Is Bitcoin a Shitcoin?

Bitcoin v Monero debate between Rafael LaVerde and Tone Vays.

Rafael LaVerde from The Crypto Vigilante takes on ex-Wall Street and current crypto analyst Tone Vays in a debate about whether or not Bitcoin is a shitcoin, pitting the OG BTC up against XMR.

Check the debate out here.

I won’t do a play-by-play because you can just watch it but I will highlight some interesting points.

There is no privacy in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is butt-naked. You’re walking around naked on the Internet. R.L.

Rafael makes his main points and attacks, which are that Bitcoin is not exactly fungible, it’s not private, its store of value, when compared to Monero, falls short, Monero ensures the health of the miners financially through their tail emissions, and that Bitcoin does the opposite due to block rewards getting smaller.

Rafael then called Bitcoin ‘the bitch of the establishment’ and used the time Elon Musk rocked the markets by criticizing Bitcoin miners, saying they were not green enough and instantly Bitcoin miners and developers started bending the knee.

All strong points in my opinion.

Tone takes his turn and the first thing he says is that Monero is a scam, and then debates Rafael’s point about Bitcoin being the bitch of the establishment by comparing Bitcoin to the Internet.

Next up Tone starts saying some stuff about Bitcoin never sponsoring conferences which is stupid and has nothing to do with the debate, it’s a dumb technicality that no one gives a shit about and can easily be argued by pointing to the recent Bitcoin Miami.

Tone does make some really good points afterward, and these by the way are the only good points he makes, he says that even the so-called privacy advocates and anti-establishment types, many of them, don’t actually use privacy tools and I think where he was going was to highlight that network effects are massive considerations in these debates because people will go where others go (Bitcoin) and he sort of says in his own words that all new technology should be private by default. To be clear he didn’t say exactly all that but I think that’s what he was implying.

Watch it yourself and correct me if I’m wrong.

Things start to get heated which is pretty funny to watch. They start calling one another liars and calling each other out, pretty sure Rafael even used a Will Smith and Jada Pinkett roast to suggest that using Bitcoin is like airing out your dirty laundry for all to see.

LaVerde then hits it out of the park by asking Vays to give a yes or no response and say whether Bitcoin is fungible or not and then follows up with ‘it doesn’t matter how much liquidity there is (in BTC) when it’s all in a glass house’, Paraphrasing there. LaVerde continues and says to Tone that it may be difficult for Tone to track and trace transactions but it’s not for Blockchain AI. And this is really the crux of the argument here.

Tone makes an argument that sometimes transparency is good and gives the example that we all want to know where the government is spending our money but this is a kind of straw-man argument and to be perfectly honest, If we are going to talk about what the government is doing, well the real answer is I don’t want them spending my money at all. If I had the choice of a Government that spends less of my money but I don’t get to see where they spend it versus a Government that spends more of my money but I get to audit and track it, we know what the answer is and pretending otherwise is just a stupid argument. The Government should always show us where they spend our money. Does that mean they will spend less of it? I don’t know but I doubt it.

The debate then goes into a spiral about Bitcoin side chains, Lightning, Liquid, and so on and in my eyes, it should have ended here. If you need to discuss side chains to make the case that Bitcoin is private, you’ve kind of already lost the argument in my book.

Finally, if you didn’t think the debate was already won by Rafael LaVerde, when the mic is given back to Tone Vays he basically does a right angle turn away from the debate and starts to talk about politics saying that what’s better than privacy is making it so that it’s not even required, where the Government cant spy on you, where you don’t have to use privacy coins to buy drugs online and so on. All decent…points if they weren't debating what they were debating which to me was Vays’s way of basically throwing the towel in.

The debate finishes with a bang, LaVerde walks off the stage at the end after a fiery last-minute exchange and I can’t quite tell if it was a mic drop or not but Tone immediately starts saying that the TCV group has given a voice to scams.

This coming from a Wall Street guy? Hilarious.

The interesting thing about both these 2 characters and this debate to me is that they are both analysts and traders as far as I can tell and they both buy and trade Bitcoin. Rafael obviously buys and trades Monero. Whether or not Tone does I don’t know but I’d be willing to bet he wouldn’t say no to it, especially with some of the comments he made in the debate.

So then what’s the point?

I suppose the point here is that Rafael is accusing the Bitcoin maximalists of not being honest to the regular Joe investors about what Bitcoin is versus what it is not.

Bitcoin is not a privacy coin, it's a spy coin.

It’s pretty obvious to anyone that takes 5 minutes to look into this topic as a whole that Monero is indeed private, and Bitcoin is not. Monero is fungible and whereas it is arguable about Bitcoin. 1 BTC = 1 BTC but as Rafael points out, that’s not true when you have a marked wallet or address, your Bitcoin can effectively become worthless. And finally to Rafael’s other point about Bitcoin bending the knee to the establishment, well I kind of have to agree with him except for the fact that Bitcoin is still technically decentralized to the point where I can send you BTC without any third party involvement.

What did you think about the debate?

Let me know in the comments below.

If you didn’t watch it yet, you can watch it here. And check out The Crypto Vigilante here.

Want to Keep Reading?

• Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable in 2022?
• Why Bitcoin Will Fail
• If Crypto Was Food. What will Bitcoin and Monero be?
• How to Buy Monero (XMR) Anonymously
• Beware: You Are Entering The World Of Shitcoins

Want to know how you can support Crypto Fireside?

Sign up below. It's free and easy 🔥.