Early day Bitcoiners took on more risk because it was FUDed by media, used primarily by criminals, and hard to acquire. Monero doesn't have privacy guarantees? That's news to me, when I read the documentation it cited that it offers sender and recieved privacy through RingCTs (Hides transaction amount), Steath Addresses (Hides the recieved, this is a feature of Bitcoin too in some wallets), and Ring Signatures (basically a 16 UTXO coin join in each transaction) for sender privacy. It also said that it offers network level privacy through Dandelion++ which obfuscates the transaction origin node. This feature has been proposed for Bitcoin but never was adopted unfortunately.