The monero community is building a lot of infrastructure to build a circular economy, and there is a lot of recent developments in that regard, such as xmrbazaar which is a sort of ebay and the sellers accepts monero. This is great. However, how can we penetrate markets outside of the monero economy? I fear that Monero still has the "dangerous hacker crypto which funds terrorism and north korea" reputation, and although while not true, could severely pause monero adoption and hurt us as a community as a whole.

We as a community value privacy, but i feel like we need to work together as a community to forge an alternative to the mainstream narrative about privacy coins. I'm thinking something revolutionarily positive, at least in the USA, such as making a charity that gives directly to homeless people, or setting up a decentralized network of people that work together to distribute life saving drugs for cheap (because drug prices are really fricking high here). Privacy coins tend to attract privacy minded people, and privacy minded people won't even touch twitter with a 10 foot pole because of all the injected ads and the tracking, and i respect that. But, one of these days we gotta do something big to break the mainstream narrative.

I personally am locked in, I have a girlfriend and two pets and a full time job, but for those that have less to lose and more time and resources to spare for the cause, i say let's fking do it. Anything, man. Let's change society with this thing.

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[+] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

[deleted]

[–] aldalire 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So if Monero wants to be a significant player on par with Bitcoin and have a circular economy, it will need to step up to the plate in a major way, and it needs to do that before Bitcoin implements privacy upgrades that place it at feature parity with Monero, which is imo only a matter of time since those folks tend to be pretty pro privacy

Overall, not convinced of your argument for a L2 in Monero to be able to be on par with Bitcoin. In fact, I believe that the bitcoin community fell for the layer 2 trap. That high transaction fees on the base layer due to the 1mb blocksize can be solved by a Layer 2, and calling lightning a success is a stretch. It still needs to interact with the base layer to open channels, and your base layer is fucked.

[–] aldalire 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Hire a data hoarder to host a full node. A 16 tb hard drive will last you a couple years as a monero node if monero takes off, if not a decade, until you need to upgrade. It's not that hard to create >20, >30tb NAS, with some more room to upgrade. I have a 16tb one myself to store movie files. Nodes are run by hobbyists nowadays anyways. Disk space and bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper. Decentralization is just another buzzword: nodes will be run by a decentralized network of very motivated, anonymous data hoarders.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds cool, did you find any standout resources in the process about running nodes, and would you be willing to share if so? I last ran local when the chain was small enough to fit under a 32gb thumb drive lol

Also if you don't mind answering I had some questions:

What would the costs be involved generally with hosting a full node? Is it high in bandwidth costs?
Would 'mining' be an option for the device running the node?
How much can u expect to spend on an 16tb hdd to host the node?
Finally, all in, how much did it cost you to set up your node?

Feel free to not answer anything/ with ambiguity for privacy

[–] aldalire 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The blockchain is small enough for now to self-host on an old laptop. That’s what i did, 0 costs.

16tb for a monero node is likely overkill for now. But it would be nice to have more nodes with overkill storage, to accommodate any sudden increases in monero adoption that might increase the blockchain size rapidly

And yes you can mine on the device you’re running the node on, but it’s generally recommended to separate the two since running a node takes up CPU power that can be put into mining.

Here’s a good write up:

https://blog.nihilism.network/servers/monero2024/node.html

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't "hoarding" as you're using it not just another word for centralization? You know, by the very motivated hoarders?

[–] aldalire 1 points 1 year ago

no i don’t think so

[–] aldalire 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Meanwhile over on Bitcoin’s side, they continue to add more functionality to their chain with a massive dev pool in terms of talent and funding

Very talented, such as deciding to keep a 1mb block size to prevent DDOS attacks in 2010, and refusing to budge even as the entire community begged them to increase because of high transaction fees. Oozing with talent and ingenuity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What does L2 mean?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you haven't seen my list for that look it up: https://github.com/HardenedSteel/Help4XMR

[–] aldalire 3 points 1 year ago

This is cool, i'll check it out. Are there any initiatives to somehow make a charity with Monero that gives directly to homeless people? That can be a great start to rebuilding the privacy coin narrative.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The need for Monero will only be realised by the masses when:

Inflation becomes so bad that people seek an alternative money system
Surveillance has a tangible threat to their well-being or safety

Monero must always be presented as a solution to a problem: https://moneromaster.substack.com/p/adoption-objections