as I understand it, the maxi thesis is "for supply audibility purposes, transaction amounts on a blockchain cannot be hidden. they must be transparent." I think for Bitcoin, which is the first to mover in a new technology space, this is necessary. it is so different and understanding it is so challenging that nobody would ever use it if amounts were not transparent. but. I reject that thesis as axiomatic. as technology ages and we begin to understand it better, the attack surface becomes better known. A blockchain is not a complicated data structure. people will trust MORE and DIFFERENT cryptographic primitives then Bitcoin has implemented as time goes on. this includes cryptographic primitives that verify supply. fun fact, both Monero and Bitcoin have had inflation bugs. monero's was detected (a "hidden" bug) and provably not exploited. Bitcoin fixed the bug and reorged out the chain with the created coins. On Bitcoin, how do you trust the cryptographic primitives that create a wallet and the addresses to be unique and guarantee that only you can spend your coins? how do you trust that when you send a transaction it is properly assigned to the destination? probably you know a little bit about the general theory and you trust the community to do the rest. after all it's mathematics. if there was an implementation flaw, the community would fix it and recover. it isn't any different with Monero vis a vis supply. The attack surface is finite and, if the implementation is correct, the supply is guaranteed by mathematics. now, maybe we don't trust the community to correctly implement it. maybe we don't trust that it's been an existence for long enough to be battle tested. these are reasonable objections. but I'm not seeing these reasonable objections. and simply saying " a blockchain should ONLY have transparent amounts because we can never trust the supply" is only a luddite view. the problems we will encounter and the errors we will make are finite and knowable things. #bitcoin #monero