Listened to the Open Markets podcast #11 (https://openmarkets.pub/). They discussed XmrBazaar, and it's clear the idea is ripe: many people are independently arriving at the same conclusion around decentralization + Monero circular economy: - I wrote about it about a month ago:

Voluntary Markets in an Involuntary World

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

- SlowBearDigger has it on the roadmap:

xmr-pay — roadmap (the wall)

The real state of xmr-pay: one core engine, public adapters, early projects, and ideas. Not a marketing timeline.

- LukeProfits is already working on something similar:

GitHub

GitHub - lukeprofits/OpenMarket: A fully decentralized, uncensorable marketplace that can’t be controlled or shut down.

A fully decentralized, uncensorable marketplace that can’t be controlled or shut down. - lukeprofits/OpenMarket

The key missing piece is multisig/non-custodial escrow. In a privacy-preserving system without KYC and/or IP logging, you absolutely can not operate without mandatory (not optional!) multisig/non-custodial escrow and/or bonds by default. Any voluntary privacy-focused market that can't rely on traditional law enforcement (unlike Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist) tends to attract a disproportionate number of scammers and worse (see this depressing thread: https://xmrbazaar.com/forum/topic/51/) There are already promising approaches for better Monero multisig / escrowed markets that are worth looking at: 1. spirobel's Serai-powered Monero multisig escrow with offline arbitrators:

Robust Monero Escrow with offline Arbitrators

During the development of the Serai network, a new piece of innovation was discovered. This piece brings us one step closer to the birth of a trad...

2. The existing tool by MoneroMultisig:

Monero Multisig GUI

(rbrunner (Monero dev) has spoken well of it, I haven't tried it myself yet) 3. Koe's (Monero dev) talk "Seamless Escrowed Markets with Monero Multisig" from MoneroKon 2023: *This post is my attempt to gather the main ongoing efforts in this direction in one place. View quoted note →

Friday night into Saturday again, known as the best time to pull shady stuff, both in politics and online (same time as XmrBazaar's 5 sudden abuse reports to its VPS provider): suddenly dozens of retweets in minutes from fresh accounts. We all know what that triggers: platform manipulation / inauthentic behavior suspension (been there, heh https://aillia.substack.com/p/a-confession-of-an-inauthentic-human). Feeling sorry for anyone who can't sleep because some little account is still alive. Locked my Twitter for now. Take a break and go to sleep, little busy bee… View quoted note →

Monero 0.18.5.1 'Fluorine Fermi' released! Recommended bug-fix release with daemon stability improvements (Tor/I2P, IPv6, sync), hardening against malicious remote nodes, RandomX update, memory leak fixes, and more.

getmonero.org, The Monero Project

Blog: Monero 0.18.5.1

Recommended release including a large number of bug fixes.

View quoted note →

🔸 Do NOT Watch This Video: THEY CAN'T STOP WHAT THEY CAN'T SEE by @DontTraceMeBruh View quoted note →

⚠️This is a WARNING for EU residents (not an advertisement of non-compliant services!). 🔸Do NOT use bisq.network, retoswap.com, BasicSwapDEX.com, eigenwallet.org - these are tools used by non-compliant people to voluntarily exchange crypto.   🔸Do NOT go to KYCNOT.ME website - it's a list of services that refused to comply with KYC.   🔸Do NOT use Monero - it never complied with anything.   🔸Do NOT read this post too - just in case it's non-compliant "advice on crypto". Stay SAFE & COMPLIANT, citizens 🇪🇺🫵

🧡 GetMonero.org 🧡

If it's not voluntary, it's tyranny. This is a very simple concept.

Back home!!! My soul is all fresh and reborn, like a happy little girl: so excited and hungry to live and learn! That's the best part of every life-risking wild adventure: you come home extra alive… and just so happy to be here!☀️

Haveno v1.8.0 released! Critical security update after the recent trade protocol exploit. Multiple fixes for message verification, arbitrator signature checks, deposit responses, and trade setup messages to prevent impersonation attacks. Also adds passphrase protection for all offer types + other improvements.

GitHub

Release haveno-v1.8.0 · haveno-dex/haveno

What's Changed User Experience Support passphrase protection for all offer types e295518 Support IPv6 Monero nodes by @lschomaker1 469264a Fix .de...

On this day, June 20, 1967, boxing legend Muhammad Ali was convicted for refusing the Vietnam War draft. In an effort to suppress growing resistance to the war, he was given the MAXIMUM sentence. Speaking of the cost to Ali's career from his refusal to be drafted, his trainer Angelo Dundee said: "He was robbed of his best years, his prime years." Ali: “I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be FREE.” Victimless acts, like the Samourai Wallet developers writing FOSS software, Ian Freeman selling Bitcoin without KYC, Dexter Taylor assembling firearms and facing charges of "criminal possession of a weapon" (a constitutional right in his country!), and countless others, ARE NOT CRIMES! They are state coercion dressed up as public service. View quoted note →

How to be free ☀️

This is a great example of different default mind settings (mindsets): one individual sees/says "mindset shift" without any adjective implying "collective mindset," while another individual sees/says "mindset shift" without any adjective implying "individual mindset." That's the difference, and *if you want* a "shift", it's where it starts :) View quoted note →

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 →