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No we don't, the ability to have and hold value without monitoring is an inalienable right afa I'm concerned and i think everyone should hold that belief.
I agree. In addition privacy and anonymity are needed in order to ensure fungibility in crypto currencies, and fungibility is is a necessary requirement of money.
Then there is of course the adaptive blocksize in Monero which ensures that there is no arbitrary limit on the number of transactions per second.
People in this scene don't know how important and rare this is.
I think it takes quite a bit of study and "pondering" before someone really "gets it" about how XMR may, in fact, be the better bitcoin than bitcoin, or how it may be the so-called "Bitcoin 2.0" that everyone also always sort-of intuitively understands *might* need to evolve before a crypto-currency can really be successful.
Everyone always "just knows" that the first iteration of something is almost never the ultimate winner... Facebook rises on MySpace, Windows rises on Mac, VHS video rises on Betamax, etc etc. Everyone "knows" this is usually what happens, but most people seem to be fairly blind to see where and how it may be coming.
Even now, I can hardly comprehend the block-size stalemate MAY INDEED be a death-rattle for bitcoin. I can't believe that those people in charge of shepherding BTC into the future could *really* allow it to fail... but my eyes are not lying and it's over a YEAR longer than I ever IMAGINED the debate would be unresolved! So...? Have to imagine it might really be happening...
Yes of course they may still fix it, and maybe Monero will remain a niche experiment forever (albeit I think even then the value will rise quite a bit more yet).
But the idea that XMR's "different design" and all-original code-base fundamentally FIXES more than one serious design flaw that Satoshi overlooked in BITCOIN is more believable to me every day.
As is also the idea that when Satoshi said he was "leaving to pursue other things"... he may have been talking about CryptoNote... SN / NS = Satoshi Nakamoto, Nicholas van Saberhagen, etc etc. Wouldn't surprise me at all... and IF TRUE? Then buying XMR now might quite literally be "buying bitcoin again" at under $10 each...