack the ability to do these things, its just harder. Theres no op return, but its well known that you can encode data in the inputs of a transaction. Which means you could probably create something like an SLP token if you really wanted to (not that id think it would be valuable, I strongly think this should be done on a sidechain, where the usecase is sandboxed for safety, optimized, and doesn't bloat L1). As for smart contracts its limited on the base layer, but sidechains can expand on them. Sidechains are possible on Monero like BCH just usually more difficult to create AFAIK.

### 2) Regulatory Scrutiny, Exchange Delisting, Less Clearnet Adoption

Its a definite disadvantage how little Monero is adopted on exchanges. But this isn't a dealbreaker to me, because small exchanges that support it and decentralized swapping services still exist. At the end of the day, if government can kill crypto by banning it, then no crypto is fundamentally safe. For this reason i'm not going to worry about the government banning Monero, they ban everything.

But Monero also has less clearnet adoption than BCH. I don't think this is an unchangeable fact about the relationship between the two currencies though, as theres a lot of merchants yet to adopt either, and many would be willing to adopt multiple coins. BCH also kinda lives in its own bubble, as far more people as far as im aware accept BTC and possibly even ETH. I also cannot directly compare other coins like Dash, Litecoin, and Dogecoin, but these could very well all rival BCH. As important as I think clearnet adoption is, i think it comes second to darknet/anarchist adoption, and i think even that comes after being a sound protocol and money system. So I plan to just tolerate this fact for now.

### 3) Pending Balances

The way Monero works, as far as I understand, is your input is locked for 10 blocks (~20 minutes) after sending a transaction, which means you can't send a subsequent transaction from the same input and your balance might be reported to disappear on the UI side of your wallet. This is obviously a fairly large disadvantage to the usability of Monero, but it can be easily circumvented by spending coins to yourself to break it up, and I heard there was discussion of finding ways to alleviate this issue in the future. Monero is an evolving protocol, and I bet some better solution to this will eventually exist.

Another solution would be a L2 network that specializes in fast and secure transactions. The issue here would be making absolutely sure the L2 network is private too, otherwise its working towards one bad tradeoff for another.

This tradeoff exists on BCH too: Even if you could configure Cashfusion to mix your coins every send/receive (this is not implemented anywhere afaik and could be prohibitively slow and expensive), and even if liquidity is good, theres still going to be waiting times preventing you from sending transactions back to back using the same inputs.

It seems that privacy may be at odds with quick access to funds from the same inputs. But if you just break your coins up into multiple inputs with self-sends, or use multiple wallets/addresses, its a quick and easy way to avoid the problem. Even just having a couple backup wallets would do the trick.

Ultimately I think this is an issue that could be fixed with better UI. Don't tell a user their balance disappeared just because its getting confirmed on the blockchain, theres a 0% chance they wont have those coins. And maybe some automated self-spends could help, breaking funds into 50%, 25%, 10%, etc... chunks to start with could help with this problem, kind of like breaking a large bill into a variety of smaller change. Ultimately a small problem long-term in my view.

### 4) Less Prunable Than Bitcoin

As far as I know, less can be pruned on Monero than on Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. On Bitcoin you can get rid of most of the data (just not UTXOs i think, and thats a few percent of the size of the chain at most), but on Monero each node needs at least 1/8th of the chain. Either way, new nodes will need the non-pruned version in many circumstances such as during certain upgrades, so the non-pruned nodes need to exist somewhere.

Pruning is useful for saving data, but comes at the consequence that if you need to rescan the blockchain you'd need to download the full unpruned version of it again. Honestly it might make more sense to prune but store that data regardless somewhere, or just not prune at all and get bigger hard drives.

Monero's system of everyone having 1/8th of the chain helps prevent a disaster in case everyone prunes at once (if i understand this correctly) but like with everything else, its a tradeoff. Personally I think pruning is weird, because all of that data is important at some level, and i think it makes more sense to just have spam-protection and keep the chain as small as possible without sacrificing scaling, and to have strong hardware.

### 5) Single Development Team, Which I Believe Is Bad For Decentralization

Bitcoin Cash is well known for its multi-team development ecosystem and how it's so decentralized it even kicked out its lead implementation (Bitcoin ABC) when it went astray and tried to add taxes to the chain. Monero however only has one team, and thats the Core team.

The rationale I've heard for this is its highly risky, hard, and expensive to have multiple teams, and this is made worse on Monero with all the privacy and extra cryptographic technology. And because there's still plenty to do in its roadmap, the Monero community needs to be able to move fast and respond to deeply embedded vulnerabilities quickly, without stopping to collaborate.

Although for Monero, theres less to fight over than in Bitcoin Cash, in my honest opinion. For instance, the blocksize is automatic in Monero, while that's still centrally planned in BCH. And AFAIK Monero doesnt have a centrally planned dust limit like BCH. And there's lots of facets to the protocol constrained by the privacy architecture preventing spontaneous change. Monero is also not meant for smart contracts, so that is another thing the Monero community wont fight over, unlike in BCH where complex changes with strong tradeoffs are introduced and fought over all the time. A

lack of contention means less a core group could theoretically exert control over.

All in all, Id love to see multiple development teams on Monero, but its not something that I feel worried about, and I couldn't imagine what could possibly be fought over. Monero is a sound protocol, and as few aspects of it are as centrally planned as possible. I would say its privacy mechanisms are dynamic and changing, but its economic properties are locked into place. I genuinely think that BCH has more central planning going on in their adjustments to the protocol, and their multiple development teams is the only thing remotely offsetting that.

So I think we have a tradeoff here, which results in similar decentralization on both sides. Monero has a single team but doesn't centrally plan economic properties of the chain (at least post-RandomX), and BCH has multiple teams collaborating that will routinely engage in what I would call central planning. I would consider things like the blocksize limit, dust limit, all the other limits, etc... economic properties of the chain just as much as the distribution schedule, and I believe these things should be set in stone and not changed on a whim, but rather I think they should be designed right the first time then left alone.

I do want to see a second and/or third implementation on Monero though, its just not a pressing issue. I think more has been done to secure their decentralization however through the inclusion of RandomX and the recent uptick in P2Pool adoption, and this is an undeniable huge selling point of decentralization that sets Monero apart from Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

## Why I Feel Like I Should Switch To Monero

I've talked about my logical reasons in depth... But humans are emotional creatures, and feelings tend to play a larger role in decision-making than cold hard logic. So what feelings do I have that are driving me?

### My Recent Negative Feelings About Bitcoin Cash

Well the first thing that comes to mind, is the price action. BCH has been weirdly volatile, almost twice as volatile as Monero. And ive lost a lot of money holding it. After four years of existence, at some point its price should stop bleeding. But its still bleeding. I don't completely understand why, but honestly I'm getting to the point where I feel like its destroying its reputation. I took it as a contrarian indicator before, but recently I feel like its taken it too far. Im starting to wonder if people are leaving BCH en masse, or if money is being burnt being speculated on stuff like SmartBCH, or if the users and believers of BCH stopped holding and buying it and follow a "use only" or "spend and replace only" policy.

Which brings me to another problem. The recent uptick in people who are espousing a pure "spend and replace" policy, and demonize holding the currency. Without holders, the price will surely die. Saving and spending cannot and should not be divorced from each other. I tried spending BCH instead of fiat, and between conversion fees and the nasty price drops all i did was lose a stupid amount of money trying to do something good. I also hate feeling like a movement is grounded in altruism, like i need to spend and replace even if it means losing money, otherwise im part of the problem. I truly hate this idea, and i think people should be properly incentivized to use a product instead. Also most of BCHs avenues for spend and replace involve KYC, and its hard to be excited about decentralized money if im constantly using centralized intermediaries.

Then theres my recent experience in neither Memo nor Member working, and being slow as hell regardless. I was so excited for this idea, but for how bugged and abandoned it is, I basically have to force myself to conclude its a dead idea, and maybe using the op return for this isn't a good idea. This got me down a path of wondering whether any usecase on the Op Return *ever* is a good idea, and the only other good usecase I can think of is SLP tokens, which seem mostly abandoned and being replaced by SmartBCH tokens.

Theres also i feel like a lot of degeneracy in the community. Not in the political sense, but in the Etherean/NFT-bro sense. Everything from the BCH community embracing a blatant ponzi scheme (Satoshi Pyramid) to NFT collections, to copying and pasting Ethereum smart contract code to make copycat gambling apps, to the new influx of moonboi amateurs shilling SmartBCH and generating noise... Ive yet to see something truly innovative come from SmartBCH. So far all ive seen is run of the mill gambling garbage that's eating peoples mindshare and diluting signal. And theres not enough leaders speaking out against it. Im seeing everyone buy lazy NFTs and perform degen yield farming on copycat dexes. Roger Ver, who I'd think of as the glue that helps hold the community together, is also mostly absent.

Im also concerned about possible lies proliferating in the BCH space. For instance it was said that the evil Core devs added Replace-By-Fee as a way to undermine Bitcoin, but it was demonstrated to me that this was originally added by Satoshi in the early days, and simply deactivated to address some technical problems it had. Lies like this are pretty big in my view, it gets people like me angry about things that doesn't necessarily make sense to be angry about. And its a similar story for Segwit, which is so heavily demonized, but i dont actually see where the objective harm is after doing my own research, and parts of Segwit were ported to BCH. They also said Segwit removes digital signatures and that could cause consensus problems, but in reality they were just moved. Also, another big lie was that Gavin was somehow forcibly removed from Bitcoin Core in some massive conspiracy, when I see no evidence for that, and evidence seems to suggest he simply became inactive and the rest of the community moved on to Github without him, and he pretty much passively removed himself from his role. I don't like this half-truthy hyperbolic nonsense, I like cold hard facts. And BCH and some of its big proponents have disappointed me here.

All in all, every day I feel like BCH drifts farther and farther away from being a successful p2p cash system that is adopted. I want it to work but adoption rates are negligible. St Kitts is interesting but honestly it feels like a PR campaign spearheaded by Roger, probably in reaction to El Salvador. That doesn't necessarily make it any less real, but being a reactionary measure doesn't bode well for the health of the grassroots energy in the community and its leadership, in my view. A lot of adoption can occur if you have a billionaire working his money magic on a concentrated area. But will the adoption last? This is unknown to me. I don't want to see an Island Roger paid off (or whatever he did) to adopt BCH, i want to see people who need BCH naturally want to adopt it and do it autonomously. No offense to Roger, and I wish there were more people like him.

### My Recent Positive Feelings About Monero

The last time I took a serious look into Monero years ago, i dont think it had any good mobile wallets. I tried to sync my own node to have a wallet and failed miserably. Since then, it seems its infrastructure has been really built out, polished, and I'm seeing cutting edge tech being released all the time. And its got three really awesome mobile wallets for Android. Im also seeing Monero more strongly cement itself in the mindshare of privacy enthusiasts, and I'm starting to really see its resilience to chainanalysis surveillance technology. I didn't understand before that coinmixing was such a weak privacy measure, and relied on the end user using it repeatedly or massively control their spending habits to use it in a way thats actually private. I also didnt realize coinmixers were pretty much completely centralized.

The argument that people deserve privacy by default is starting to make more sense to me. After seeing myself give up aftet trying to use cashfusion and failing, I thought "geeze, if me, a nerd and hobbyist programmer doesnt want to deal with this crap, then no normie will either, and Bitcoin is just going to be a massively surveiled nightmare". And seeing the ramping up of surveillance and totalitarianism is starting to alert me as well. Also fears of Monero being banned and brought harm in this way is starting to dissipate now that I see statist's primary hatred of crypto is the POW and its environmental externalities, as well as the ignorant feeling its scary in abstract, rather than fundamentally hating privacy in particular. I want to see every normie on Earth fully anonymous, using a digital cash as private as physical cash, otherwise the totalitarians will take advantage of this and the future will be very dark.

My vexation about perceived central planning on BCH seems solved with Monero's automatic blocksize approach. I thought BCH could just add an automatic blocksize, but i didnt understand how critical of a role the tail emission played. I also used to be scared of the tail emission, but after thinking about it, not having a tail emission could be a supply problem. You can't just use smaller and smaller units of money forever in a system with a fixed decimal place, youd have to fork the system to support smaller units which could be extremely complex or issue problems, more than one might naively think. Or perform a redenomination, which could be economically disasterous. A tail emission combined with natural deflation will result in a supply equilibrium (lots of deflation will probably happen first) that ensures the money system will be viable in its current form long-term. Why be greedy about the scarcity? Monero is already twice as deflationary as gold and it has linear inflation so it will tend to 0% (until theres natural equilibrium). Plus we shouldn't want to gamble on security, if tx volumes are too low or too erattic this could make Bitcoin insecure or have wildly swinging block times.

Im also starting to like the Monero story more than Bitcoin's. Bitcoin feels like something that started good and ended in tragedy and failure, while Monero was the literal opposite, forking off essentially a scam, the founder both equally respected and infamous, then the community took over and made something amazing out of it, which has only gotten better and better, rather than devolving. I really like the strong grassroots energy in Monero, and to me it feels even stronger than what I've felt in BCH.

When I sit back, and imagine myself trying to convince people to adopt crypto, I feel so cringey tryjng to sell them on BCH and get

them entangled in the history and drama, or telling them "it just works" like no sh** sherlock every crypto does, versus trying to sell them on Monero, which honestly has so many better talking points and is just a so much stronger and less confusing brand. I could tell them Monero is private, decentralized, and secure digital cash, i can tell them no other crypto is private like monero, i can tell them its the defacto crypto standard of people p2p trading goods and services with each other (outside of Bitcoin), and I can tell them its what's most cherished by the liberty community, if they are liberty minded. I can also tell them "it just works" if i want to, all the same, because normal 0-conf exists on it and its cheap. The best part is there's no chance I have to tell someone some mentally and emotionally taxing history lesson.

Finally, I'd honestly rather see the world adopt Monero than BCH. Ive always doubted this as a serious possibility, but anything is possible if enough time and effort is intelligently invested. And id much rather see a world of mandatory privacy on a stable blockchain than a world of mandatory transparency on a shifty blockchain with weaker security and decentralization. Monero is more defiant to Government and tyranny than Bitcoin Cash.

## Closing Thoughts

Again, this article is not meant to attack BCH. I have made arguments both for and against both BCH and Monero in this article. Rather, its me expressing my raw thoughts, feelings, and stating my new preference for Monero over BCH. BCH would be my second favorite blockchain, in the same way many in BCH view Monero as their second favorite.

I think Monero is the only soldier in the crypto-fiat war packing enough heat to actually win. All the other cryptos are basically running down the street naked, while Monero is a stealth machine working strategically in the shadows. Isn't it ironic how many people from every crypto circle will call Monero their "second favorite coin" or "a very respectable one" and don't really feel that way about anything else in particular? I think this is because people partially realize the importance of the privacy and other features, but maybe do not fully realize it, or are prioritizing something else like Smart Contracts above it.

Monero provides a sound digital cash layer, which is scalable, secure, and designed intelligently with pragmatic and strategic considerations in mind, and any of these overhyped technologies like "Smart Contracts" (which have known scaling problems and detriments) can be built on top using sidechains, which Monero is working towards having sidechains, just no EVM on the horizon yet. And Monero is also making its sidechains private too, and exposing other chains false and misleading claims to privacy. I could see a future of sidechains playing a huge role on both Monero and Bitcoin Cash.

I want sound, digital cash, because I care about freedom. Objectively speaking, Monero seems to be the strongest in this area. I still have emotional ties to Bitcoin Cash and feeling like we can make the Bitcoin experiment work, but I know deep down emotion must be shunned and a perspective that takes reality for how it really is, is necessary.

There is no aspect of crypto I *don't* care about, and I do want a cryptocurrency that can do everything. This is why Ive been so involved with BCH, because its basically like a Jack-of-All-Trades. But Monero is not excluded from any usecase so much as certain ones, which are far less important, are marginally harder to build and nobody's done it because they just aren't necessary or they get lured into the cryptos that make them easy. Monero being a fairly focused community seems to me to be a positive thing, and being a sound digital cash layer with no extra bloat could be a positive thing in the long run too. This is why I'm far more excited about sidechains.

TLDR: Coinmixers are centralized and not useful for persistent privacy but Monero is perfect for this, the automatic blocksize is necessary, monero mining is the most decentralized, monero has become the staple crypto of privacy enthusiasts and anarchists, the brand is stronger, and lately ive felt like infrastructure and grassroots energy on Monero is getting better while the opposite is mostly true for BCH. Also, for some reason Monero seems to have a much more stable price, and im not sure why. Finally, I think practically mandatory privacy will do more good in the world than practically mandatory transparency, and with the expansion of the surveillance state this is becoming increasingly obviously necessary.