Back in 2024 I wrote: “Our aim is to grow a parallel economy with its own MoE, separate from the state. This requires a mindset shift, as we are born into state systems. Once enough people embrace this on nurturing platforms like XMRbazaar, we can progress towards decentralization: the only way forward.” XmrBazaar has already achieved the first part of that goal. It has nurtured a growing community that has experienced P2P freedom. It has served as the necessary on-ramp. It proved the demand exists. It showed what works and what breaks. It gave thousands of people their first real experience of a parallel, voluntary economy using Monero as the medium of exchange. That experience cannot be uninvented. Once people have traded privately and directly, the appeal of returning to fully tracked corporate systems diminishes. It is growing exponentially and will keep growing. View quoted note →

🚨Haveno PSA - Ongoing Attack: If you're running RetoSwap, revoke all offers and pause trading. Attacker (buyer) fg2lhfhgjrfz4oywqy2mfwfehhqsjse6wyrtdczsrhtves2jofi2qpad.onion (already banned from the network) is taking buy offers → forcing arbitration → trades close with no BTC sent, but XMR is released after 30 confirmations. Arbitrator: 7xktb2noofpx7vqom5d6b4gub6wi2znkfhbowtv2xxkbx63simfj3bqd.onion Trading halted. Check your open trades. Stay safe.

Tracking remains one of the most obvious pain points for privacy-conscious people in today’s surveillance economy, and it shows up clearly in #XmrBazaar’s data. The majority of listings in the top four categories exist to solve exactly this problem. You want a verified account but refuse to hand over your credit card details to a platform: You can pay someone to handle it for you and gift you the X/Twitter blue checkmark. You want to use AI tools without letting the company build a permanent profile of every conversation you have: You can pay someone to create the account and pay on your behalf. These rank among the most popular services because the free market is doing exactly what it’s meant to do: identifying real problems people are willing to pay to solve, then delivering practical, effective solutions. View quoted note →

New The Meritocrat Article: Voluntary Markets in an Involuntary World Centralized chokepoints, free-market solutions to the surveillance economy, and the push toward truly decentralized infrastructure.

Voluntary Markets in an Involuntary World

Centralized Chokepoints, Free Market Solutions to the Surveillance Economy, and the Push Toward Decentralized Infrastructure

View quoted note →

For the absolute majority of people, surveillance is the first step towards… safety. "You will have no privacy and you will feel safe" is part of the "you will own nothing and you will be happy" social package. I'm not even being sarcastic: it's simply reality. A couple of months ago YT recommended a random video by a random Chinese vlogger. I scrolled through it mostly trying to reverse-engineer why the algorithm pushed it. Then I paused on this line: "Cameras are all over the place in China but honestly we are pretty chill about it. They make us feel safe. If anything we worry about is the blind spot where there are no cameras." Just a normal person. She wants to feel safe. Most do. Especially as violent crime rises in Western countries. At some point, anything that delivers that feeling (real or perceived) will be embraced.

Any technology that CAN be used for surveillance WILL be used for surveillance.

Privacy is not a setting. Privacy is an architecture.

Today, people use medicines developed through horrific experiments on concentration camp prisoners. This does not contradict being fiercely opposed to the atrocities that produced them. The same logic applies to the internet, computers, and many other technologies that originated from state-sponsored programs: this does not contradict being fiercely opposed to the state's monopoly on coercion and violence.

What’s wrong with humanity? Site gets restored and the first thing people do is scam each other... 😭

UPDATE: XmrBazaar is back online! 1984.host removed the abuse status. "These complaints were mostly DMCA complaints." View quoted note →

The State used you in secret. You helped end a world war and birthed modern computing, yet were denied full recognition in your lifetime. The State wielded its monopoly on violence to humiliate, convict, and destroy you. The State keeps killing the best. On June 7th, my hatred for this monopoly on coercion and violence burns even deeper. Rest in peace, Alan... View quoted note →

This is the most comprehensive list of privacy-focused, crypto-accepting VPS providers I’ve seen so far (and I've seen quite a few just today): http://cryptpad.kikurievy2gz765eyexqbgcdgv4t34md4wjk3aadnwoofjitbkgk3xqd.onion/sheet/#/2/sheet/view/ROGgFB7RgcxhssSwaIWPQRcs4006ANtfnjSwcMserOs/embed/

I really wanted XmrBazaar to switch to Mynymbox some time ago: we even discussed it in our dev chat. I had no idea they now run their own servers: I simply pasted some outdated information from our internal discussion (I was quite overwhelmed today and didn’t double-check). I apologize for that (I’ll remove all posts mentioning it). View quoted note →

XmrBazaar's hosting provider 1984.is has shut down the VPS without warning due to abuse tickets we NEVER received notifications for. We had NO chance to respond. Good news: All data is fully backed up and safe! Worst case, #XmrBazaar will migrate to a new provider.

This is nightmare-level OPSEC. Praying it's just an AI-generated photo with fake names… because if it's not, this might be the last photo of them with all ten fingers attached...