It works both ways. Monero can also protect law enforcement from the kind of attack proposed in this thread regarding the SilkRoad coins. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=306809.0 Ethereum has proven that it is actually possible to do this on a blockchain in the clear.

So here is the question for law enforcement. You seize Bitcoin or Ethereum as proceeds of crime. Then the "community" decides to undo the seizure without any form of due process. How do you prevent this? Now with Monero law enforcement is actually protected from this kind of attack.    

Edit 1: The majority of the hashpower for Bitcoin is in China. Food for thought for US based law enforcement.
Edit 2: A taint attack against the seized coins is also possible. Fungibility works both ways.

No it will not. .

Monero has an adaptive blocksize limit that avoids the whole Bitcoin blocksize debate. This adaptive blocksize limit works because Monero has a minimum block reward  of 0.6 XMR per block in perpetuity. This means that there is no need to rely on transaction fees to secure the proof of work (miners) as is the case not only in Bitcoin but in coins such as Dash that have a fixed maximum number of coins. In the case of Dash the problem is magnified since the falling block reward has to support not only the proof of work but also the masternode network and the funding of projects.

Once the fees are no longer required to support the proof of work etc., they can actually be used to create a market for scaling the blocksize. One significant advantage of this is that it avoids the kind of spam attacks against the memory pool that were recently launched against Bitcoin. These attacks rely on the fact that the bulk of the spam will never be mined because of the fixed  blcoksize effectively having a minimal cost to the spammer. As someone who runs full Bitcoin nodes I am well aware of the bandwith costs of these spam attacks.

Bitcoin's problems, or Dash's problems for that matter, with scaling cannot be solved with a continuation of Moore Law, Nielsen's Law etc. alone, because of the falling block reward approaching towards zero over time.

Another factor that is orthogonal to fungibility, privacy and anonymity is that Monero has an adaptive blocksize limit that avoids the problems with a fixed 1 MB blocksize limit in Bitcoin. This adaptive blocksize limit actually works because Monero has a minimum block reward (tail emission) of 0.6 XMR per block.

From the article in the OP

Ever heard of innocent until proven guilty? I suspect this will attract the attention of constitutional lawyers in many parts of the world.

I suspect it is related to the blocksize issue. For example force a bigger blocksize etc. It will not bring down the Bitcoin network at least at the current levels, but it is having a negative impact. Increasing bandwidth costs for nodes, slowing down legitimate transactions, etc.

The point of the spam is not to buy blockspace since there is way too much spam for that, or even compete with the ham but only to spam the nodes. Fee filters are not a defense since the spammer sets her fees above the filter but below the ham. 

Actually the spammer simply increases her fees. One must keep in mind that the spammer relies the fact that only a very small portion of the spam transactions will actually get mined regardless of the fees because of the fixed blocksize. A dynamic blocksize with a proper fee structure can be a very effective deterrent against this type of spam attack because by threatening to mine the spam it imposes a very significant risk to the spammer.

The issue with a dynamic blocksize, following a model similar to that of Monero, in Bitcoin is that there is eventually no incentive for the miners as the base reward falls. The reason the dynamic blocksize works in Monero is that Monero has a minimum base reward of 0.6 XMR per block. A rough equivalent in Bitcoin would be 3 XBT per block in perpetuity. Fees have little or no impact on mining security in Monero. They are actually there to control the blocksize increase and deter spam attacks. So unless one is prepared to violate the 21 million XBT maximum limit, I am afraid there may be little that the Monero project may be able to offer Bitcoin on blocksize scaling.

What I must strongly caution against is taking elements of Monero's dynamic blocksize, with critical security components removed, and expecting them to work in Bitcoin. This I am afraid can easily lead to disaster.

Edit: The total fees per block in Monero are actually set to be proportional to the block reward. Think about this when combined with a block reward that falls to zero over time.

This kind of attack works because the spammer sends spam at a much faster rate than the Bitcoin network with its fixed 1 MB blocksize can possibly mine. There is consequently little or no cost to the spammer other than the spammer's own bandwidth. There is a significant cost to the network; however in driving up the bandwidth costs of those of us who run full nodes, with the likely result of driving down the number of full Bitcoin nodes.

A ~60% effective blocksize increase via say SegWit alone will not address this kind of spam attack.

Getting rid of Windows is a must here. Covenants fail when the Windows malware steals both keys, so would a paper wallet created on a Windows system with malware for the same reason.

The key point here is that it must be able to meet transaction demand and that means an adaptive blocksize limit and long term security for the coin. Bitcoin in its current implementation fails this test and proposals such as Segwit and Lightning Network are at best a one time scaling.

You may want to consider the GNU AGPL https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html It is free libre open source software however it is a very strong copyleft that also applies to software on  server used by the public. In effect his forces the bank to share their software improvements back with the community.

A dual license between the AGPL or GPL and closed source for a fee can work very well. The user is given the choice of playing by FLOSS rules and contributing code back to the community or playing by proprietary rules, the get to keep their own code secret but also have to pay license fees. There is a reason why copyleft was invented over 1/4 century ago.  https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

Edit: Qt is a project that does exactly this. Combine strong copyleft with proprietary in a dual license https://www.qt.io/licensing/

Die deutschen Bären

This is one of the most common misconceptions about gold. The economic (mined) gold that is traded and treated as a scare resource is about 0.00047% of the surface gold on earth. http://www.westcoastplacer.com/how-much-gold-is-left-on-earth/. There is a lot of gold on earth, it is just very expensive to get at it. There is also gold in the earth's core, gold from nuclear reactions and gold from mining asteroids. A much better model for economic gold is a small inflation rate from an "infinite" source.

To put things into perspective. After many thousands of years of mining gold there is a ~1% annual inflation rate, compare this to Bitcoin where the annual inflation rate falls to below 1% in under 20 years.

You mean gold?

Edit: One of the considerations with setting the tail emission in Monero was to have an inflation rate below that of gold.

In order for crypto to become to become "asset class among metals, land, RE, bonds and fiat," it will need to be able to handle transaction volumes, on the main chain. at least comparable to the un-leveraged or  "monetary base" level of these assets. This will be possible if the current trends of falling real costs of CPU time, bandwidth, digital storage, digital memory etc. continue. I am talking of a continuation of the trends of the last 50 years.

No
I doubt very much that Bitcoin will keep its position over the long term since the current Bitcoin protocol is hard coded to not scale the number of transactions per second (blocksize) and the only viable long term blocksize scaling solutions that I am aware of, and are sustainable would be very similar to those of Monero. The trouble with Monero like blocksize scaling solutions in Bitcoin is that they require a tail emission, which would be an unacceptable  change in the Bitcoin social covenant.
It is possible that over the short term we may see an increase in the Bitcoin price above the last ATH; however over the long term I remain a bear with respect to Bitcoin because of the long term fundamentals of the blocksize issue. At the recent San Francisco Monero meetup one of the participants commented to me: "The product is transactions".  If one limits the number of transactions per second one in effect is limiting sales. This begs the question would one invest in a company for long term growth that has a hard limit on the gross sales?

I still hold a nominal amount of Bitcoin; however since September 2015; I have replaced the bulk of my Bitcoin holdings with a combination of Monero, Canadian Dollars and US Dollars. This portfolio of Monero, Canadian Dollars and US Dollars has out performed Bitcoin handsomely during this period of time with a significantly lower downside risk.

Edit: The rise of the order of 10^6 in the price of Bitcoin between December 2009 and December 2013 followed by at best a flat market since December 2013 can be explained as Bitcoin's growth until the 1 MB blocks were filled up followed by stagnation since the 1 MB blocks were full. Another way to put this is an increase in the value of a company until the hard gross sales cap was reached.

It is possible because XMR/XBT on Poloniex is the 4th largest Bitcoin market. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets I have seen in the past where it was the largest Bitcoin market.

Other: The fixed blocksize limit in Bitcoin.

I have been involved with Bitcoin since 2011. Yes I have read Satoshi's paper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf and believe in the vision for Bitcoin as presented in the introduction:


I have quoted this before. The critical part is in bold. The reality is that Bitcoin cannot meet the stated vision and objective with a fixed protocol limit of approximately three transactions per second on the blockchain. I came upon Monero in 2014 on this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.0 while researching the blocksize issue in Bitcoin. At that point my total involvement with alt-coins was Namecoin which I had obtained as a by product of mining Bitcoin, and subsequently successfully traded for Bitcoin during the Bitcoin bull market of 2013. I had enough respect for Risto as a member of this community for me to at least do some due diligence on Monero even though there was no mention of the blocksize issue as a reason to buy Monero in the post. After discovering that Monero has at least the a reasonable chance of a viable solution to the blocksize issue in Bitcoin the rest became history. Many if not most of the supporters and detractors of Monero consider Monero primarially a fungibility, anonymity, privacy coin. My take is that Monero first addresses a much more fundamental issue; namely the ability to be able to transact in the first place. After all there is little point is having concerns over fungibility, anonymity and privacy of one's transactions if one is not even able to transact to begin with.

Edit 1: By far the majority of POW coins have the same fixed blocksize issue as Bitcoin with in some cases the ball being kicked down the road. Notable examples are: Litecoin, and "Monero competitors" such as Dash and ZCash.

Edit 2: I have come to the conclusion that for a Monero style adaptive blocksize to work a trail or permanent emission is an absolute must. Given that this involves for most POW coins a radical change in the social covenant I do not see a simple solution for most POW coins including Bitcon here. One notable exception is Dogecoin since it already has a tail emission.

In the short term moving away from a fixed coin reward may create an increase in price in ETC because of the increase in scarcity, but fundamentally this is a very bad move over the longterm. The falling coin reward will put into serious question the ability of ETC to scale while at the same time maintaining the security of the proof of work.

It would be very ironic if capping the the coin supply in ETC leads to ETC surpassing XMR in market cap while at the same time removing ETC as a competitor of XMR in the area of an adaptive blocksize with a secure proof of work. As I have said before I have not seen a solution for an adaptive blocksize with a secure proof of work without a minimum tail reward. Minimum fixed fees in the protocol is not the answer here. This could easily become very serious long term pain in exchange for some short term gains for ETC, and some short term pain in exchange for long term gains for XMR.  

This is very true. Take for example the monetary policy move by ETC away from a tail emission similar to Monero to a falling emission similar to Bitcoin.