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.

Actually, the meme is correct and something I didn’t realize. Money is deferred proof of work (i.e. a store of wealth) and a unit of exchange. Money allows me to have a unit exchange with you without knowing what your needs are so we don’t have to barter. Since I won’t need to know what you eventually will want for barter, I can store value for the future. Note, any commonly accepted nonperishable commodity (fiat, gold, silver, Monero, rice, beans, cigarettes, beaver pelts, etc) fits this definition too.

Granted, but searching bank records requires a warrant and you’d have to have one for all possible banks. Donations might be tracked (if not made in person), but distribution of donations are a whole another story since the people involved were already debanked…they could only spend the cash and they would likely mostly spend the cash in places that didn’t scan bills. Even if they directly deposited the money into the bank, there would be no record of who got the donated money (remember, the people involved were debanked so the only way for them to get the cash if it were directly given to them). With Bitcoin, there’s a clear trace from donator to donation collector to debanked person stored in the blockchain so it can be retrieved for analysis at leisure. With AI it’s possible to greatly narrow down the path to the extent that standard police leg work and warrants can find the path with a high degree of accuracy.

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.

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.

If you want to start a new community on Bastyon or Brighteon.io, go right ahead. There are other communities on reddit, matrix, Simplex, and individual posts on nostr. People gravitate towards the community that have other non-Monero accounts that suit their interests. IMO, if monero.town is defederated, people who use monero.town on lemmy are more likely to either return to reddit or move to matrix or nostr or simplex rather than try yet another new platform, but if you do succeed in getting people to join, I’ll happily at least look in on it to see what else the platform has to offer.

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).

Note with this federated approach it would be possible for some instances to add plug-ins for haveno and basicswaodex and serai.

I agree in principle but in practise it would be a disaster without a plan. Localmonero.co works because it is THE P2P XMR place. If there are 100 versions, the liquidity on each would be so low that Noone would use it, especially for non USD trades. Having 100 localmoneros is good but you need a federated login like nostr and when you search for offers you would see offers for all instances of localmonero, or at least the most reputable ones. With this approach, the new localmonero would be unstoppable.

Here’s instruction on use: https://learn.robosats.com/read/en/

I think the key issue is the lightning network and the lack of user state so they user doesn’t know how many steps there are or where they are in process. Getting rid of lightning solves parts of the issue. The user state issue is a newbie UI mistake that most DEXes have solved by including something basic like providing the steps involved in the sidebar, highlighting where you are in the process and how to get to the next step. What I found intimidating on LocalMonero was the openness of it and the fact that may ads requested either KYC or to use Telegram (which I have no need of installing). The two extra layers on anonymity in robosats discourages KYC or use of 3rd parties to discuss the transaction. The discussions can take place on an ID-less chat like SimpleX which is integrated. I believe that SimpleX supports plugins to allow for automation, so crypto-to-crypto trades can be done without user intervention.

The point I’m trying to make is that in the absence of LocalMonero, it is possible to build a replacement using existing technologies (Tor,Robosats,SimpleX,Haveno,BasicSwap,Serai, etc), in a more private, anonymous, an easier and less intimidating to understand technologies.

Eventually Monero will ossify and be linked to the existing financial system just like cash and gold. But when it happens it has to be on Moneros terms. Unfortunately bitcoin ossified and got adopted before it became popular. Btc.maxis believe Btc is popular but that is only in comparison with other crypto. If you look at people like rebel capitals on YouTube try to live off crypto outside Europe or the US you see it no crypto is anywhere near usable except perhaps Usdt on tron. That’s to Btc, monero has a guide on what not to do.