It is notes like this that make me take stock, reassess and ask why a few times to work back to the core reasons of what the hell I’m doing and more importantly, why am I doing? 🙏

fuckin’ A

And that is why I am ditching #btc. It's time has passed.

Seems like you lack the Nuances here in your argument and are dealing in absolutes. There can not be privacy in base layer bitcoin, get over it. This is an explicit trade off made for auditablity. Now that there is a immutable base layer that everyone can agree to on order to build the higher layers in which privacy for everyday payments can be made? Absolutely. Saying monero is a solution is missing the forest for the trees. Monero being delisted isn't something to be proud of. This limits its liquidity profile thus making it a worse money. Do some homework about this shit before forming naive surface level convictions (opinions)

Bitcoin Lightning is Bitcoin's "p2p cash" layer, and is very private.

The problem here is as soon as they bake in privacy on the protocol level there can be a higher possibility for delistings. This is against the fairy tale Bitcoin is a store of value because it will loose value. They don't want that.

Its not

Given your infosec background, I'm sure what I am about to say is nothing new for you, so I am mostly speaking to "the room" here. Yes, Lightning offers better privacy than Bitcoin when set up properly, but it also has a more complex system, equating to a larger attack surface. LN's privacy features are not automatic; users must understand and manage their privacy settings actively, which can lead to unintentional exposure of transaction details. A fundamental privacy weakness persists in the asymmetric nature of Lightning transactions—the sender learns extensive details about the receiver's node, channels, and liquidity, while the receiver learns nothing about the sender. Plus, there's the persistent hassle of maintaining channel liquidity. Even with proper setup, Lightning faces critical privacy vulnerabilities against global adversaries who can monitor network traffic—while individual participants can't see payment details, entities capable of monitoring internet connections can track payment flows by observing message patterns between nodes, making its privacy guarantees fundamentally weak against sophisticated surveillance. Lightning falls well short of the anonymity provided by Monero with its stealth addresses, ring signatures, and RingCT—and soon, Full-chain Membership Proofs (FCMPs) will fix current vulnerabilities like the Exchange Attack Everywhere (EAE) attack. With FCMPs, every input will have a 100-million anonymity set, up from the current 16 Ring Signatures. Where privacy is a concern, I still recommend Monero over Lightning for most people, as Monero's privacy features are built-in on the base layer and work by default.

Highly scarce money starts as primarily a NGU vehicle. Its use as a medium of exchange is enhanced by this. This trumps everything in the long term. It will not remain underutilized in spending forever. Number go up is intrinsically part of medium of exchange, and reinforces it to such an extent that it would take a tremendous amount of trust in government and slow encroachments to cause something significantly less sound to win. That's exactly what happened to gold.

Just a thought… Low liquidity and delisting risk = censorable Uncensorable > Private

Delisting Monero from CEXs makes it more private by pushing users toward decentralized alternatives and the network remains fully functional and private.