The scary part is, that the US can do something like this if it wants to. A service provider saying “We’re privacy-friendly. Your email address is all we ask.” could end up this way. Think about so-called bullet-proof hosting providers or so-called trusted no-long VPN providers.

The only safe way, if any, may be that you never show them your IP… (much less any identifying information)

A fun project would be: factor Mersenne numbers! Naive trial division -> optimize your code by only trying valid candidates (you’ll learn about quadratic residues, Jacobi symbol etc.) -> You’ll soon realize that trial division only goes so far, motivated to learn new approaches. The P−1 method may impress you, it’s powerful. Enjoy coding that. -> But then, you’ll be frustrated by even stronger opponents here and there beyond M100, which the P−1 method can’t factor. Now you’ll be so ready, even determined, to learn ECM. At this point, you’ll find using elliptic curves is actually not so difficult, because it’s just like P−1. And yay, 20- or 30- digit numbers are no longer your enemies, they’re just small fish, elliptic curves rule!

Before you know it, you’ll have a clear, intuitive vision about “an elliptic curve over a finite field”. Try to understand why ECM works. Try to count the number of points. Everything you experience with ECM is related to ECC too.

I’m not that good; know enough to know that I don’t really know much. Just a hobbyist; posted ℍappy ℍamilton Day! here.

Yes, Monero is community-based. That is warm and fuzzy, except frankly, this Lemmy instance is not always very peaceful… its users tend to be vocal and variously a bit weird.

XMR is an interesting experiment and, although not perfect, rather successful so far. Several privacy-friendly companies accept XMR as you can see on kycnot.me so it has its ecology. Like you said in your OP, this might be what Satoshi really wanted to create.

For many people it’s difficult to get out of the box—ditching Google, Windows, &c. You have chosen and joined Lemmy (Fedi), even though there may be a more “popular” place elsewhere in non-libre world. That’s why I said thanks!

Thanks for joining monero.town :) Not only it’s a good crypto—it is a great privacy tool, recommended e.g. by privacyguides.org, accepted (as donations) by the Tor Project (which is endorsed by the BBC, the New York Times, etc. and now also by Amnesty International), by Tails.net, and many other privacy advocates.

You might be thinking about “investment” but the implications of Monero is much, much bigger—among other things, you may question today’s privacy invasion by some oppressive governments or monopolizing companies like Google.

Gandhi said that whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it's very important that you do it, 'cause nobody else will.

Also, if you happen to be a math geek or a cypherpunk, this thing is based on Elliptic (Ed25519)—something deep and fascinating for number theorists to study!

@alphonse Sorry, I double-posted a link to the same tweet. This was coincidental, we posted almost at the same time!

It might be better to use nitter.oksocial.net. It’s Tor-friendly so more people can see the linked post (while nitter.net is blocking Tor now).

A Cake contributor or contributors are also running, or related to, a blockchain analytics provider, Moonstone Research, specialized in tracing difficult-to-trace payment methods such as Monero, proudly saying, “Moonstone Research can provide leads when no other blockchain analysis firm can.” How? Maybe because their technology is so great, and/or unlike other companies, they’re running major remote nodes themselves, monitoring and recording a lot of things.

The positive side is, this Moon-Cake duality could help Monero improve, become more private, more untraceable. They simply may have tried to help solve the recent incident, never using it as a promotional opportunity of their unparalleled blockchain analytics.

• Postmortem of Monero CCS Hack: A Transaction Graph Analysis https://monero.town/post/996649

That said, this reminds me of Team Cymru, a company basically selling its skill to deanonymize netflow data. Someone from Team Cymru had managed to become an important board member of the Tor Project, hosting TorProject.org website and several bridges to the Tor Network. The Tor Project admitted the conflict of interest, and quickly fixed the issues once discovered.

Like mentioned above, the Moon-Cake duality could work positively for Monero. Nevertheless, one might want to think carefully about the potential ramifications of using Cake Wallet, related services, and especially their remote nodes. Nothing personal against Cake, its contributors, developers, supporters/users. On the contrary, I genuinely thank Justin Ehrenhofer (sgp/SamsungGalaxyPlayer) for revealing (at least part of) what they can do, what they’re doing as a side business. Thank you!

That should be easy if you do some script-fu, etc. Perhaps not so easy on Windows, though.

I understand that you may feel depressed, or even annoyed, for example when told, “Solving the problem foo is trivial if you use bar” when bar is not trivial nor realistic for you (or so you believe). For example, 2^149^−1 is easy to factor if you use elliptic curves, but studying elliptic curves may feel daunting (though it’s not so hard as you might think).

I do understand how you may feel in such a situation. I may be sometimes in a similar situation too.

Obviously, though, not trying to read about the solution bar wouldn’t solve the original problem foo. Not learning ECM doesn’t enable you to factor 2^149^−1 for example. Not trying to listen to about the L-word wouldn’t fix the annoyance of Windows. Annoyance itself may be harmless but everyone knows Windows is privacy-invasive and vulnerable to malware, viruses, keyloggers, etc. So staying too long there, refusing to learn some solution, something really bad might happen to you eventually. Honestly, something like that did happen to ourselves recently. Our community lost a lot of money, apparently stolen by attacker(s)—exactly what happened is still unknown, but the victimized wallet was on Ubuntu connected to Windows 10 via SSH.

You don’t need to ditch Windows. I respect your freedom to use non-free software. In fact, many L-word systems do include non-free blobs too!

That being said, may I suggest that you try different OS(es) just for 10 minutes, booted from a USB stick, when you have time, to see what it’s like. You might be surprised because it just works, actually more intuitive, you can use it easily, not to mention you’re not forced to see ads. Or no invasive telemetry. Feel free to ignore this suggestion if you really love Windows, thinking it’s the best OS ever. I respect freedom of thought!

I do agree most cryptocurrencies are scammy, or traded speculatively. It’s a free country, so one can do whatever they want to with their own money, but I personally think they’re like greedy gamblers.

I’m a Monero user, not a trader, not an investor. I have Monero because I use it. I support it because I’m a privacy advocate. I’ve never even once used a CEX, totally unrelated to investment. Your points may be valid for those investor people, though.

In hindsight, maybe something very simple—using Feather on Tails, and this USB stick is only physically connected when necessary—could have prevented this from happening. Maybe.

Also, when something is behind CF, Tor users often (though not always) just can’t open/use it. Say, you have a seriously privacy-centered website. Then try not to accept donations via ko-fi (behind CF) or have links to a video platform behind CF. Which just wouldn’t make sense (especially if your website is recommending Tor, even providing onion), making you look a bit stupid tbh.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) this kind of stupid websites are not rare; Tor users are so get used to blocking, it’s unlikely they get upset. If necessary, they can easily circumvent the blocking in various ways (except they may lose interest or assume it’s perhaps worthless, and as soon as they see “Just a moment…” they may just close it).

PS: Recently (2023-09-20, noticed by Anti-Censorship team) some of snowflake users also got problems. If a Snowflake client gets a Cloudflare IP address, their connection will fail. The latest Tor Browser 12.5.5 is out (2023-09-26), with a workaround, where snowflake avoiding IP that might resolve to CF (Bug tor-browser#42120).

You may want to also check kycnot.me — any option could be a good option for you, including one where you purchase non-xmr then swap it to xmr, or you swap xmr to non-xmr then downgrade it to fiat (or gift cards if you’re purchasing anything) for backward compatibility.

There are several options where a bank account is unnecessary too (e.g. cash by mail), or an option with almost zero country restrictions. DYOR. Out of the box & good luck :)

This Licence decision diagram might be helpful for general public:

1. Allow others to create closed-source projects with your code?
2. Yes -> MIT license
3. No -> Allow others to create a closed-source web service with your code?
4. [3.] Yes -> GPL-3 or LGPL-3
5. [3.] No -> AGPL-3