g2devi

Yes but Nostr is mostly a maxi community which is very niche compared to lemmy. These smaller Reddit-like clients are every more niche. Since most of those forums are incompatible since there isn't a standard, that's even more of a niche. At that point, what's the point? Matrix and SimpleX might be niche but they have a large Monero communities. Reddit and X have large communities that don't care about being managed. Nostr currently has a twitter like community for people that like interacting with maxis. Lemmy had a place for reddit refugees who still liked the concept of reddit where different communities could stumble on each other.

Nostr is fine, but it's really a twitter competitor and not really a reddit competitor like lemmy is. The top 20 hashtags are dominated by bitcoin, nostr, and photography/offgrid living, so it's not for normies. Most XMR posts have comments from bitcoiners and BTC vs XMR threads dominate so nostr is something I occassionally follow but get bored with all the repetitive arguments and little information that I wouldn't also find on Matrix.

Matrix and SimpleX are where Monero has a real community with real forums on important topics and it is normie friendly even if normies don't tend to go there unless they've already convinced themselves that Monero is valuable.

Twitter apparently has a good monero community although I don't know anything about it since I've never gotten or want a twitter account and it's closed up so I can't see it.

That leaves Reddit as the place normies would go to and discover XMR. If the lemmy instance disappears, then reddit and twitter are the only mainstream XMR instances out there.

If no-one wants to help, then I think we all understand that the burden really should be just on one volunteer and it's entirely reasonable to shut it down. But I do challenge the "your entire online presence when the instance goes down" statement since monero.town was still visible on lemmy sites like feddit.nl due to caching. Similarly sharding and co-hosting exists for lemmy so it is possible to make monero.town more resilient if people are willing to step up. Taking over all of monero.town is a huge burden but dividing up the work and taking a tenth of it (which can be given up if life gets in the way and returned to when it doesn't) is much less of a burden.

As explained many times PoS XMR is the surest way to permanently centralized Monero because of the Cantillon Effect and slashing. That being said, PoS time or effort (see Torrents) can work. Essentially, the more you devote your machine to validate, the cheaper your transaction fees are. That wallets would then be encouraged to add an "validate in the background" feature. There would be no slashing...you either validated and got the discount coupon on the next transaction or you did not. AFAIK, nodes are validated each time someone syncs the block chain. There is a lot of work being done that's just thrown away because it's not recorded. If that work were recorded, you could have a hundred validations in 2 minutes and finalize blocks far quicker.

IMO, while a hybrid approach might be eventually necessary, I don't see PoS as part of the solution. But there are viable solutions (see below).

The problem with Qubic is that a few players can (temporarily) disrupt the network. The tokenomics of Qubic allow it to attack temporarily but it will ultimately fail by that same tokenomics. With PoS, the problem is that a few players (the stakers) can disrupt the network. The requirements for staking (e.g. not turning off your machine for a set period of time, etc) encourage people to stake with a service so it encourages non-custody and centralization. And since PoS gives stakers more stake, their power to disrupt can only grow.

So you're trying to fix one set of disruptors by adding a second set of disruptors. Not exactly a solution, IMO.

Of course there's slashing. If it's purely algorithmic slashing, then it can be gamed and taken advantage of by either disruptor. If it's "trusted individuals" then you're just adding another set of disruptors to the mix. With so much complexity and potential for collusion, it's almost certain that failure will eventually result.

So what's possible? There are other consensus mechanisms that greatly reduce block reorderings like GhostDag (see Kaspa) that might be used to support the current PoW. Nano also has no transaction fees and seems to keep working. Instant validation of mutually agreed upon transactions also work if both parties are online at the same time (it doesn't work otherwise). If I give you cash, and you accept the cash and give me a receipt for that cash in real life, I don't need a third party to validate it so it would be wrong for a third party to not confirm it on the blockchain as finalized. You can even add the condition of having both parties have a copy of the receipt and both parties have to sign it. That extra condition is usually a part of the transaction of big ticket items like houses for extra security. True this approach wouldn't work if one party is offline, but since I estimate for over 90% of transactions both parties are online (since NFC cards aren't common but phones and computers are), this approach would all the blockchain to keep working even if there is an attack. The other supports are there for offline transactions.

PoW means you're doing work to support XMR, so any XMR you get from mining is deserved. Yes, bigger entities have an advantage in doing more work, but so do off-grid mining with cheap/"free" energy in cold climates. It all balances out.

With PoS, the more you have, the higher your validation rewards, and the higher the rewards, the more you rewards, the more you have, which leads to even higher validation rewards. This rapidly leads to a few players dominating and the rest of the people fighting for crumbs at an accelerating rate. Plus since the big players are the only ones getting rewards, the little guy has to stake with the big players, increasing the profits for the big players (hooray for capitalism!). However, if there is any slashing, the penalties are spread to all the little guy stakers (hooray for socialism!). This leads to a situation that encourages big players to go for a 51% attack since if they succeed, they get wealthier and if they lose, their losses are absorbed by everyone else.

This can happen in PoW too (see Blackrock and Michael Sailor), but even there having a lot of the coin does not give you more power, only doing the PoW, so the growth is slower and the extra XMR doesn't give you more power over XMR. Having a tail emission like Monero does should be enough to ensure that eventually no matter how much you have, it will be diluted by what's yet to be mined.

PoS has two main problems: (1) It makes the blockchain less resistant. (2) the Cantillion Effect. With PoS, all it takes to do a 51% attack is to have enough XMR.

If you look at the existing financial system, you can regularly see the big players openly sabotaging themselves to either kill competition or push down prices to cause a panic and then silently buy back more than they had sold while people are still panicking or just because they are subsidized to do so (e.g. DEI). With XMR's antagonism to the existing financial system, PoS would be a death sentence. PoW + PoS changes little since you can just game the algorithm so the PoW doesn't matter.

The Cantillion Effect is essentially, people with wealth get more and more power over time to game the system because they have wealth (PoS) and not because the did anything to deserve that wealth (PoW). It's the whole reason why the financial system is the way it is now and XMR should have no part of it.

It's a good payment option but it's also a good store of value. Note, I didn't say speculative investment. If you want that, go to Bitcoin or beany babies.

A store of value holds its price over time and Monero does that. It especially does if you add in the ridiculous taxes that do not apply to currencies but apply to crypto currencies that are used as currencies (e.g. you can convert from CAD to USD and not pay extra taxes if you use USD even if USD goes up. You also don't need to keep track of each and every change.

And if "digital property/unproductive wealth" are created in your jurisdiction, that tax would not apply to USD on hand but would apply to crypto). I'm not a "taxation is theft" guy, but I do think you that fair is fair and XMR allows savings to be fair.

In addition, if I'm caught on the "wrong" side of another Canadian Trucker's protest styled even, XMR is an excellent store of value because 100% of the money in your back account or KYCed open block chain crypto can be locked but 0% of XMR can be. There can be no store of value if the value can be locked.

In Europe, probably not. The bureaucracy is too thick. For the US, maybe but as mentioned in other responses we don't need CEX access. What is likely is that due to Trump's executive order, banks may be allowed to hold digital assets. That means, you could just open a litecoin or USDT account in your bank and transfer money in and out of it from your fiat bank accout. CEXes are complicated (compared with instant exchanges) and tend to have KYC rules that if stolen can be used with AI to not only identity theft you, they have the power to put you at the scene of a crime or blackmail you. Banks don't need nearly as much KYC since they know you directly. This would have a huge effect. It allows you to be paid in crypto and merchants to receive money in crypto so crypto can instantly be used by all stores without pain. Not only that, if you can be paid in Litecoin, paying it to your personal wallet, you can use MWEB to instantly swap it with Monero (e.g. on BasicSwapDex, Haveno, or a DEX) so you can hold all your daily money in Monero. It should be possible to do this automatically via a script. Unless you want to do a lot of trading and want the proper tax forms automatically set up for you, I see no reason why anyone of any experience level would even want to use CEXes when banks could hold crypto.

The issue is more the onramping than the offramping. As long as gift cards are available, it's fairly easy to use Monero gift cards for Amazon/eBay/Facebook marketplace. This doesn't create a Monero circular economy, but it does ensure that once you have XMR, you can live off it even if no-one else in your area accepts it. XMRBazaar is better since it help the Monero circular economy and provides a good way to both onramp and offramp.

Three things could greatly help XMR: (1) If banks could custody crypto (promised by Trump, hopefully other countries will follow), even non-XMR crypto and you're allowed to transfer to a self-custodial wallet, then it would be trivial for merchants to accept crypto and businesses to pay in crypto and for individuals to purchase crypto simply by moving money into your crypto account. CEXes would be irrelevant for everyone except degens. Once that happens, it'll be easy for people to be paid in crypto which is easy to convert to and from XMR without KYC. (2) If BasicSwapDex is made easy to install and the appropriate automation scripts are created, converting to and from XMR via P2P should be trivial. (3) If Serai is finalized and proven itself and the appropriate automation scripts are created, converting to and from XMR will be trivial. (4) If all three of the above happen, having a store front that accepts XMR is trivial, even if the store only wants USDT. Also having all your savings in XMR is also trivial and can be automated.

It does. The proof of status comes from your value to the community and that can change with time.

Look at Michael Saylor, for instance. He's undeniably an official Bitcoin representative, yet he's undeniably been incredibly harmful to the Bitcoin ethos, moving it from digital cash, to digital energy, to digital gold (HODL only), to now digital property (i.e. government controlled trad-fi) that should be managed custodially and is subject to a "digital property tax" (i.e. wealth tax). Through Saylor and his ilk, other Bitcoin destroyers have been promoted as Bitcoin representatives and actual OGs have been sidelined.

Meanwhile, Luke Parker (now retiring for a bit), Doug Thurman, Arctic Mine, etc are undeniably Monero representatives because they proved their value, but when some of these representatives try to promote the Zano leads as being kindred spirits with Monero and potentially the way forward for Monero, a large portion of the Monero community balked because whatever past contributes they may or may not have had, they don't represent Monero now and promotes some very un-Monero ideals. This healthy direct contribution=representation ideal keeps Monero on track and on mission.

I used to watch on odysee but unfortunately MoneroTalk stopped posting there. GrayJay is an alternative the NewPipe that tend to work better, but when it doesn't work, NewPipe tends to work. Unfortunately the two apps don't have a common playlist so you'll have to manually add all your NewPipe channels to GrayJay and sync them.

A problem with zcash is that most people only use transparent addresses, so if you are one of the few people who uses shielded transactions, you're wallet is already marked as "dirty". In addition,I don't know if any other crypto has tor nodes and dandelion++, zano and pirate chain included. Add to this private transaction rates and a large anonymity set and a skeptical community that actively searches for and rewards finding flaws, there is no competition. That may change in the future, but not any time soon.