POS is fundamentally flawed. It increases centralization because people won't want to validate themselves and instead delegate their stake to "trusted institutions". Essentially, you're recreating the existing financial system. POS is also less secure since you only lose X dollars for misdeeds but have the power to do far more than X dollars of damage. And if all you want to do is damage, that slashed stake is just the cost of doing business. And if people are staking with you, you don't even risk losing your own money. And although the "guarantee" that the validator is doing right comes form the slashing of the stake, the enforcement of that slashing is political (i.e. others have to gang up on you to take your stake). When enforcement is political, wrongful slashing is inevitable. Finally, when a 51% attack is possible with validators, it's imposible to undo it...unlike POW which can call on the community to start a few miners on their PCs.

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.

Something is seriously wrong. There's a reason decentralisation is important. Anonymity or not, you never put all your eggs (digital or physical) in one basket for precisely this sort of reason. Once the wallet size reached a certain threshold (say 100 or 500 XMR), a new wallet should have been created for subsequent funds and the previous wallet should be in a hardware or paper wallet with a different trusted person ideally multisig. If funds were stolen via hack or the police forces the wallet holder to give up the keys, only a fifth (for a 500 XMR wallet) or a twenty fifth (for a 100 XMR wallet) of the amount would have been lost. If multisig is buggy, it need be ready for Seraphis. If it's just a matter of UI, then it needs to made usable and widely adopted. Remember, one of the key advantages of Monero is that it make privacy easier. You can try use Bitcoin and go through a lot of hoops to get privacy and forever stay vigilant, or just use Monero. Multisig and managing multiple accounts should be at most as difficult as Bitcoin.

Instead of POS (see my previous post), it would make much more sense to adapt the Nimble Wimble approach of making it so that validation is P2P whenever both parties are online. If I buy from you and you agree, then the purchase should been validated with 2 confirmations. Since we both agree that the transaction is made, it's no-one else's business if the transaction is valid. This would be much less resource intensive than even POS and be faster. If only one party is online at a time, it should be possible to have 1 confirmation and the other confirmation can be delegated to a miner. If neither are online at the time, then the usual POW takes place. Of course, that would mean that all wallets would have to be validators, but since you're only validating your own transactions, it should be light weight.

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.

Actually it can't because Bitcoin is a naked blockchain and you will be able to look at it in its whole glory. What mixers do is essentially allow you to occasionally hide your face. Sure, someone who doesn't know about your mole on your left thigh might not recognise you, but the rest of you is still exposed. Even worse, because of the high fees involved in moving funds around, you're paying a high fee for that face mask.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Depending on how serious you are about "getting government approved", you can do a cross chain analysis on yourself and provide necessary view keys. To prove you bought 10K of Monero, just show that your bank account went down 10K and your Monero account went up 10K (at the past exchange rate). To show you exchanged 5K Monero for 5K Bitcoin, show that 5K Monero was transferred from your wallet at the same time 5K was added to your Bitcoin wallet. It's extremely cumbersome and requires that you have access to all wallets/accounts and is extremely invasive on your privacy, but it can be done if you really want to. Personally, I'd agree about the tax attorney. Often there's a way of "legitimising" grandfathered funds, but expected to be taxed to the max. Alternately, there may be a way of doing crypto loans so that you get the money without actually cashing out.

No comparison, I like hammermann's the best. The only real criticism is that white text on black "burns my eyes" and is harder to read, so I'd much rather an off white font is used. The offwhite that's under the Monero coin on the side is about the right brightness. The only caution I'd give is that although the Roadmap is cool and both new and old users want to see it, it might be best to keep it off the front page since it's unlikely that it would be updated regularly and it might be easier to maintain on a different page (or offsite, e.g. github).

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.

@[email protected] It seems as long as you have an anonymous email and mail box somewhere, you can be anonymous with these cards. It's an easy off ramp for daily living for the average person. One thing I don't like about these cards is that they're not refillable. So unless you have a purchase of exactly $50, you'll have large number low spend amount cards ($1.23 on this card, $4.06 on this card, $0.02 on this card) which you'll either never use or you'll have to convince someone to accept payment with several of these cards.

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."

Diversity is your friend. It has been illegal to have gold. During the Canadian trucker's protest, trucks have been confiscated, and companies have been forced to close. Bitcoin wallets have been tainted so they could not be withdrawn from CEXes. During those protests, many properties with mortgages were foreclosed because banks froze trucker accounts so they could not pay mortgages. As long as DEXes and P2P exist, Monero is safe. Diversification can reduce the risk of any single attack.

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

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.

Why not both? No one platform dominates today. Reddit's monero community, lemmy's monero community, nostr's monero community, matrix's monero community, and twitter's monero community are all distinct. Monero needs to be supported everwhere since the world is moving away of the "one world monoculture". WRT Nostr vs ActivePub (Lemmy/Mastodon), Nostr has a unique ID assigned to each person that can be easily portable, but the over-reliance on GUIDs makes it harder to identify people. ActivePub has a more diverse community but your identity is tied to a server. That being said, it is possible to move profile identities with the host support. The GUID and identity issue can be solved in both protocols within a year with suitable software upgraded, but the community issue is a much more difficult issue to change. Nostr tends to be more geeky while Lemmy tends to be more an "every day folks" forum.

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.