Perhaps, but there are at least 5 factions mentioned even in Roger Ver’s account. Project management is hard, especially for a research project (i.e. trying to build something that’s never been built before) and people dig in for the dumbest reasons. Usually, developers can hash out a compromise solution but when non-developers try to “help” like the Reddit moderator or the companies putting out the ad to pressure the core team to change, things can get very messy and factions solidify to the point where nothing moves forward. IMO, if developers were to just sit down together to resolve this, a new structure would have formed. Bitcoin Next Generation would contain all the advanced experimental changes such as those that eventually got into Etherium. Bitcoin Preview would contain all Bitcoin Next Generation which have a solid chance of being accepted into Bitcoin Core but need proving time. Finally Bitcoin Core would be the most conservative Bitcoin branch which would only contain changes from Bitcoin Preview. Yes, they would be 3 different coins but they would work towards being mutually compatible and would be able to satisfy all parties. If you want to see how well this would work, look at Debian which has the “Unstable, Testing, and Stable” branches. All three branches are in use. Note, “stable” is ossified (like Bitcoin Core). It’s old but it was proven.

You’re missing the point. The core devs were responsible for their implementation. A BDFL can delay changes indefinitely and add or remove controversial features. Satoshi did with some features that were re-added to BCH. According to Vitalik, ETH might never have existed if some of the changes Satoshi reverted were kept in. BTC was never set up as a reference platform and probably couldn’t have been without destroying via fragmentation hell. But even if it was, they would not need to fork off the reference since they are The Reference. You might not like the decision of the core team. Many Linux developers did not like that C++ was banned from the Linux kernel because it is not pure, only to have Rust be accepted despite being fundamentally a bigger difference to C than C++, but that’s the BDFL’s decision to make. If you don’t like it, you make a fork which is what BCH ultimately did and what many Linux forks continue to do. With 20/20 hindsight, BCH should have just maintained a separate fork (made in the most backwards compatible way so all BTC features were BCH features) and created a parallel Reddit Forum (perhaps call it something like Bitcoin Complete), but that would require a new BDFL which you might not end up agreeing with on other points. If such a fork was done early enough, Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Complete might have been forced to co-operate or come to an arrangement like “no new feature goes into Bitcoin Core unless it first goes into Bitcoin Complete and people are free to use either coin”.

Although I agree with much of what Roger Ver is saying, it can’t be denied that his criticisms are filled with the contradiction “It’s okay if we do it but not if you do it.” For instance, he says that having a Benevolent Dictator For Life like Satoshi is good but then criticises that Bitcoin Core for being a dictator that blocked his changes. You can’t have it both ways. Understandably, he’s trying to express that he wants Bitcoin to be like Linux with its BDFL but Linux works because the “Linux Core” under Linus is more a reference implementation than anything else and each version or fork of Linux does not have to be compatible with each other. But they don’t have to be. This can’t work for currency. Granted, Linux forks as of late have adopted unifying standards like Snap and Flatpak that span different distributions to bring unity in diversity but currency requires much more unity than this in order to work.

You do not need to fight governments. You just need to make them irrelevant. As much as possible, reduce your government dependance footprint.

I think you miss what the poster and I are trying to say. On LocalMonero and on Bisq2, you could purchase without deposit based solely on the reputation of the person. That is all the person was asking. I commented that if Haveno had a field in the seller information for private contact (e.g. simplex, signal, etc) the trade could be done outside of Haveno since other than listing the sellers and contact information, Haveno would provide no guarantees. That’s an acceptable risk for many people to start off - you just don’t risk too much on first contact. Unfortunately I’ve checked and , Haveno doesn’t provide this feature yet…IMO, it will as it incorporates Bisq2 features or at least adds a contact field in the seller information.

I installed Haveno-reto but haven’t used it yet. Is it not possible to contact the seller directly (without deposit)?

If so, then why not just contact the seller directly and handle it out of Haveno? Other than listing an order book, Haveno wouldn’t be providing any value in mediating the order since only one side is actually using Haveno.

Give it time. I never used LocalMonero since I was happy with instant exchanges but I came close to using it just before it got shut down. At the time, there were only 2-3 acceptable sellers of XMR for Canadian Dollars and the best one kept having banking issues. There are currently 2 acceptable sellers of XMR for Canadian Dollars, which means that in Haveno’s short life it’s getting close to replacing LocalMonero for me. My hope is that eventually it gets integrated with Unstoppable Swap and BasicSwapDEX (and maybe Serai DEX) since there’s no technical reason it can’t automatically mirror the offers. Once that happens, it’ll have more than enough liquidity for anyone.

May I suggest that you don’t convert to fiat and instead buy either gift cards and debit cards or buy items directly with Monero? This avoids all the KYC issues with offramps and helps the Monero economy. If you need the cash in hand, then buy a gift card for something you normally pay with fiat (e.g. amazon, gas, phone, vpn, etc) and then use the money you would have spent on those items or bills for whatever you need the cash for.

Also agreed. Having atomic swaps for BCH, LTC (MimbleWimble), and ETH would be fantastic. IMO, we don’t need liquidity pools if we could have a simple UI that would allow us to say “I have 30 LTC to convert to XMR” and it allows you to divide up your 30 LTC into several XMR offers and then press “start” to execute the batch process. Sure you might only be able to convert 29.3 LTC to XMR using this method, but it would be completely peer to peer and could be done without the need for an arbitrator or liquidity pools or (if it’s loaded into wallets) any separate software like Haveno that you have run on your computer. It would also allow someone to convert large quantities of one crypto into another safely without arbitrators. And if I’m not mistaken, the trade could be done in parallel so making a trade of 50 smaller exchanges would not be significantly longer than a single trade.

Objectively, ZCash has the equivalent of FCMP++ right now but there are a few issues. Firstly, most ZCash transactions are public so the anonymity set for ZCash is small and even smaller when compared with Monero which has a lot more users. Also, because of the former issue, every time you switch from public to private transactions, it taints your wallet just as it does with coinjoins in Bitcoin. There’s also a much smaller purely private ecosystem (e.g. Haveno, Atomic Swaps, Serai, Tari, DarkFI, etc), since there is less pressure to do things privately. That makes it easier for ZCash to cave to governments request, even if it didn’t have a company to target. It also lacks other features like Dandelion++ to help anonymity or P2Pool and RandomX to help avoid centralisation. Pirate chain, being a fork of ZCash, solves some of these issues by getting rid of the public blockchain but it is smaller and dependent on ZCash for new research so it is not viable yet.

No comparison, I like hammermann’s the best. The only real criticism is that white text on black “burns my eyes” and is harder to read, so I’d much rather an off white font is used. The offwhite that’s under the Monero coin on the side is about the right brightness. The only caution I’d give is that although the Roadmap is cool and both new and old users want to see it, it might be best to keep it off the front page since it’s unlikely that it would be updated regularly and it might be easier to maintain on a different page (or offsite, e.g. github).

Both socialism and capitalism are real. Socialism itself on the large scale is undesirable and impossible. It can be approximated on the small scale (say less than 20 people) in a very tight nit community (e.g. family or tribe) where there is strong social pressure and environmental pressures to pool resources and help each other, but the moment the community grows so large that you do not know and interact with every single person and do not have a strong bond with every single person, the community fractures into factions, with some factions dominating over other factions and eventually become the elites with special privileges ruling over the plebes which have privileges at the mercy of those in power.

Capitalism, OTOH is simply a system where there is a free exchange of capital which is anything of value. The main critique he has is that because there is no absolute free exchange change of independent value, there is no capitalism. This is the same mistake people who don’t believe in free will make. Yes, there is no absolute free will. I cannot will myself to be on the sun drinking ice tea with Socrates. But that’s not what free will in finite entities means. It means, given the limitations of your circumstances, you can make a choice. If someone paralyses you and puts you in a sensory deprivation tank, you can still have more free will than your captors since you can choose how you react to your circumstances.

Similarly, most hard assets depreciate in some sense. Rice is a classic store of value, but pests can get to it. Gold and silver wear out with time and their value changes dependant on availability and speculation. Fiat deflates. Properties depend on the ability of you to protect it and environmental factors. Yet all can be considered assets despite their imperfection. Similarly, all trade has restrictions. I can’t send some property in the Sahara to the Caribbean. I might transfer “the title” between people of these countries but I cannot guarantee that anyone accepts such transfer as legitimate. I can’t easily transport a large quantity of gold or silver or any commodity including fiat with there being a risk of confiscation by either thieves or governments. But to the extent that I can have and transfer value, there is capitalism.