Bitcoin vs Monero: Only One Is Actually Private

0:00 Bitcoin verse Monero. Both are digital cash. Both are peer-to-peer. Both can be mined by anyone with the hardware and electricity to do so. But they both took a different approach from the beginning. Bitcoin chose to be public by default, whereas Monero chose to be private by default. Today we're comparing the history, the technology, mining, privacy in the real world, market caps, and price history, and the question most people actually care about, which is better for paying for things. That means talking about the Lightning Network and answering whether you can be private on it. If you only know Bitcoin, you'll need to get the full picture. If you've been in crypto for years, there's a few things in here you probably haven't heard. The history of Bitcoin. In October of 2008, someone calling themsself Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine-page paper to a cryptography mailing list. The network went live on January 3rd, 2009. The first block had a newspaper headline about bank bailouts

1:02 embedded in it, so you know exactly what they were reacting to. For the first year, Bitcoin had no price. The first real purchase was May 2010. 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas. Satoshi vanished in late 2010 and has never been heard from since. That's the best thing that ever happened to Bitcoin. There's no founder to pressure, arrest, or buy out. Then the trouble came. Mount Gaus collapsed in 2014 with hundreds of thousands of customer coins. From 2015 to 2017, the Bitcoin community fought the block size war over whether to make blocks bigger. The small block side won.

1:42 SegWit activated in 2017. Bitcoin Cash forked off of that and scaling got pushed to a second layer called Lightning. SPA ETFs got approved in January 2024 and Bitcoin became something Wall Street holds in a brokerage account. The history of Monero. Monero's story is messier. In 2013, an anonymous author published the Cryptonote paper, a privacy design that had nothing to do with Bitcoin's code. The first coin built on it was Bitecoin and Bitecoin turned out to have a massive secret premine. So in April 2014, the community forked it with a clean chain. And after a fight with the original launcher, the project became Monero, originally Bit Monero. Monero meaning coin. No company is behind it.

2:34 No foundation owns it or gets a cut. Unlike Bitcoin, Monero changes constantly. Ring CT in 2017 hit amounts. Bulletproofs in 2018 cut fees by 80%. Random X in 2019 made mining work on regular CPUs. Tail mission started in 2022 and the next upgrade full chain membership proofs is on a test network right now. I'll explain why it matters a little bit later. How Bitcoin works. Bitcoin is a public ledger. Every transaction ever made shows the sending address, the receiving address, and the exact amount forever to anyone who looks. Addresses aren't names, so people call it pseudonmous. But the moment one address gets tied to you through an exchange, a payment, or a data leak, your entire history is exposed, and so is everything you do from then on. There are 21 million coins, and the mining reward halves every four years. That sounds great, but it has a problem

3:36 Bitcoiners don't like discussing. When the mining reward runs low, miners have to live on fees alone, and nobody knows if that's enough. Blocks come every 10 minutes, and they're capped in size. So, when demand spikes, fees spike. People paid $50 a transaction in 2021 and over a hundred during the ordinals craze in 2024. Monero hides three things on every transaction, and there's no way to turn it off. Ring signatures hide the sender by mixing your real input with 15 decoys. Stealth addresses hide the receiver, so every payment lands on a fresh one-time address, and your public address never appears on chain. Ring CT hides the amount. The ring of 16 is the real weak spot. It's a crowd of 16, and researchers can do statistical guessing.

4:27 That's what full chain membership proofs fix. Instead of 15 decoys, every transaction hides among every output on the chain. Over a 100 million. The beta test network forked on October 5th. There is no mainet date yet. Blocks come every 2 minutes. The block size grows with demand and fees are a few cents. Supply is about 18.4 million plus a tail emission of 0.6 XMR per block forever. That's under 1% inflation and it shrinks every year and it means miners always get paid. Bitcoin left that question for the future. Monero has it answered already. Self-custody, the part everyone skips. A lot of you may own Bitcoin and have never actually held it on your own.

5:13 If it's in a Coinbase account, a Robin Hood account, or an ETF, you don't own Bitcoin. You own a claim on a company that owns the Bitcoin. They have the keys. You have a login. If they freeze your account, get hacked, or go bankrupt, your coins are gone. Mount Gaus customers waited over a decade to get their coins. FTX customers found out their Bitcoin was an IOU on a spreadsheet. The entire reason Satoshi bothered creating Bitcoin was so that you could hold money nobody can take, freeze, or inflate. That only works if you hold the private keys yourself.

5:51 That's self-custody. A wallet where only you have the secret. Usually 12 or 25 words written down. No account, no company, nobody to lock you out. Everything I say about privacy in this video assumes self-custody. Monero on an exchange is a number on their server with your name on it. Buy it wherever you have to, then move it to a wallet you control. Tainted coins and risk scores. Here's something most people learn the hard way. On Bitcoin, your coins have a credit score and it's one you didn't apply for. Every major exchange runs incoming deposits through a screening service like Chain Analysis or Elliptic. It walks backwards through the history of the coins you just sent and scores them. Touched a mixer three hops ago? Risk elevated. Passed through an address linked to a darknet market in 2019? Risk elevated. Came from a sanctioned wallet? Frozen. The score isn't about you. It's about the coins.

6:49 And the coins remember everything. And you can get caught with no bad behavior at all. A customer pays you. Their coins came from a swap service. The swap services wallet once touched a hack. And now your deposit is flagged and you're the one answering questions. Freshly mined Bitcoin with no history can actually sell at a premium. But if it was known to be mined in a sanctioned country, even that might not be enough. The market already knows not all Bitcoin are equal. That's what it means when people say Bitcoin isn't fungeable. Monero has nothing to risk score. Every output looks like every other output.

7:27 There is no history to walk back through. A Bitcoin is worth what its past allows. One Monero is always worth one Monero. Mining and security. Bitcoin is mined on AS6 machines that do one thing made by a few companies. The upside is more hash rate than most countries could organize an attack against. The downside is that a few pools and a few chip makers sit at the top. It's secure like a fortress, not a crowd. Monero's Random X runs best on normal CPUs, so anyone can mine on a laptop and there's no pool operator in charge. The downside is far less total hash rate, so it's cheaper to attack. In 2025, a project called Cubic pointed its computing power at Monero and for a time reorganized blocks. A reorg can't steal coins or break privacy, but it can double spend transactions, which is why exchanges raise confirmation counts. It did happen, but just required waiting

8:31 longer for funds to settle on exchanges. Bitcoin is harder to attack and more centralized. Monero is more decentralized and cheaper to attack. Pick your poison. Market cap and price history. No predictions, just history. Bitcoin is the number one asset by a mile around $80,000 with a market cap near 1.6 trillion. It hit $1,000 in 2013, 20,000 in 2017, 69,000 in 2021, and crossed over 100,000 after the ETFs and the 2024 having four cycles each with an 80% crash. Each new high above the last Monero currently sits around $600 with a market cap near 10 billion, ranked about 15th. It peaked near $500 and again in 2021. Then it got hit by something no other major coin has faced.

9:25 D-listings. Bitrex, Kraken in Europe, OKX, and then Binance in February 2024, which dropped it to around $100. And then it came back and set a new all-time high in early 2026, near $800, with less exchange support than ever. The liquidity left and the price went up anyway. That's likely because people are buying Monero to use it. To be fair, Bitcoin is a few hundred times bigger with institutions, ETFs, and liquidity Monero doesn't have. If you're holding for 10 years, that matters. And speaking of how to get Monero, this video is sponsored by Ctova. Since a lot of you may be coming from Bitcoin, let me start from the beginning. If you've only bought crypto through an exchange like Coinbase, you've only used a custodial exchange. You make an account, upload your ID, and they hold the coins. That works for Bitcoin. It mostly doesn't work for Monero because centralized exchanges have mostly dropped it. So, how do people get Monero? Usually

10:29 through an instant exchange, no account, no ID. You tell a site, I have Bitcoin. I want Monero. It gives you an address. You send the Bitcoin from your wallet and minutes later, Monero shows up in your Monero wallet. It's like a currency booth at the airport, except you never show a passport. The problem is there are dozens of these services and it's hard to find the best price. Kova solves this problem. It's not an exchange. It's a comparison site. Pick your pair. It asks several services at once. Shows every quote side by side and you send straight to the best one. Kova never touches your coins. No account, no email. They also have a feature called freeze protection. Turn it on and every service capable of holding your deposit is removed from the list. So, your swap only goes through an automated protocol with no desk to freeze anything. They're a great sponsor for this video because you can select Bitcoin to Monero or Monero to Bitcoin and find the best rate from their trusted providers. Get any crypto into a self-custody wallet you

11:32 control and you can swap without an account. They are a real company in Germany listed on Monerica. Link in the description. Now, back to it. The Lightning Network. Lightning is Bitcoin's answer to slow, expensive payments. It went live in 2018. You and a counterparty lock Bitcoin into a channel on the main chain. Then pay each other back and forth instantly for almost nothing. Because nothing touches the blockchain until the channel closes. Payments can route through other people's channels to reach anyone on the network. When it works, it's great. That's the experience in apps like Strike or Wallet of Satoshi. But those apps are custodial. The company holds your Bitcoin and runs the node. It's a bank with a Bitcoin logo. Running your own node means managing channels, keeping liquidity in the right direction, and staying online to receive. It has never become the self-custodial everyday payment rail it was pitched as. Most of the real volume runs through a few big custodians. Can

12:37 you be private on Lightning? Partially if you're sending, much less if you're receiving. Lightning uses onion routing, so a node in the middle only knows the hop before and after it. That's better than onchain Bitcoin payments. But opening and closing a channel is a public Bitcoin transaction. Your channel partner sees every amount that passes through, and most people's partner is a big hub that sees a huge slice of the network. Researchers have shown that you can probe someone's channel balance just by sending fake payments. Standard invoices reveal the receivers's node to every sender. The newer Bolt 12 standard with blinded paths hides your node from the sender. And that's a real improvement. But it doesn't change what your channel partner sees or the public channel on chain. And on a custodial app, none of this matters because the company sees everything. For the advanced crowd, Lightning privacy is network layer. It hides the route.

13:38 Monero's privacy is protocol layer. It hides the sender, receiver, and amount in the ledger itself. Those aren't the same thing. Which is best for paying? Bitcoin on chain has 10-minute blocks, an hour for confirmations, fees from a dollar to over a hundred, and fully public. It's the worst option for spending privately. Lightning is instant and nearly free when it works. It needs a custodian or channel management. It's smooth if you trust an app. A lot of work for partial privacy if you don't. Monero onchain has twominute blocks. It settles in about 20 minutes fees of a few cents no matter how busy the network is. Privacy every time and nothing to configure. It's slower than lightning, but it's as simple as sending any other crypto payment once the wallet is fully synced. And nobody can see the sender receiver or amount. For a beginner, Bitcoin is digital gold. Lightning is the fast rail that sits on top of gold.

14:34 And Monero is cash. Merchants want cash. There are more businesses taking Monero directly than people think. And Monerica.com lists hundreds of them. How to get Monero? Getting Bitcoin is trivial. Any exchange, any ETF, any ATM. How to get Monero is the number one problem people keep complaining about. So, here's the path. If you're in the US and not in New York, Kraken sells it if you give them your ID. You can then withdraw it to your own personal wallet. If you already have Bitcoin, an instant exchange or an aggregator like today's sponsor swaps it with no account. Beyond that, there's Aino and Bisque. Buying from another person, mining it on your CPU, or earning it by selling something.

15:19 For the advanced crowd, atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Monero exist and work with no middleman at all. They are generally slow and require a lot of setup, much more difficult than an instant exchange swap. Regulation is the big problem for Monero. Although Monero is legal practically everywhere, places like the EU with their new anti-moneyaundering rules prevent regulated exchanges from selling privacy coins in 2027. Using it stays legal. Buying it from a licensed European exchange won't be. That's why the decentralized paths matter more every year. the fair case against each.

15:58 Against Bitcoin, it's not private at the base layer and never will be. So, every payment is published forever. Your coins carry a history that can get them refused through no fault of your own. Fees are unpredictable. Lightning didn't solve self-custodial payments for normal people, and the ETF era means more of the supply sits with custodians who answer to regulators. against Monero. It's cheaper to attack and 2025 proves somebody will try to. It's being pushed off exchanges and that seems to get worse every year. Transactions are larger, so the chain grows fast. There's far less liquidity, so bigger price swings. The ring of 16 is small until FCMP++ ships. And the privacy coin label means some people will always assume it's bad. It's important to see both coins for what they are if you plan to buy or sell them. This is not financial advice. The final verdict. Bitcoin already won the store of value narrative. It has a liquidity, the ETFs, and the brand. If you want to hold

17:00 something for 10 years that institutions already accept, that's the one. But money has two jobs. Holding and spending. And spending in a public way is bad. Every balance on a transparent chain is a target. Monero is the only major coin where you can't accidentally leak your financial history because there's no public mode to accidentally use. Learn Bitcoin to understand the space. Use Monero when you need to pay for something. And whichever one you hold, hold it yourself. A Bitcoin on an exchange is a promise. A Bitcoin in your wallet is a real one you own. Thanks to Kova for sponsoring this video. Their link is below. For places to use Monero, check out monerica.com, the Monero economy directory. Thanks for watching.