lightning + ecash makes monero obsolete.

run your own mint and use it for small acounts. instant and with maximum privacy. interoperable with lightning. i guess you never tried that

ofc i have. no you don‘t have to run your own mint. You can also use existing mints. swap in for lightning pay with ecash. instant.

use whatever you want, i am ok with monero. its just 10x easier switching from sats to ecash without buying p2p or monero on a shady exchange.

bro they just don't know ecash bro, like... bro.

Sorry oversaw your answer. I did not question moneros usage in darknet markets, use whatever you want. but if you already hold bitcoin which is a way bigger amount of people you can go lightning->ecash if you need full privacy for specific txs. you can also use lightning with private channels for day to day usage. monero plays a niche role which is ok. but its not easy to on and off ramp from fiat to gain that privacy and because of that more and more people getting onboarded via bitcoin and can get access to privacy txs via ln (+ecash). In the long run this makes monero obsolete imho. will it be a niche? possibly yes. but not for mass privacy adoption.

Comparing to the broader world economy darknet market are an absolute niche. ~0.002 from global e commerce is a niche. Why should those markets switch to lightning or ecash right now? monero is older and works darknet markets obviously well enough. bitcoin lightning not aming for darknet, its object is to dominate/penetrate global markets.

If you call a worldwide transaction volume of 0.002 percent not obsolete than ok. I doubt monero will ever go beyond dark markets and some specific shops. As of right now monero users are willing to spend there coins because of privacy functions or because they don’t believe in worldwide adoption is unknown. Lightning Volume exploded in 2025, you can ask any noderunner on nostr. Just because some shops have a higher monero volume doesn’t count the lightning volume for all the other txs. At one point blinded paths for lightning gonna be implemented which increases the privacy even more.

No it didn’t explode with nostr. It exploded with privacy swapping and the implementation of lightning into a shitload of square pos terminals. A gazillion more point of sales than all those monero shops.

I can tell you that since they implemented it the volume on my routing node increased drastically. Why is the comparison unfair. Way more people holding bitcoin than monero and they gonna switch to lightning (with privacy features like ecash on top) than going to swap to monero to pay goods on the darknet.

Agree, it is speculative. We are gonna see. Enjoyed the talk anyway! Always good to have different opinions talking about possible outcomes in the future without insulting each other ✌️

😂👌