The issue is more the onramping than the offramping. As long as gift cards are available, it’s fairly easy to use Monero gift cards for Amazon/eBay/Facebook marketplace. This doesn’t create a Monero circular economy, but it does ensure that once you have XMR, you can live off it even if no-one else in your area accepts it. XMRBazaar is better since it help the Monero circular economy and provides a good way to both onramp and offramp.

Three things could greatly help XMR: (1) If banks could custody crypto (promised by Trump, hopefully other countries will follow), even non-XMR crypto and you’re allowed to transfer to a self-custodial wallet, then it would be trivial for merchants to accept crypto and businesses to pay in crypto and for individuals to purchase crypto simply by moving money into your crypto account. CEXes would be irrelevant for everyone except degens. Once that happens, it’ll be easy for people to be paid in crypto which is easy to convert to and from XMR without KYC. (2) If BasicSwapDex is made easy to install and the appropriate automation scripts are created, converting to and from XMR via P2P should be trivial. (3) If Serai is finalized and proven itself and the appropriate automation scripts are created, converting to and from XMR will be trivial. (4) If all three of the above happen, having a store front that accepts XMR is trivial, even if the store only wants USDT. Also having all your savings in XMR is also trivial and can be automated.

It does. The proof of status comes from your value to the community and that can change with time.

Look at Michael Saylor, for instance. He’s undeniably an official Bitcoin representative, yet he’s undeniably been incredibly harmful to the Bitcoin ethos, moving it from digital cash, to digital energy, to digital gold (HODL only), to now digital property (i.e. government controlled trad-fi) that should be managed custodially and is subject to a “digital property tax” (i.e. wealth tax). Through Saylor and his ilk, other Bitcoin destroyers have been promoted as Bitcoin representatives and actual OGs have been sidelined.

Meanwhile, Luke Parker (now retiring for a bit), Doug Thurman, Arctic Mine, etc are undeniably Monero representatives because they proved their value, but when some of these representatives try to promote the Zano leads as being kindred spirits with Monero and potentially the way forward for Monero, a large portion of the Monero community balked because whatever past contributes they may or may not have had, they don’t represent Monero now and promotes some very un-Monero ideals. This healthy direct contribution=representation ideal keeps Monero on track and on mission.

I used to watch on odysee but unfortunately MoneroTalk stopped posting there. GrayJay is an alternative the NewPipe that tend to work better, but when it doesn’t work, NewPipe tends to work. Unfortunately the two apps don’t have a common playlist so you’ll have to manually add all your NewPipe channels to GrayJay and sync them.

A problem with zcash is that most people only use transparent addresses, so if you are one of the few people who uses shielded transactions, you’re wallet is already marked as “dirty”. In addition,I don’t know if any other crypto has tor nodes and dandelion++, zano and pirate chain included. Add to this private transaction rates and a large anonymity set and a skeptical community that actively searches for and rewards finding flaws, there is no competition. That may change in the future, but not any time soon.

I think you’re talking about a number of things that have nothing to do with each other. Yes, communists and anarchists have the “just one thing” in common and don’t seem to understand anacyclosis (i.e. all political systems are unstable and flow into each other), but both are a response to the current system. It is not a coincidence that the tea party and occupy walls. Communists accept that governments are going to take over everything, so if that’s going to happen, it should work for the people (it won’t…it will just make it more abusive and self righteous). Anarchists see government abuses and think that getting rid of governments will fix things (it won’t, it just replaces abused laws with “might makes right”). Each are pushing in different directions of anacyclosis and each will fail. So far, the most stable political system is a mixed system that contains multiple systems, but even this seems on the verge of collapse.

WRT Open source, it’s not about communism. It actually encompasses many contradictory political theories. Even the self proclaimed commie himself, Richard Stallman had no issues with selling open source programs or paying for maintenance, so there is some nuance you’re missing even for the open source commies. Let’s not even mention the more nuanced views of Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux). I’ve been using Linux since the 1990s when it was real bear to use. I did it because I was feed up about being controlled and spied on and nickel and dimed and planned obsolescence. Plus i wanted to know how it worked. I could take a Unix programmer from 1980 and drop him in front of modern Unix and he could start producing useful code. There’s no way I could do that on Windows. Linux is good because it’s motive for existence is usability, not profit even though profit can enter into the equation. Yes, you may have to pay for something advanced now, but if it’s needed and if it’s not niche, it will eventually be developed by open source and create a more advanced ecosystem upon which more innovation can be build and paid for if it is good enough.

WRT Lemmy, it depends on which forums you visit. On my forums, I tend to see more apolitical and privacy focused people (i.e. they don’t want their info shared to the collective), so your impression may say more about you than Lemmy. WRT Nostr, look at the top 20 tags for any week of the year. Over three quarters have to do with either Bitcoin or Nostr. Yes, other topics exist but for the most part Nostr is a bitcoin maxi echo chamber that tries to chase away all non-Bitcoin conversations. It’s being ruined for any non-bitcoin usage.

WRT cloudflare, agreed, even the monero.town owner agrees so it’s not about ideology. He said he’s not technical enough to know another solution since not using cloudflare resulted in weeks of downtime. Give him a hand on a solution…you can even open up a CSS to fund this work, and you can be sure this will be taken care of since cloudfare prevents Tor from being used.

Regardless, the world is complex. If you see the world as “Just my one thing” alone, you might be a victim of your own analysis.

Kewbit, if you look at my previous response, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and encouraged you to get an emotionally intelligent friend to tell your side of the story. If this is the response, it’s clear that whether or not you were sincere about completing Haveno mobile and whether or not you wished to scam, you’re far too petty an immature to work on the CSS, so the CSS was correct in its decision to close the CSS. It is a pity since Haveno mobile is a much needed part of the XMR ecosystem and I hope someone completes it.

As for BasicSwapDEX, the code is finicky and is difficult to install but it does what it says it does. It needs a lot of improving for the newbie to get right but it does work and it does have liquidity. I’d say it’s about six months away from being as competitive as Haveno, and its potential for automation makes it a worthy part of the XMR ecosystem. If BasicSwapDEX mobile could ever be developed, it would be even more competitive.

Thanks Kewbit. I hope this is a misunderstanding that can be resolved. That being said, it’s unlikely many people will beta test a binary without source code, especially if the main reason to use Haveno is to avoid KYC. IMO, it’s probably best to address the drama and move on. Since you’re likely gun shy about speaking out, it’s perhaps best to contact a diplomatic friend that can help express your side and why you don’t feel comfortable releasing the code and what would it take to do it.

IMO, there would only be two reasons why you’ve sent out a follow up post here: (1) You were sincere but made some bad judgements (e.g. timelines, amount of work, how much XMR you needed, “life got in the way”, overreactions that cascaded, the code is uglier than you thought and wanted to clean it up, etc) and you hope there’s some way forward, (2) You’re hoping to make more money either through binary back doors or selling data or convincing people to fund the rest of the project outside of CSS so you can scam them.

I haven’t decided which conclusion to make. At the beginning of the last crypto crash most people were angry at the original Haveno team for halting work when the price of XMR crashed with many calling that team scammers. They made a poor judgement on pricing and could have avoided the drama if they priced their work in USD (paid with XMR). Of course, if XMR continued to go up they’d miss out on the USD gains, but fair is fair. Either you want security or risk. Choosing one and then complaining about not choosing the other isn’t fair. When they continued their work once the XMR price appreciated and released, all past accusations were forgotten (I know I did until tried to remember an example) and they were and still are appreciated for their hard work.

If you are sincerely #1 and are able to express yourself reasonably, there is a way back. If not, #2 will be the conclusion most people will make and releasing the binaries without source code will reinforce this conclusion.

I agree with Bobr. As someone who regularly keeps friendly relations between several parties who “know” they are “in the right” I can tell you that it’s unlikely the complete story is being told once emotions take over. When that happens truth takes a back seat to “being right”. From reading the logs, emotions were inflamed far too early with kewbit threatening to stop right at the beginning. You can’t lead a horse to water. At that point, the CSS should have dispassionally lay down the law without insult or consession and either negotiate an end to the CSS or negotiate new timelines and expectations.

My reading of that likely happened is this. Kewbit appears to have classic engineer delusions. Engineers naturally overestimate their abilities and underestimate the difficulties. Experienced engineers or well managed engineers know about this tendency and add buffers and contingencies “just in case”. Kewbit likely thought he could do more than he was able to in the time period, but “knows he is just needs to get over a minor difficulty to make up the time”. When he missed his deadlines, he became defensive and the emotions on both sides started there and escalated.

Could the drama been avoided? From the CSS side, yes. Calling Kewbit an exit scammer automatically ends any hope that can be resolved and brings needless drama. When the deadline was missed and attempts at negotiation (which are not likely show in the published logs) failed, the CSS should have been withdraw and a settlement should be made. At most, it should have been announced, “Due to on project completion disagreements, the CSS has been withdrawn. Anyone else that wishes to take over the CSS may apply with a plan.”

Isn’t possible to do it on RandomX? Yes but not on Monero since that’s not its purpose and it hurts anonymity (review the Mordinals reaction).

Why the F will you sell JPEGs with the Monero mascot that I can download off of Google images for free? Yes, it’s fugazi as is most of the “modern fine art” market.

That being said, NFTs are available on CEXes and there will be an easy XMR to this NFT atomic swap so it might be an on/off ramp for some people.

No but it’s a good thing for a few reasons (1) XMR really needs to focus on it’s primary mission. Blockchain based smart contracts make privacy harder. (2) There is no consensus on a good smart contract language is yet, especially for UTXOs so it’s best to wait until a standard emerges (note there are several challengers to EVMs that might yet replace it), (3) Once something is on the public blockchain, it’ll stay forever so it needs to be done right the first time so we need a mature smart contract standard (see previous point), (4) It can be handled by a parallel merge mined chain for added flexibility and experimentation so XMR might never need it, (5) the comining implementation of FCMPs has featurres that will make it easier to do, so any effort spent now will need to be thrown out. (6) Most common smart contracts like automatic payments and smart contracts and payment channels can be done by using time locked XMR and checkpoints (with clear roll back rules) and step signatures. These can be integrated into wallets to run in the background, so it might not even be necessary for most cases to hard code opcodes onto the main block chain. All you need to do is leave your phone on to handle the checkpoints. Atomic swaps and the “Monero Subscriptions Wallet” already prove this is possible. All that’s needed is a more full featured wallet extension library that handles all the typical smart contract cases (i.e. currently there are thousands of smart contracts out there…most are abandoned and only a handful are actually useful. We could implement those).

Given Monero’s anonymity and the media lock out, it would be hard to know how popular Monero is in Russia. Haveno isn’t the best measure of adoption. Perhaps Russians prefer swapping Monero for other easier to acquire crypto on Russia-agnostic DEXes? Remember also Russian citizens are masters of covert communications. Back when computer programs were on cassette tapes a common strategy was to embed programs and documents in the middle of extremely hard to listen to music like high volume death metal or MERZBOW Woodpecker #1. Any guard charged with finding illegal content would have to listen through hours of ear-bleeding and harsh music before they could detect that “something” was being hidden. Perhaps there’s an active trade in the underground market which the average citizen is a part of. Perhaps they have an active independent street exchange as is available in Argentina (from what I know, street vendors tend to give the best rates).

these sanctions are actually hurting the individual citizens more than the government to whom they should be targeted.

Of course. That’s the point. Sanctions rarely ever harm the leaders. Do you think 1000 times harsher sanctions would affect the North Korean dictator one bit? Sanctions are meant to cause so much civilian pain that the governments has no choice but to yield or risk revolution. Causing revolution in the enemy to weaken it is an extremely old and effective strategy to win without fighting. The US would not likely exist without the support of the French of the American revolution against the British. Of course, the french monarchy might still be around if it did not go bankrupt funding the American revolution, thus causing its own revolution, so this strategy has its dangers.

You do not need to fight governments. You just need to make them irrelevant. As much as possible, reduce your government dependance footprint.

I think you miss what the poster and I are trying to say. On LocalMonero and on Bisq2, you could purchase without deposit based solely on the reputation of the person. That is all the person was asking. I commented that if Haveno had a field in the seller information for private contact (e.g. simplex, signal, etc) the trade could be done outside of Haveno since other than listing the sellers and contact information, Haveno would provide no guarantees. That’s an acceptable risk for many people to start off - you just don’t risk too much on first contact. Unfortunately I’ve checked and , Haveno doesn’t provide this feature yet…IMO, it will as it incorporates Bisq2 features or at least adds a contact field in the seller information.

I installed Haveno-reto but haven’t used it yet. Is it not possible to contact the seller directly (without deposit)?

If so, then why not just contact the seller directly and handle it out of Haveno? Other than listing an order book, Haveno wouldn’t be providing any value in mediating the order since only one side is actually using Haveno.

Give it time. I never used LocalMonero since I was happy with instant exchanges but I came close to using it just before it got shut down. At the time, there were only 2-3 acceptable sellers of XMR for Canadian Dollars and the best one kept having banking issues. There are currently 2 acceptable sellers of XMR for Canadian Dollars, which means that in Haveno’s short life it’s getting close to replacing LocalMonero for me. My hope is that eventually it gets integrated with Unstoppable Swap and BasicSwapDEX (and maybe Serai DEX) since there’s no technical reason it can’t automatically mirror the offers. Once that happens, it’ll have more than enough liquidity for anyone.

May I suggest that you don’t convert to fiat and instead buy either gift cards and debit cards or buy items directly with Monero? This avoids all the KYC issues with offramps and helps the Monero economy. If you need the cash in hand, then buy a gift card for something you normally pay with fiat (e.g. amazon, gas, phone, vpn, etc) and then use the money you would have spent on those items or bills for whatever you need the cash for.

Also agreed. Having atomic swaps for BCH, LTC (MimbleWimble), and ETH would be fantastic. IMO, we don’t need liquidity pools if we could have a simple UI that would allow us to say “I have 30 LTC to convert to XMR” and it allows you to divide up your 30 LTC into several XMR offers and then press “start” to execute the batch process. Sure you might only be able to convert 29.3 LTC to XMR using this method, but it would be completely peer to peer and could be done without the need for an arbitrator or liquidity pools or (if it’s loaded into wallets) any separate software like Haveno that you have run on your computer. It would also allow someone to convert large quantities of one crypto into another safely without arbitrators. And if I’m not mistaken, the trade could be done in parallel so making a trade of 50 smaller exchanges would not be significantly longer than a single trade.

Objectively, ZCash has the equivalent of FCMP++ right now but there are a few issues. Firstly, most ZCash transactions are public so the anonymity set for ZCash is small and even smaller when compared with Monero which has a lot more users. Also, because of the former issue, every time you switch from public to private transactions, it taints your wallet just as it does with coinjoins in Bitcoin. There’s also a much smaller purely private ecosystem (e.g. Haveno, Atomic Swaps, Serai, Tari, DarkFI, etc), since there is less pressure to do things privately. That makes it easier for ZCash to cave to governments request, even if it didn’t have a company to target. It also lacks other features like Dandelion++ to help anonymity or P2Pool and RandomX to help avoid centralisation. Pirate chain, being a fork of ZCash, solves some of these issues by getting rid of the public blockchain but it is smaller and dependent on ZCash for new research so it is not viable yet.

Agreed, all wallets should included and added to a trust tier chart. Note that multicoin is not the only unreasonable exclusion. Non-reproducible wallets are also excluded, so the monero.com and Monerujo wallets are also excluded. Unless you have a completely controlled and specified environment (i.e. linker and linker version, compiler and compiler version, all needed libraries and library versions, target type), no source code is binary reproducible. You might get it with the JVM or Qt or Go but those are minority platforms for wallets. What counts is that you can compile the code yourself if you distrust the source. Similarly, multicoin is only a problem if monero is “just another coin” and not the primary coin of the wallet or if the code is mixed together so a bug in another coin could compromise the security of Monero. So Monerujo, Cake, and Monero.com should at least be added, even if they classify them as tier two wallets. Stack wallet would then go in tier three since it is multicoin without a Monero focus, and all the other wallets except Exodus for be tier four, and Exodus being closed source would be tier five.