Notice that Signal isn’t attacked (at least not yet). Telegram is optionally end to end encrypted and it is a for profit company. Those are two vectors that Durov was attacked on. It’s the same reason Samurai Wallet was attacked on and Tornado Cash. Going after Monero would be much harder. It is not a for profit company (or even DAO). It’s privacy is part of the protocol, like SSH and when ring signatures are gone the final legal potential weakness will be gone. Legally, there is no clear way to attack Monero since if Monero is attacked, any privacy technology like VPNs and SSH and HTTPS could also be attacked and that would have a major industry backlash. It is far more likely that if an attack happens, the infrastructure would be attacked (e.g. getting Monero off github, etc) by putting pressure on the web hosts, but there are already several projects that work on GIT over TOR so this is more an inconvenience than a threat. At the moment, I’m not worried. If Signal and ZCash are attacked, then I’d start to be more worried.

Both socialism and capitalism are real. Socialism itself on the large scale is undesirable and impossible. It can be approximated on the small scale (say less than 20 people) in a very tight nit community (e.g. family or tribe) where there is strong social pressure and environmental pressures to pool resources and help each other, but the moment the community grows so large that you do not know and interact with every single person and do not have a strong bond with every single person, the community fractures into factions, with some factions dominating over other factions and eventually become the elites with special privileges ruling over the plebes which have privileges at the mercy of those in power.

Capitalism, OTOH is simply a system where there is a free exchange of capital which is anything of value. The main critique he has is that because there is no absolute free exchange change of independent value, there is no capitalism. This is the same mistake people who don’t believe in free will make. Yes, there is no absolute free will. I cannot will myself to be on the sun drinking ice tea with Socrates. But that’s not what free will in finite entities means. It means, given the limitations of your circumstances, you can make a choice. If someone paralyses you and puts you in a sensory deprivation tank, you can still have more free will than your captors since you can choose how you react to your circumstances.

Similarly, most hard assets depreciate in some sense. Rice is a classic store of value, but pests can get to it. Gold and silver wear out with time and their value changes dependant on availability and speculation. Fiat deflates. Properties depend on the ability of you to protect it and environmental factors. Yet all can be considered assets despite their imperfection. Similarly, all trade has restrictions. I can’t send some property in the Sahara to the Caribbean. I might transfer “the title” between people of these countries but I cannot guarantee that anyone accepts such transfer as legitimate. I can’t easily transport a large quantity of gold or silver or any commodity including fiat with there being a risk of confiscation by either thieves or governments. But to the extent that I can have and transfer value, there is capitalism.

Fortunately, you’re reading the numbers wrong. Yes, some projects have 1-3 projects. Those projects tend to be side projects (e.g. Revuo, web site maintenance, etc) and are likely founded mostly from wallet providers and Monero service providers since it helps spread information that helps the ecosystem. I know Cakewallet has funded a few of these. The really important projects have 5-70 contributors. If donations stop, then some people would keep working on it because Monero is important, but they wouldn’t be able to spend very much time on it so progress would be incredibly slow.

The “sources” are extremely sus. Most CEXes have delisted Monero and no-KYC exchanges by definition don’t have KYC. The addresses are not stored on the blockchain. If an address is known to be CSAM, it would be blocked off so no transactions would have been made and because of the previous point, you can’t go back in the blockchain to find past offenders. The CSAM site likely has other non-CSAM porn so many actual purchases would be legal so usage on honeypot exchanges would not mean much. Reading between the lines, the article is basically coming up with its statistics via inference. (1) Most BTC blockchain activity is speculation, (2) CSAM makes up a significant percentage of BTC actual usage, (3) Monero’s popularity is growing, (4) Criminals prefer privacy, (5) therefore Monero’s growth is mostly from CSAM. The main counterpoint to this is Monero’s increase use in coin cards, VPN and other privacy tool/services purchases, Shopinbit, etc where Monero’s use exceeds that of BTC and lightning. So (1) does not apply to Monero, and it’s likely (2) if it were ever true is increasingly not the case so (5) is absolutely false.

Two things. While you may disagree with some points, his overall analysis is well thought out. While he does acknowledge that fungeability and price stability are essential to a currency, and you could convince him that Monero has these qualities, he also has two other criteria that Monero does not currently possess, namely “being declared legal tender” and durability, i.e. will it be around with a predicable price in 100 years, so you can make contracts with it. Monero fails the “official” legal tender criteria (even if you’re able to live off Monero and show it’s unofficially legal tender). All crypto, including Bitcoin fails the durability criteria. Bitcoin has only been around 15 years…that’s just a baby currency that has not even gone through even a single serious recession. I cannot guarantee you that Bitcoin or Monero will be around in 100 years. I can’t guarantee that its price is at least the current price at that time. No-one can, even though they may believe it to be the case. The only way to show that Monero is durable, is using Monero so it will endure. Eventually, it will reach the stage where all reasonable people will trust it enough to believe that it is durable. No need to worry about influencers. They will look into Monero when the need or interest arises.

As usual, Monero is mentioned as a problem (for criminals) and not a solution (no-one knows your funds). and KYC and CEX are good since the catch criminals.

Either way, the standard rule applies, always have a decoy account with enough money to be plausible that you can give up. Unlike bank accounts or CEX accounts, decoy wallets are easy and cheap and even if you’re forced to give it up access, you’ll be able to convince the thief and save the rest of your money.

This is not how things worked in the past. Income tax is a modern invention and if the government or anyone who was in power wanted money, they would take it and punish you if you resisted. There was nothing voluntary about it. The key difference is that governments tend to tax you either or force “tribute” per head or per property or per trade port, and your family, religious group, guild, protector, tribe, and lord would have their own “taxes”, either as a percentage of what you produce or seasonal fees. Governments tended to leave you alone and focused on roads, the military, and courts. As for the military, it tended to be forced on each land owner to supply a certain number of people when the region needed it, and there were strict penalties for both avoiding military service or trying to take advantage of unoccupied land because the owner was serving. Also, people in the military often needed to pay their own way and provide their own weapons. In modern times, everything is centralized and the government has done its best to get rid of all competitions so families, religion, guilds, tribes, and “lords” have all been dis-empowered, except those who found a way to become so powerful that they span nations. Because there’s little competition, there’s only one organization to pay and only one organization to plan your life because there is no competition, that organization keeps wanting to grow and take over ever more of your life. Centralization is the issue, not taxes. With competition from the local groups, you may not be freer, but you will have more flexibility on which groups to pay taxes to and services are more customized and taxes are lower since no-one group wants the other groups to grow too big and will go to war to assert this. Does monero help fix this? To some extent. It forces government to depend more on property and head taxes and user fees for government services since it’s possible to hide income taxes, sales taxes, transaction taxes, etc. But it’s not a solution for building up the other competing groups to supplement government as has been shown to work in all countries around the world for thousands of years.

Since you’re not asking about Haveno, the key question is, what are you trying to federate and what do you mean by localmonero?

This is what I liked about localmonero: (1) It had an easy to use web site – this can be federated over onion; (2) it had many options (especially necessary if you’re not using USD or EUR) – federation reduces liquidity per mistance; (3) It had a reputation system for sellers – this is hard to federate; (4) The arbiters have been proven over time to be trustworthy – this may be impossible to federate without a reputation system.

So, IMO, your first task is to come up with a federated trust system for both arbiters and sellers. Once you have that, listings and trading can happen on any platform, even lemmy or nostr or Simplex or Haveno or something like robosats.

In my simpleminded approach, a wallet public key could have multiple reputations associated with it (e.g. seller, buyer, arbiter). There would have to be a way to confirm that sellers actually “sold” and “buyers” actually bought and arbiters actually arbitrated…I’m sure this could be done in a hidden ZK way by adding transaction IDs to the reputation . Could this be abused since a person can create multiple wallets and trade with himself? Sure, but that could also be done in localmonero and it did fall apart.

This is where open block chains fail. A good open block chain won’t disallow the transaction, but since it is open, the owner of the wallet can be fined or jailed after the fact. Coinjoins don’t work since they depend on most people doing it, most people not being KYCed, and most people not making a mistake that would cause them to be KYCed. This just doesn’t happen. Breaking a transaction up into several transactions just under the limit makes you more of a target since it’s obvious what you’re doing. By all means, try to defeat this measure politically and form common cause with the cash/gold/silver bros, but recognise that even if you win, we’re only one 9-11 or COVID-19-like crisis away from losing. The only real solution are private block chains like Monero and non-cash unit of accounts like gold, silver, rice, dried beans, or outright barter.

I’ve tried to connect but there are so many options that I really don’t know what to do. The link has a series of node addresses. What do I do with them. There are networks, people, chats, files, channels, forums, boards. Where do I enter the node information? As far as I can get so far is that I have a New Channel listed in Activity for monerohub. I can’t subscribe to it or do anything except delete it. Can someone post a few screen shots from the beginning of how to get the boards for (I assume) monerohub . No explanation beyond the pictures is needed unless there’s a “gotcha” step that’s more complicated or behaves unintuitively.

One should never invest more than one is willing to loose. If he’s willing to lose it all, then there’s no problem. Let him be. In the long term, it’s uncertain whether Bitcoin will stay above the current price. As the ETF expands, Bitcoin usage will decline and it may eventually become a HODL-only asset that is very unprofitable to mine and mined only by the Blackrocks of the world to get their transactions approved. In the mid term, Bitcoin is now a “store of value” asset for the finance industry, meaning it can be fractionally reserved and effectually there will be far more than 21 million BTC once you include paper BTC, so the same sort of inflation tricks that’s done with any digital assets can be done on BTC. That being said, in this cycle, it’s not unreasonable to expect it to go to 100K based on past trends and current hype and the fact that large BTC purchases from slow moving funds like retirement funds have yet to approve BTC purchases. But if most purchases are done OTC, that might not affect the price and paper BTC might absorb BTC’s price increase. So your friend will have to accept that the current price might the the all time high of BTC forever, and it can only go down from here. But, IMO, it won’t go down too quickly or too much in the short term. So I don’t imagine that the downside risk is more than 30%. In sum, I think that in the short term, the upside and downside risk will be 30%, with a higher chance that the 30% upside will happen. Be prepared to intervene at the end of next year when it’s supposed to be the top since that will be the time your friend should collect his 30% gain or accept his 30% loss.

I don’t like CEXes and the whole transfer money in and transfer out process and Kraken appears to require an account. and I see a sign in. If ChangeNow or any other instant exchanges that don’t require 3D KYC/AML, I’ll use it. I haven’t purchase XMR in the last few months since I have enough for a major emergency and I can’t tie up more money, so I don’t know the current state of instant exchanges. But when I do need to buy again, if I can’t find an instant exchange with low KYC out there to buy XMR, I know that they still exist for the popular POW coins so I’d go the DEX route. But if those don’t exist, I will be more open to explore other options like Haveno or Kraken.

I’ve never understood the attraction to CEXes. IMO, they’re confusing, slow, require you to put funds into them and take funds out and wait for each to process, and have heavy KYC/AML. I gave up on then the first time I tried them. My first purchase of Monero was on the ChangeNow instant exchange. It was simple and at the time the KYC/AML was only a document. There’s no way I’d ever give a 3D video Selfie with the modern state of AI. Changing between cryptos on DEXes was even easier since there was no KYC/AML. I’ve never used LocalMonero but was willing to try it before it was shut down, but I’m looking forward to Serai. I’m not yet comfortable with Haveno but if I were to buy Monero now, I’d likely buy DAI or LTC or BCH on an instant exchange (depending on the exchange rate) and then swap with XMR immediately so it doesn’t cause a taxable event from the government’s perspective. Yes, it would be registered with the government that you had crypto, but unfortunately I love boating and things happen.

Sorry, I disagree. Yes inflation makes things worse, but for most of human existence for all of the world, except for the era of prosperity that started in the 1950s, the standard was closer to 60 hours a week of back breaking work, with Abrahamic religions giving people one day of rest. Also, for most of human existence in all the world, a tiny fraction of people were actually rich, except for modern times when there was a legitimate middle class. Inflation is just the way the ultra rich return us back to the historical norm. Getting rid of fiat and getting rid of inflationary banking systems are our only hope, but they won’t return us back before the modern norm. 40 hours is the best we can do for the foreseeable future even if we’re successful.

Put yourself in the place of the grocer. If one person asked you to accept platinum as payment, would you? Probably no. If 10 people or a few loyal customers did, you might look into it.