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Skepticism Sunday #1 -- Jul 21, 2024
(monero.town)
This is the lemmy community of Monero (XMR), a secure, private, untraceable currency that is open-source and freely available to all.
Wallets
Android (Cake Wallet) / (Monero.com)
iOS (Cake Wallet) / (Monero.com)
Instance tags for discoverability:
Monero, XMR, crypto, cryptocurrency
Despite how bullish i am for monero in general, i have a major concern. Picture the following:
The monero community starts to move heavily into adoption (see what xmrbazaar.com is trying to achieve) and it starts to become widespread, BUT it's still not officially allowed by governments. In fact, imagine that governments start to realize how bad monero is for their own economics and centralized control, and they start to explicitely ban it and enforce penalties for just using it (like any controlled substance). what about then ?
What about that one random farmer (small business, selling products attending to people's basic needs to survive), who wants to accept monero to sell his vegetables, he's going to get bothered by authorities for publicly accepting monero, after getting enough fines, i'm sure he'd actually give up trying to use monero officially.
Going even further down that road, as this would be an attack on the currency itself, what about that one fed guy buying monero (wherever, right, haveno, or whatever CEX) just to find out who's selling monero, to literally prosecute them for just having monero?
Would Monero always remain a way to transact secretely ? rather than existing it as a way to transact publicly ?
This technology is not even meant to conform to any law, nor any governmental concern to assert their control over the populations, in fact, it is a direct threat to their existing control.
Now for me, Monero adoption must be a Bottom-UP process you go from individuals, to small businesses (farmers, bakeries, etc) and try to make monero getting adopted further up into bigger and bigger companies, which is (currently at least) increasingly less likely to get adopted due to financial regulations the higher up you go. Picture the day when those same financial regulations trinkle down all the way to the bottom of the pyramid onto small businesses and individuals, this'll be a very tedious environment just to transact monero
BTW, are you the nihilist? The one with the guides we see around those parts?
yup its me :)
There are plenty of tradesmen working on weekends without reporting it to tax authorities. Common in cities, practically the norm in rural areas. Time spend working doesn't leave a paper trail and whoever hired them can buy all the materials for "personal use". Farmers do need to buy supplies, but unless they have John Deer equipment, the harvest amount will not be automatically counted, and it's trivial to sell some part of it on non-official markets.
I think it all hinges on how fast people get used to using monero "for real" and not only to buy some merch or for other meme purposes. When regulations come down, the people who will be hit the hardest are those bridging between fiat and xmr, because their banking activity can be moderately easy controlled.
@itsmect @nihilist
I agree. Alaska already has this culture in many parts. In rural communities they'll happily pay each other for services in fish, firewood, fuel, etc..And XMR is doing well there too by all accounts.
If the farmer accepts XMR over the darknet (I'm really hoping that XMR adoption will lead to widespread use of I2P over TOR), the government is going to have a fairly hard time of it without active 0-days.
He needs to use the darknet and keep his mouth shut, and things will fine unless he's a kingpin of sorts
yea tor and monero go hand in hand, but even over tor. take mr fed going to that farmer store over tor paying in monero, at some point he has to get his vegetables physically, where he can identify who the farmer is (cant just send food by mail i guess ?)
if the farmer has to retain his anonymity, he needs a way to send his vegetables anonymously to the buyer
Farmers market on the weekend lol