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Earnest question for you, have you read "The Blocksize Wars" ?

I think the premise of your question is flawed. Bitcoin is not competing for apex MoE, it is establishing itself as the apex SoV. There are no solutions, only trade offs.

I haven’t, although I am familiar with that part of bitcoin’s history, and most of the nuance and complexity of that debate. I will read it.

Bitcoin has a larger hashrate, a larger network effect/larger adoption, a larger developer pool, and a functioning L2. Market cap doesn't matter, except that it also means more investment into infrastructure, more buy-in into the system, etc. These effects are multiplicative. And remember that Bitcoin can "absorb" innovations made in other chains, as it did with zero-knowledge proofs and other tech. The functional L2 is very very important as a P2P money protocol. You cannot scale L1 to contain all global transactions unless you make it hella centralized (blocksize debate) or build L2s and L3s. Monero has plans for an L2, but it's debatable if they actually have the development resources to pull it off. Lightning took years to get to where it is now. "Pros" cited by monero proponents: Variable Block Size This is another way to say "big blocks, when we need them". If monero actually becomes the global P2P currency, this will be "big blocks, all the time". It's antithetical to decentralization. The higher the block size, the greater hardware resources to run a node. You can run a full Bitcoin node on a laptop from 10 years ago. The majority of Eth nodes are in corporate datacenters because it's not realistic to run it on home hardware/connection. Big blocks are not a real scaling solution for any decentralized system. Privacy Monero beats Bitcoin in this, there is no doubt. However, lightning and other L2s make significant gains in privacy for Bitcoin. Bitcoin can always upgrade to a more private protocol if it wants to, and many key people in the Bitcoin world are calling for it. Perhaps this will happen during the transition to post-quantum encryption. Things like coinjoin etc, if common, may also solve this problem. Monero's reputation as a privacy coin has caused some major legislative/political/adoption hurdles that Bitcoin hasn't had to face.

When (if ever) do you believe #bitcoin ceased to be competing to be a superior MoE, and more so a superior SoV?

The "functioning layer 2" (Lightning Network) you mention is pretty terrible in my opinion though. Payments fail quite often.

Quit with the FUD. I have rarely seen payments fail. There are entire companies built off lightning infrastructure, it's integrated in cash app. On nostr alone users are moving millions of USD worth of sats every month with lightning https://stats.nostr.band/

You can edit your note to fix the typo, you know, instead of making a new note about it.

With centralized wallets like Wallet of Satashi, sure, maybe. Self custody is a pain in the ass though. Breez Wallet payments fail often.

Idk about breeze, I've never used it, but the numbers speak for themselves. Zeus and Phoenix are self-custody wallets that take 5 minutes to download and receive your first transaction in. If breeze was giving you trouble, I encourage you to try another wallet. If you haven't tried payments to several different parties, it's possible your receiving party did something wrong (like sent you an expired invoice or something).

I tried Phoenix Wallet a long time ago, but the fees were so high (on par with on chain transactions), which kind of defeats the point of using L2. Maybe they've gotten better since then? As for failed payments, I don't know whose fault it is. It happens with all sorts of different vendors. And then some days it works. All I know is it hasn't been very reliable.

You were probably got high fees because you were not managing liquidity. On a non-custodial wallet, if you try to receive a payment that is larger than your inbound capacity, you will get hit w/ an on-chain fee to resize the channel. The solution to this is to either spend more sats or use a service like boltz.exchange (non-custodial). This way, you can "empty" out your lightning channel. For example: 1. You receive $50 into your new non-custodial lightning wallet, this incurs an on-chain fee. You now have no inbound liquidity, but you have $50 in outbound liquidity. You can send up to $50 over lightning. 2. You use bolts.exchange to send $50 over lightning, which is returned to you, on-chain, minus tx fees (say $48) 3. You now can receive up to $50 in your lightning wallet without paying any on-chain fees. Think of lightning like a bucket. A bucket is a lightning channel, the water in the bucket is sats. If you buy a $50 bucket, the bucket is full to start, it can't receive any more water unless you buy a bigger bucket. If you dump some water out, now you make room for more water to be added to the bucket, and you can do this infinite times.

Fees on-chain are about $1.50 right now. Lightning is consistently 1% or less.

Larger adoption? How can you explain that Monero is more used than bitcoin in P2P payments? You say that is antiethycal decentalization when you cant mine bitcoin with any device, and that is the really antiethical decentralization. You also mention that you have more developed pools? You don't have any decentralized pool developed and the only solution that would solve that problem was put apart 12 years ago, that would make bitcoin mining decentralized 👀 Lightning is a band aid, it doesnt work well if you use it by self custody.. And you tell that decentralization falls with the big blocks? Hardware grows 100x faster capacity than any blockchain grow, what isn't un-ethical is that you only can mine bitcoin with specific and expensive hardware.. Monero you can mine with any device, even a old android can mine monero..

This is a reasonable response. however... anyone serious about Bitcoin development acknowledges that eventually blocks have to get larger. The devil is in the details of course. when do they change? by how much ?Because of the speed of technology it becomes easier for people to run larger nodes on cheaper hardware all the time. An elastic Blocksize limit makes the chain more flexible to sudden rushes of transaction volume without forcing that conversation. It absolutely does NOT mean that it's suddenly going to be like ethereum and impossible for your average pleb to run a node. So Monero's approach here makes a lot of sense. You say that Bitcoin can absorb technology developed for other chains but note that Monero has in fact absorbed a lot of innovations that were designed for Bitcoin and not vice versa. In actual fact Bitcoin L1 seems impossible to change and all the Innovation is happening elsewhere.

I think the most important thing to highlight is that Monero actually is "fuck you money" while Bitcoin is not anymore. Bitcoiners de-Emphasize the importance of the community and believe that the technology Is unassailable. There are external factors that greatly affect the network. Inviting normies Wall street and VC capital in search of greater adoption undermines the cypherpunk ethos that got Bitcoin to where it is today. Monero is a smaller community that does not have that problem (yet). Over the last five years or so Bitcoin has decided to emphasize adoption and not ensuring that the chain itself is censorship resistant. By which I mean it's not private. Without privacy, there is no censorship resistance. By putting adoption before privacy/censorship resistance Bitcoin seems inevitably destined for regulatory capture.