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No we don't, the ability to have and hold value without monitoring is an inalienable right afa I'm concerned and i think everyone should hold that belief.
I agree. In addition privacy and anonymity are needed in order to ensure fungibility in crypto currencies, and fungibility is is a necessary requirement of money.
Then there is of course the adaptive blocksize in Monero which ensures that there is no arbitrary limit on the number of transactions per second.
People in this scene don't know how important and rare this is.
I think it takes quite a bit of study and "pondering" before someone really "gets it" about how XMR may, in fact, be the better bitcoin than bitcoin, or how it may be the so-called "Bitcoin 2.0" that everyone also always sort-of intuitively understands *might* need to evolve before a crypto-currency can really be successful.
Everyone always "just knows" that the first iteration of something is almost never the ultimate winner... Facebook rises on MySpace, Windows rises on Mac, VHS video rises on Betamax, etc etc. Everyone "knows" this is usually what happens, but most people seem to be fairly blind to see where and how it may be coming.
Even now, I can hardly comprehend the block-size stalemate MAY INDEED be a death-rattle for bitcoin. I can't believe that those people in charge of shepherding BTC into the future could *really* allow it to fail... but my eyes are not lying and it's over a YEAR longer than I ever IMAGINED the debate would be unresolved! So...? Have to imagine it might really be happening...
Yes of course they may still fix it, and maybe Monero will remain a niche experiment forever (albeit I think even then the value will rise quite a bit more yet).
But the idea that XMR's "different design" and all-original code-base fundamentally FIXES more than one serious design flaw that Satoshi overlooked in BITCOIN is more believable to me every day.
As is also the idea that when Satoshi said he was "leaving to pursue other things"... he may have been talking about CryptoNote... SN / NS = Satoshi Nakamoto, Nicholas van Saberhagen, etc etc. Wouldn't surprise me at all... and IF TRUE? Then buying XMR now might quite literally be "buying bitcoin again" at under $10 each...
The reason why I took an interest in Monero about a year ago was because of these fundamental principles such as ring signatures/CT, dynamic blocksizes, etc. This was to act as a
hedge against Bitcoin not being able to figure stuff out... And you're right, it looks like it's getting closer to the point where the Bitcoin devs just decide to keep everything the same because of "maximalist" ideas that there is no need to do such things.
If what I think is going to happen in terms of price speculation of BTC/cryptocurrencies in general to be correct, then there will be a crucial point of a tipping point where a wavering global economy will force investors to move all of their liquidity into assets such as gold and Bitcoin which will inflate the price of it... and when Bitcoin simply can't handle the transaction volume and be 2-3X more slow than it already is, I would assume people will start to freak out and try to get out of Bitcoin as soon as possible.
Just my two cents... I always slowly bought in Monero a little at a time, but now since it looks as if the Bitcoin community has decided to sit on their hands while certain BIP and maximalist fans shout obnoxiously at each other; it just looks like a sinking ship and I want to get on the escape boat and back on solid ground.
