You do not need to fight governments. You just need to make them irrelevant. As much as possible, reduce your government dependance footprint.
Also agreed. Having atomic swaps for BCH, LTC (MimbleWimble), and ETH would be fantastic. IMO, we don't need liquidity pools if we could have a simple UI that would allow us to say "I have 30 LTC to convert to XMR" and it allows you to divide up your 30 LTC into several XMR offers and then press "start" to execute the batch process. Sure you might only be able to convert 29.3 LTC to XMR using this method, but it would be completely peer to peer and could be done without the need for an arbitrator or liquidity pools or (if it's loaded into wallets) any separate software like Haveno that you have run on your computer. It would also allow someone to convert large quantities of one crypto into another safely without arbitrators. And if I'm not mistaken, the trade could be done in parallel so making a trade of 50 smaller exchanges would not be significantly longer than a single trade.
Agreed, all wallets should included and added to a trust tier chart. Note that multicoin is not the only unreasonable exclusion. Non-reproducible wallets are also excluded, so the monero.com and Monerujo wallets are also excluded. Unless you have a completely controlled and specified environment (i.e. linker and linker version, compiler and compiler version, all needed libraries and library versions, target type), no source code is binary reproducible. You might get it with the JVM or Qt or Go but those are minority platforms for wallets. What counts is that you can compile the code yourself if you distrust the source. Similarly, multicoin is only a problem if monero is "just another coin" and not the primary coin of the wallet or if the code is mixed together so a bug in another coin could compromise the security of Monero. So Monerujo, Cake, and Monero.com should at least be added, even if they classify them as tier two wallets. Stack wallet would then go in tier three since it is multicoin without a Monero focus, and all the other wallets except Exodus for be tier four, and Exodus being closed source would be tier five.
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).
Very interesting video. Is far as I can see, there are really only three points of weakness that were exploited by the chain analysis. The first was if the transaction was started using one of their Monero nodes. The second was exchanges or partner services. The third was the fee structure used. So as long as you use the default fees, use trusted Monero nodes (especially your own), and you either don't use exchanges/partner services or at the very least, have multiple wallets where each wallet connects to at most one exchange/service (i.e. one wallet has public money inflows from a single service and another has public money outflows from a single service), it would be virtually impossible to have your transactions traced.
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.
One should never invest more than one is willing to loose. If he's willing to lose it all, then there's no problem. Let him be. In the long term, it's uncertain whether Bitcoin will stay above the current price. As the ETF expands, Bitcoin usage will decline and it may eventually become a HODL-only asset that is very unprofitable to mine and mined only by the Blackrocks of the world to get their transactions approved. In the mid term, Bitcoin is now a "store of value" asset for the finance industry, meaning it can be fractionally reserved and effectually there will be far more than 21 million BTC once you include paper BTC, so the same sort of inflation tricks that's done with any digital assets can be done on BTC. That being said, in this cycle, it's not unreasonable to expect it to go to 100K based on past trends and current hype and the fact that large BTC purchases from slow moving funds like retirement funds have yet to approve BTC purchases. But if most purchases are done OTC, that might not affect the price and paper BTC might absorb BTC's price increase. So your friend will have to accept that the current price might the the all time high of BTC forever, and it can only go down from here. But, IMO, it won't go down too quickly or too much in the short term. So I don't imagine that the downside risk is more than 30%. In sum, I think that in the short term, the upside and downside risk will be 30%, with a higher chance that the 30% upside will happen. Be prepared to intervene at the end of next year when it's supposed to be the top since that will be the time your friend should collect his 30% gain or accept his 30% loss.
For the record, this is more information on how drive chains are implemented in Z-Cash: https://lightco.in/2020/04/30/xcat-drivechain/ .
Essentially, a drive chain works by defining a wallet to accept payments and return money. When you put money in the wallet with a note on which sidechain wallet you want to have the money directed, a token representing the money placed into the money deposited is placed into the sidechain wallet. To remove money from the side chain, you send a note to the side chain where to send the money to and the tokens are destroyed and the wallet that you deposited the money returns the money to you.
This is extremely easy to build in Monero and is transparent that there is a point of trust (unlike BTC's Lightning where at least the wallet appears it's completely noncustodial), and that everything from Monero-LIghtning to Monero-Liquid to Monero-EtheriumCompetitor to even a currency exchange (put money into the wallet pool in one currency and get money back in the other currency by a drivechain on the other currency) can be built into Monero. It's also clear that it could be done today without the Monero developers permission, but without some kind of endorsement, no-one would trust it since it's so easy to rug pull.
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.
@aodhsishaj@lemmy.world 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.
g2devi
joined 1 year ago
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.