Saki

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] Saki@monero.town 0 points 10 months ago (5 children)

They have ignored this request for almost 10 years. https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/935538-accounts-payments/suggestions/33188971-accept-monero-for-payment

Like 3 or 4 years ago, Seth said they might soon accept Monero, but they didn't either. Proton is not too bad, to be sure, but it's been really questionable in various ways too... Better late than never, though.

Cf. elsewhere https://l.opnxng.com/r/Monero/comments/1lmuhfi/proton_to_add_monero_support_with_1000_signatures/

[–] Saki@monero.town 0 points 11 months ago

I think they will be the first to have both digital ID and CBDC.

Or possibly Israel will be? Or China. Paying/Having cash may become illegal eventually.

[–] Saki@monero.town 0 points 11 months ago

Ah, AI-generated "cheap" text. That'd explain a lot!

In addition to what you've pointed out (which perhaps many Monero users agree with) such as the paper Monero issue, I'd say that fundamentally CEXes have this conflict of interest: they're supposed to help investors or whatever, help them become rich (as if that's the point). But reality is, often customers' losses are their profits - that's their (casino-like) business. In short, they essentially want you to lose your money. And in the first place, this investment aspect is not even the point of cryptocurrencies.

EU bans in 2027? - that's old news. Already in 2022: there were anonymous accounts ban in Lithuania for example (and the remarks by US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury about "unhosted wallets" too). Basically central entities have always wanted to regulate things centrally, but that's not how cryptos are supposed to work. I think XMR is one of the only few coins, still having this fundamental (admittedly, a bit idealistic) philosophy. Either way XMR is only a few "true" cryptos, actually being used (as opposed to just being traded as investment aka gambling). Because of that, some people, including myself, may tend to feel that Monero is essentially valuable and that the recent price movements are something that could have always happened (though, this unconscious assumption could be misleading too). So maybe... even though what's happening now might have been triggered by some criminals, that may have been just catalysts; the cause of these price actions may be intrinsic - because Monero is valuable, it's being valued. Perhpas a bit too optimistic view, but perhaps not entirely untrue either?

Cryptographically it'd be absurd to share your sec key with CEX ("hosted" wallet). Like 30-year-old PGP/GPG key-escrow debates yet again; or worse, not even escrow, CEX users don't even have their keys. Which feels so absurd. I've never once used CEXes, except I tried no-KYC web swaps a few times (but they too are CEXes, having the same fundamental problems). Obviously pure P2P DEX solutions feel much better and safer, where Alice and Bob are mathematically / trustlessly safe as in atomic swaps or via multisigs. DEXes (e.g. Bisq, Haveno) may be for-profict business too (no free lunch), but that's beside the point. Nevertheless, it's important to realize that everything, including "no-KYC" or "DEX" solutions, may become "sneaky" if not scammy.

[–] Saki@monero.town 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, most probably. It's crazy, though: they're now saying that: privacy-by-default = bad, no-privacy = good. That's the EU for you?

[–] Saki@monero.town 0 points 11 months ago (9 children)

That's possible. I happened to see these weird/questionable theories elsewhere, not really convincing:

"There are also rumors that major exchanges are thinking about relisting XMR, which, when combined with Monero's lower liquidity and more concentrated holdings, can lead to major price movements"

"Researchers say part of that growth is due to a shift in the U.S. regulatory tone. The FIT21 crypto bill is picking up steam, and the SEC is taking a step back from labeling privacy coins as securities. This seems to be helping the market out a bit. It looks like the easing of pressure has led to more money flowing back into assets like Monero"

"There is also a lot of excitement about Monero's upcoming FCMP++ upgrade, which is expected later this year."

https://u.today/xmr-explodes-past-350-is-monero-finally-back

"Perhaps ironically, the surge is being fueled by this regulatory purge."

[This may be right.]

"Monero's rise is reactive rather than entirely organic. Fearing censorship, there is a rush toward decentralization."

https://u.today/monero-xmr-surges-with-3900-volume-skyrocketing

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Introducing oniux: Kernel-level Tor isolation for any Linux app (pzhdfe7jraknpj2qgu5cz2u3i4deuyfwmonvzu5i3nyw4t4bmg7o5pad.onion)
 

You may have also heard of a tool with a similar goal, known as torsocks, which works by overwriting all network-related libc functions in a way to route traffic over a SOCKS proxy offered by Tor. While this approach is a bit more cross-platform, it has the notable downside that applications making system calls not through a dynamically linked libc, either with malicious intent or not, will leak data.

[–] Saki@monero.town 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Try not to take things too personally. Tails devs explicitly said they were making it for regular people (activists, journalists, domestic violence victims, etc.) and mainly not for advanced users. So by design it's a normie-friendly OS (a user is not even expected to know how to use pgp); as such, one might generally assume its users may not be "geeks". Nothing personal there.

While asking questions and exchanging ideas are wonderful, one can also enjoy the freedom to study (one of the four essential freedoms), guessing, narrowing down a problem by trial and error. An attempt at solving the problem on one's own is often of great value, a great way to learn, even if it's unsuccessful; after that, one might be able to ask an even better question, which could be helpful for more people too. Either way, I think that most Monero users can happily agree with each other that we want a better version of bisq :) (Sorry if this comment is uncalled for.)

Maybe this is why no one ever posts here.

Imho (quite) a few users ditched monero.town when they had started blocking Tor.

 

On the front page of monero.town, sm.ms and catbox.moe are recommended as image hosting services. Unfortunately both are not Tor-friendly, esp. Catbox blocks Tor.

The Cock.li guy comes up with a solution.

  1. Solution about Catbox: Just change cat in the URL to fat and the image is viewable for Tor users!

Example https://monero.town/post/1025717 where
https://files.catbox.moe/6z3p3z.jpg is not viewable via Tor
https://files.fatbox.moe/6z3p3z.jpg would be viewable via Tor

  1. How to use an inline image (in general, not only Catbox)

The syntax is ![](URL) so…
![](https://files.fatbox.moe/6z3p3z.jpg)

Result:

  1. How to make it a Clickable thumbnail

Text link would be [Text](URL) you can replace Text with an inline image, URL with the image URL, i.e.
[![](URL)](URL) so…
[![](https://files.fatbox.moe/6z3p3z.jpg)](https://files.fatbox.moe/6z3p3z.jpg)
Result


Note: Optionally you can put Alt text in ![] as in
![Monero-chan is happy](https://sample.net/happy-monerochan.png)


Another hosting service imagebam.com is iffy but Tor friendly, easy to upload images there from Tor Browser & you can direct-link to the uploaded full image.

Using 3rd party image hosting services has privacy implications, but it will save the server resource of monero.town.

 

Apparently, the Nintendo Switch gets 230 hashes per second mining #Monero

Jpeg Image

Can you mine crypto with a Nintendo Switch? https://cryptonews.net/news/mining/27918548/

Interestingly, RandomX, the Monero mining algorithm, allows for alternative experiments like this due to being ASIC-resistant. Miners can use simple CPUs or gaming devices to run the algorithm and try their luck at block discovery while supporting network security.

 

https://monero.town/post/1144305

Bicoin Black Friday: BusKill (Open-Source Hardware Dead Man Switch) Announces 10% Discount

There are 4 reports saying this is spam, and it is indeed cross-posting link spam, and feels slightly excessive but not extremely so (?).

The thing is, Monero.town doesn’t forbid ads, and freedom of speech is important even if what is said is unpleasant for me or for someone else. Thoughts?


Edit: Since someone has appointed me as a mod in !privacy, where https://monero.town/post/1144305 is, I can remove it, except I don’t want to remove anything unless really necessary. The lack of guidelines about ads in monero.town means, the OP didn’t do anything against the rule(s).

I couldn’t remove the new one in !moneromarket https://monero.town/post/1142415 Not sure if @admin@monero.town thinks it’s bad enough, either. Monero is censorship-resistant, meaning we tend to hate deleting someone else’s speech/expression just because it’s subjectively disagreeable.


Given that Monero is money after all and some for-profit services are useful for its users too, probably commercial posts (ads) should be allowed in general, if not excessive. And BusKill ads are not excessive in terms of frequency, like only once a month.

Perceived link spamming (self-promotion) advertising SimplifiedPrivacy has been also noticed by many including myself, which has been like once or twice a week, and explicitly questioned here ( https://monero.town/post/1085883 ); but many (including myself) think these posts can be useful nevertheless, the poster being knowledgeable.

[–] Saki@monero.town 2 points 2 years ago

The linked article (and so AutoTL;DR) is not very accurate. If you’re interested in this incident, read the original post, which is short and compact. General media articles are only quoting or re-quoting this thread, typically with some misunderstanding.

Specifically (about this post): Among other things, multisig is only suggested; nothing has been decided yet.

Generally (in many similar articles): Probably a specific local machine was hacked, though no one really knows yet what happened. It’s unlikely that the Monero network itself was hacked.

Since I’m a Monero supporter, obviously I tend to say good things about it, but frankly, the ironical fact here is, Monero is so privacy-focused that when something like this happens, it’s difficult to identify the attacker—i.e. by design Monero also protects the identity of the attacker. Some Monero users are having this weird, paradoxical feeling: it would be nice if we could catch this evil attacker, but being able to catch the attacker would be in a way very bad news for Monero (if you know what I mean) 😕

 

For example "3 (1 New)" is understandable: there are 3 comments, of which 1 is new. But I sometimes also see things like "6 (-3 New)", "5 (-1 New)", where the number of new comments is negative. Is this some kind of known bug, or is it by design actually meaning something? It's totally harmless, but weird...

 

The bug fixed in cURL 8.4.0 (CVE-2023-38545) is a nasty one, but it seems rather harmless in our context.

First of all, if you don’t use socks5, this issue should be irrelevant. (But do your own research. Source code is there for you to freely study, modify, compile.)

According to the blog, the bug could be exploited only if a socks5 proxy user is tricked to resolve a crazy long hostname (~1024 characters+), which sounds unlikely; except if your direct peer is evil, they might be able to send you a crazy long hostname instead of a numeric IP… maybe? However, if you’re on socks5 proxy, the attacker can’t see your real IP to begin with, so they can’t attack you (I think).

The only attack vector my stupid head can think of is: if for some reason you use both clear connections and socks5 connections, then a lucky attacker who notices your behavior can hit your real IP when you’re on Tor, using your wallet address as an identifier. (Tor exit nodes are public, so they know someone is on Tor.) Even then, maybe the worst thing that could happen is that your p2pool crashes due to buffer overrun.

 

Why did you remove the “How do I start mining monero?” post?

Because the OP may have been a child? Or simply because it should have been asked in Monero Mining rather than in Monero? Or perhaps because the question was trivial (too basic)?

While I do feel (a few more) rules are necessary here, I’d like them to be explicit and transparent, if possible. Thank you.

 

P2Pool v3.6.2 was released. There were no code changes since v3.6.1, but the MacOS aarch64 build and Windows build were re-compiled with the previous compiler same as in v3.5, to fix reported stability issues.

It is said: “If the previous version works fine for you, you don't need to update.” but even if you think v3.6.1 is working, you may want to carefully monitor the situation (e.g. Hashrate / CPU temperature) to see which compiler works better for you. It is possible that keeping using v3.6.1 is better for some users.

Apparently it is not yet proven that the new compiler is the culprit for this, though a compiler optimization-related issue is suspected.

Changes:

  • macOS aarch64 build is back to using old compiler (same as in v3.5) to fix reported stability issues
  • Windows build is back to using MSVC compiler (same as in v3.5) to fix reported stability issues

Release P2Pool v3.6.2 · SChernykh/p2pool · GitHub

EDIT (Clarification for Windows users)

  • The previous (old) version (v3.6.1) was created with a NEW compiler, and is supposed to run faster (7-8% faster block verification), while there might be crashing bugs or other unexpected issues.
  • The current (new) version (v3.6.2) was created with the OLD compiler (same as v3.5), and is supposed to run only as fast as v3.5 (so 7-8% slower block verification, than v3.6.1), although it might be stabler.
[–] Saki@monero.town 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Don't forget about the proposed Client-Side-Scanning in EU too!

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Bad Internet Bills (www.badinternetbills.com)
 

Congress is trying to push through a swarm of harmful internet bills that would severely impact human rights, expand surveillance, and enable censorship on the internet. On July 20, we’re launching a week of action to get loud about our opposition to legislation like KOSA and EARN IT and demanding that Congress focus on passing badly needed comprehensive privacy legislation to actually protect us from the harms of big tech companies and data brokers, instead of pushing through misguided legislation before August congressional recess.