In Europe, probably not. The bureaucracy is too thick. For the US, maybe but as mentioned in other responses we don't need CEX access. What is likely is that due to Trump's executive order, banks may be allowed to hold digital assets. That means, you could just open a litecoin or USDT account in your bank and transfer money in and out of it from your fiat bank accout. CEXes are complicated (compared with instant exchanges) and tend to have KYC rules that if stolen can be used with AI to not only identity theft you, they have the power to put you at the scene of a crime or blackmail you. Banks don't need nearly as much KYC since they know you directly. This would have a huge effect. It allows you to be paid in crypto and merchants to receive money in crypto so crypto can instantly be used by all stores without pain. Not only that, if you can be paid in Litecoin, paying it to your personal wallet, you can use MWEB to instantly swap it with Monero (e.g. on BasicSwapDex, Haveno, or a DEX) so you can hold all your daily money in Monero. It should be possible to do this automatically via a script. Unless you want to do a lot of trading and want the proper tax forms automatically set up for you, I see no reason why anyone of any experience level would even want to use CEXes when banks could hold crypto.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

What does unlawful sources mean? If you donated to a Russian band a few years ago, you were doing something lawful. Now, it's unlawful in some parts of the world. Even remittances to your Russian family puts you in question. If you supported certain protests, you can be unlawful, but lawful the next government. Privacy pools only "work" if they are federated because laws throughout the world are not uniform, but being part of the "wrong" federation can make you unlawful. In the end, fear will prevent people from joining, and that fear will spread to the pool developers since at least one federation will do something another country does not like. I'll fail before it gets started. Just use Monero.