Essential consumer goods have huge markets, and have few differentiating factors. Both of these things are beneficial for mass production, which lowers the cost so much that small business are driven out of the market. And the small business that remain often only resell mass produced goods. Even though WE want essential goods available for Monero, I think it offers buisiness too little advantage in a highly competitive market and the effort required plus legal uncertainty may even drag them down.

If you want Monero adoption, ask yourself: Why would you want to receive XMR instead of cold hard cash for your work and/or goods? The obvious answer should be: Because you can use it for things you can not use cash for! Yeah people of course thing “duh we got the darkweb” and while that’s true the market is way beyond early adopter stage and does not really require our attention. I do like to market for internet services (email, vpn, vps, sms verification etc) because it’s such an obvious yet still niche use case. It’s also a low value way to spend donated money on your foss projects or whatever you do.

Personally I think good markets would be anything that is not illegal, but people still don’t want anyone else to know about. If you could pay for tax consultants, lawyers, psychiatrists and similar professions anonymously, I’d bet some people would be willing to pay extra and go out of their way to acquire XMR. And once you can’t trade for fiat anymore, the best way to get some would be to earn by offering more generic things.

Yes, in the end it’s a hen and egg problem. But I really do believe the least uphill battle is going the “exclusive for XMR” route.

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.

nonkyc.io requires javascript to run, which is suspicious considering the purpose of the site

I have used them back when they cost 3.5€/mo instead of the 5€/mo you pay for mullvad or ivpn. Gave them a try specifically because the support XMR, and it worked flawlessly for each of the 5 (?) payments I made. Service is fine, no complaints, but the desktop app is shit. Can’t easily configure local bypass which is supported by mullvad/ivpn. At the new pricing their offer doesn’t really make sense anymore.

I recall one instance where a user only got their coins after contacting people in the community who then put pressure onto majestic bank. Higher then advertised rates also happened more then once.

fuck off. seriously.

THERE IS NO OFFICIAL HAVENO INSTANCE, because no one involved with making haveno is running a haveno network, and not even endorsing one. This is very impotent to mitigate legal risks, because apparently governments pull reasons out of their asses to prosecute open source devs they don’t like. Your centralized “fund” shows blatantly that you have no fucking clue what you are doing, and you should not be trusted with an important piece of infrastructure.

If you are looking for a real network, check out the first and only instance of haveno: https://github.com/retoaccess1/haveno-reto

For tutorials on how to use it, check out nihilism’s excellent guides: https://blog.nihilism.network/servers/haveno-client-f2f/index.html

ysk messages on lemmy are not encrypted. Put your matrix username in your bio to enable the “secure message” button (which just redirects to matrix)

exactly. haveno can be a cash cow for the arbitrators if they keep it running. The more they scam, especially on high value disputes, the higher the chance traders will just create their own network, killing the cow in the process.

Either monero or cash is fine as payment. You don’t need to support both.

I can not take any privacy service seriously which does not accept monero and/or cash. You exceed expectations by not even including kyc’d payment methods.

Your landing page does not load at all without javascript. For a privacy service this is an immediate red flag. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but I expect to be able to read all text without JS.

I’m not a fan of your “litepaper”. It contains too much marketing (mission statement, ownership, zero knowledge praise) and user guide (website, payment, dashboard, referral). The first block belongs on an about us page, the second on an faq page. As it is right now, it feels a bit like a shitcoin whitepaper. Instead use it to exclusively explain how your tech works, and why I it is better then what your competition does.

Ultimately you could just be another ANOM, and it’s up to you to sufficiently proof you aren’t. Sorry to be this harsh, but your presentation does not give me the confidence to even try your service.

• There are plenty of VPNs that accept credit cards Paypal etc etc
• There are plenty of VPNs that have company and contact information on their website

Vote with your wallet.

destroy […] assets […] for the public good

The public would greatly benefit if we destroyed assets of lobbyists and their funders! You’re drafting the law for that, right? Right?

NFTs require arbitrary data storage, which not all blockchains support (or are prohibitively expensive).

The major issue is the low market share of crypto and the higher effort required to get USD. If you want USD, Monero can not fix this. So whenever you can offer your goods and services in XMR natively to lesser the dependence on fiat ever so slightly.

We’re still here, and have never left. Interest in crypto is primarily driven by price, and with the relative poor market performance attention of the masses is diverted. Almost like if it’s planned by those who don’t like xmr.

very useful, much appreciated

Improved energy efficiency only results in a higher hashrate with the same amount of energy consumed. Assuming electricity costs dominate the mining expenses, in an efficient system the value of consumed energy should equal the value of mined coins. If it’s significantly less, more miners will join until everything is balanced again.

On the flip side this means it’s very easy to calculate the running cost of a financial system based on XMR: it’s roughly 0.8% of the supply per year, slightly decreasing in the future thanks to the tail emission.

If you use the same metric to determine a cost for the current central banking system, which targets a real inflation of usually 2%, but it’s more like a 4%+ cost of living increase for necessities, meaning using monero is AT LEAST 5 times as efficient. However this is ignoring the fees banks demand at every opportunity, so I’d estimate monero is about 10x as efficient.

You cant remove pocket and telemetry without recompiling. That’s why its not just a config file.

please do not bring over reddit memes. Eventually someone will not understand the irony and keep doing it for real. thanks

I’d encourage you to copy/paste any or all of this

Your post may resonate with many people in the community, but I certain it won’t with the general population. When recommending anything, it’s best to focus on things the listener cares about, so tailor the message and don’t copy and paste.

What can we do today to increase Monero adoption?

Use it when buying and explicitly say you accept it when selling. It’s literally that simple.