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.
g2devi
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.
Yes, adopt those threads on Monero Town but do not be surprised if it doesn't change the size of the reddit population. People on reddit that have no other interests, might move to Monero Town, but most reddit users started with interests in several reddit forums and monero just happens to be one of them. They won't leave reddit for Monero Town, although they might add to their social media if Monero Town is much better than /r/monero. If you want them to move from reddit, you have to make sure the other groups are also on lemmy. My suggestion is to have a poll on /r/monero asking people which groups do people look at. Once you have that list, then find the comparable lemmy group (if there is any) and then post it on reddit. That resource would open people up to considering life outside of reddit. Without that resource, expect slow change.
You're logically correct but people aren't...at least not in a straight forward way. There are lots of thing that have zero value but are tremendously overvalued because they get value "in other ways" which are downplayed. Take fine art. Some "fine art" is used in influence peddling. For instance, it may be illegal to give a politician 1 billion dollars, but perfectly legal to buy the politician's back of the envelop scribble as "art" for 1 billion. "Fine art" is also a common way money laundering happens and creating tax writeoffs out of nothing. As for BTC, it would not matter if there was no retail usage. As long as it can be a unit of account that can get shuffled once a month between megabanks, all legit transfers of value can happen on L2s. Banks have been at this for thousands of years. They know how to control, capture and keep the value of any commodity. What counts is trust and BTC, even after the megabank takeover will still be decentalized enough to preserve trust across banks, and if there is an issue, BTC could be swapped with something like wrapped BTC on Solana and the original BTC coins can be burned, leaving BTC as a burnt out relic. Thankfully Monero is currently free of "the system", but if privacy is ever accepted as necessary by the mass portion of the population, we need to be vigilant.
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.
I think it's because finance in general is more a guy's conversation area. Put two arbitrary guys from anywhere in the world together and they'll talk about one of the following: sports/gaming, business/finance, technology, politics and family. XMR covers at least three of these. Women tend to have more social interests so finance (other than budgeting, where women dominate, even it hyper-traditional families) is a much smaller percentage of most women's conversation. It's not to say that privacy isn't important to women, but if you want a privacy podcast for women, it has to be more social. If you want a pro-privacy podcast for women, get the following women to start a group podcast: Naomi Brockwell (privacy), Janice McAfee (privacy money activist), Vanessa Harris (practical altcoins with strong support for privacy in crypto), and some women in the "Women Leading Privacy" organisations around the world. If you want such a podcast, reach out directly to these women, encourage others to do so, and pledge to support the podcast, either by spreading the world, or helping organise it, or day to day, or even through a donation (in XMR of course).
There is no "we". Like fiat, Monero is used by activists and persecuted people on all sides of any issue or normies in messed up countries where banks prevent you from getting your own money or normies who long for something better (either new or from the before times).
I'd be perfectly happy if the fiat system returned to the 1980s when you could get a bank account without ID, banks had to bribe you to share purchase history with "partners", banks didn't censor you because of your politics, you weren't asked questions or restricted when you wanted to remove your money from the bank, MMT did not exist, and governments provided fewer services so they taxed you less. But that world isn't coming back (at least not without a collapse). A 1960s world when fiat was still tied to gold would be better. But that's even more unrealistic without a collapse. There are still a number of people who still remember the before times, and many have a similar vision and we can reach them. Bitcoin isn't good enough...it's too public...the information on it is too permanent. Showing the account balance and purchase history of an arbitrary Bitcoiner to a normie is the surest way to turn him off to crypto, especially when that normie learns that you can find out the purchases made during their younger years. People don't want to be financial exhibitionists. So privacy coins like Monero are our only hope and our only hope to reach the normie.
People who do not remember the before times tend to either accept he current state or lean to a form of libertarianism or anarchism or agorism.
IMO, it's a good thing there is no "we". It means Monero is for everyone.
While I do admire the pledge and I hope it succeeds, IMO, it's a bit too idealistic given how few people currently accept Monero. My suggestion is to have three tiers...platinum (the above)...gold (add "where possible" to each level) and bronze (add "or other crypto" but not fiat when not possible).
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.