I agree to an extent, but banning from CEXes is the only way for Monero to truly become digital cash since cash is P2P. If everything depends upon CEXes, all Monero has done is replicate the existing financial institution. We might as well adopt anonymous repaid debit cards. It would have been best if this happened after Haveno, Serai, Serai integrating with the Maya Protocol, Seraphis, and FCMP (Full Chain Membership Proofs). But realistically, Haveno was taking forever, as was Serai, and FCMP were supposed to be done after Seraphis, and Seraphis might take 5 years to complete. IMO, because of the pressure with the delisting, Haveno and Serai have accelerated their development as has the interest in using them. FCMP may arrive before the end of the Bitcoin bull run. People from the Maya Protocol have also eyed Serai as a possible hub into the privacy space (since Monero proved that it won’t go away or be bow to regulation) and an integration like the Cosmos integration might be possible, making Monero integration into the whole DeFi world convenient and possible.

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.

Note that when you first deposit money into a wallet, you would prepay the cleanup fee and you would pay the cleanup fee on any transaction made after the N months. This would ensure that only N months of records are present. And if you do not touch you account for 20 years, no problem. You still have all your money and you only have N months of payments

Agreed but that’s the wrong approach. You cannot just drop old blocks since old wallets would lose their money. A better approach would be to have wallets specify a 'preserve records for N months ’ feature. The larger the number of months, the higher transaction fees are so people are incentivized to use a small number… A small number would also help with privacy since if the view key is ever leaked or quantum computing ever takes off, old your old records would not be leaked. Once N months passes. Old transactions are replaced by a single forwarding transaction with the total amount in the account.

Don’t laugh. Gold can be purchased in many jurisdictions without KYC, so having a tokenized gold sidechain that may be exchanged with real gold at participating local dealers might actually qualify as a legal fiat on/off ramp. If gold is KYCed in your region, just then use a silver, copper, or even industrial grade manure or toilet paper side chain token. You can’t KYC all commodities. Imagine the field day the press would having on any politician that required KYC for trading fiat for bull manure (BS) and vice versa. The jokes just write themselves.

BTC/ETH sidechains would be silly but there are valid uses of sidechains. Currently all transactions are stored on the blockchain forever, but do you really need to have 600 coffees a year forever on the blockchain for a significant portion of the Monero community? It makes much more sense to farm that out to a Monero Mimble-Wimble sidechain. Since this side chain specialises in small purchases, the consensus rule might also be speedier, so you get all the benefits of the lightning network with none of the drawbacks. Similarly, having a sidechain for scripted actions like automatic subscription payments (or at least payment reminders) would be nice, or more complex multisig and escrow wallets. If done correctly, all this could be done without touching the main Monero chain so Monero can focus on being real cash and the sidechains can do the extras and test out experimental features that may come to Monero eventually.

The reasons you give for using Monero don’t resonate with most people. No matter what political system you’re under, most people generally live very similar lives, separated more by the city/rural divide than anything else. So even if you convince people of all the threats, they’d shrug their shoulders and adapt, no matter what actually happens. Every once and a while, things get really out of whack, like during the lockdowns, but they can’t stay that way because people get bored of the political blah blah and tired of being manipulated and just go back to normal despite the consequences. Revolution doesn’t defeat tyrants, indifference does.

So what can be done to help Monero? Just increase the parallel/circular economy. Convince shop owners that crypto in general allows them to avoid credit card service charges and that there are only a few cryptos that are actually used, Monero being one of them. Host Monero meetups in restaurants and convince them to accept Monero during the meetup. Talk to farmers and get them to accept. Get content creators and online services to avoid dealing with payment processors and accept Monero. Basically, the usual stuff. Also, improve Monero technology. There are a lot of gaps that need filing to make the user experience as easy as credit card to use and banks to manage your money. Make it easier to live off Monero using by providing services like Spritz finance (https://www.spritz.finance/). Yes these are KYCed services, but you are already KYCed by your landlord, tax department, and electricity company so there is no loss of privacy. This does, however, allow you to live on Monero without having a bank account and some services can be made non-KYC when possible.

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.

The main problem I see with this is that it looks complicated and it’s unclear how to spend Monero upfront, so the bulk of people won’t follow through on this even if they understood what to do. The BTCtip is closer to what being approachable…fewer words and a barcode to get to the site directly and an expiration date to encourage people to act now (and let you know if the gift was accepted). Ultimately, I don’t see how you can avoid some one-on-one preparation (possibly with some hand holding) for this to work.

Actually both since it is an important way to avoid and resolve payment disputes. Private ledgers mean nothing in a payment dispute. It’s so important that without it, for large payments everyone will have to involve a “trusted third party” to keep everyone honest. It’s the reason why good cashiers never put payments in the cash register until the customer leaves…without this “trick” it’s easy to be scammed. It’s the whole reason double entry accounting exists. MW also doesn’t completely fix the issue of exploding blockchains. With 6 billion people on MW (arbitrarily chosen number) and each person having multiple wallets and wallets being lost and new people coming into MW regularly due to new births the number of wallets will explode. There needs to be a regularly get rid of abandoned and locked out wallets. Hard forks like Seraphis are a good way to find out who still has a wallet and eventually clear out the old wallets, but you can’t keep doing that for a stable money supply. I’ve stated before, I fully support transaction fees being partially based on how big your blockchain footprint is as long as you can “close the books” and compact your footprint. I’m also open to fair schemes dropping abandoned wallets (e.g. calculate a “fee” based on blockchain footprint and time of last access. If the “fee” is less than the amount in the wallet, then do nothing. If it is greater than the amount, then the wallet can be pruned.).

Personally, I think the truth lies in the middle. I think having full history for purchasing coffee is not only wasteful of space clogs the blockchain (imagine 6 billion people adding 3 coffees a day to the block chain over 50 years). My back account keep track of all transactions for a few years and I’ve rarely needed more, but I absolutely do need a transaction history for budgeting and taxes. So a hybrid approach where important or big ticket items have full transaction history (until you ask to prune to a MW), and smaller ticket items can be in smaller MW subaccounts of different categories is the best of all worlds.

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.

There are several possibilities. Here are four off the top of my head: (1) The “evil” had second thoughts and returned the money for one reason or another. I’m not sure why he’d return more than he stole since he was likely going to get away with it. (2) A white hat hacker took the money to force the CSS team to clean up their OPSEC and custody. He was always going to return it so once the message was relayed and the CSS community began a respond, he returned the funds. Why the extra 21 XMR? IMO, he was able to profit from the borrowing, possibly by taking advantage of the BTC pump (as his white hat hacker fee) and gave some of his gains back. (3) An insider “borrowed” the money, either for the white hacker reasons or take advantage of the BTC pump. The 21 XMR has the same meaning. (4) A BTC whale benefactor benefited from the pump but loves Monero and wants it not to suffer from the hack, so he gave his profits plus a 21 XMR hint.

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.

@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.

I don’t know where to begin but I’ll give it a try:

Statement: …at present monero-multisignature wallet tech is not 100% … and would probably make things more complicated and not easier. Response: The easier it is for you to get funds, the easier it is for a hacker to get them, so what’s wrong with this.

Statement: Using direct donation payments to devs is not an option for couple of reasons since there will be no oversight on their work / spend hours. Response: It is if done naively, but trivial if each CSS proposal had its own wallet. After validation, final payment can be made by handing over the keys (no transfers required). If there are multiple milestones, make a wallet for each milestone. This will take less time to manage than a big wallet, it would be easier to automate, and be harder on hackers.

Statement: Bitcoin multi-signature is much more tested… Response 1: And Monero multi-signature will always be less tested if it isn’t used. Please “eat your own dog food” (i.e. use Monero the way it should be). When Linux lost access to the proprietary version control the core team was using, Linus wrote his own. It was buggy, but did the job. Because it was used, it was made to work the way the core team needed, and eventually took over the world (i.e. GIT). Use Monero multi-signature so that it becomes better and works the way you need it to work. Response 2: Effectively, the CSS team would be proclaiming “Don’t trust a big chuck of funds to Monero. Use Bitcoin”.

Statement: I gave plowsof and luigi as example to keep CCS structure as much AS-IS. Response: This is precisely the problem. If there are OP-SEC issues, you can use multisig and all the advanced tech you want but it will not stop the funds being being hacked because tech wasn’t the problem. Please see the most recent Monero-Talk with Artic mine for details. Yes, having good OP-SEC is a pain, but rebuilding trust is a lot more expensive. How much do you think the CSS will raise if people don’t trust it? Note, the core team might be the most trustworthy people on earth, but if they had poor op-sec, it can happen again. Also, I am extremely trustworthy to a fault, but if someone but if someone put a gun to the head of my family, I don’t know if I wouldn’t give up the keys to save them.

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.

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.

There is no Monero company so if you want it popularized you need to be part of the solution. Go to or start a user’s group. Take part in localmonero.co. Convince people to use monero for remittances and get stores, especially gold and silver shops and pawn shops to accept or sell monero. Etc