Swag meaning logo gear and such? That was in the latest missive.

I'll take a stab at it. I'll just take the whitepaper and try to cut out anything that isnt absolutely necessary for satisfying your request. Maybe we can bounce it around and crowd edit/redraft it. Ok so thats just a super rough draft. Please be tactful.

Monero in a nutshell

Inorder for an electronic cash to be private and anonymous it must satisfy two requirements. Untraceability: for each incoming transaction all possible senders are equiprobable. Unlinkability: for any two outgoing transactions it is impossible to prove they were sent to the same person.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin does not satisfy the untraceability requirement since all the transactions that take place between the network's participants are public. It is also suspected that Bitcoin does not satisfy the second property. A careful blockchain analysis may reveal connections between the users of the Bitcoin network and their transactions thus it fails the unlinkability requirement as well. We offer a solution that fully satisfies both untraceability and unlinkability conditions.

Inorder to satisfy the requirement of untracability, monero utilizes the concept of one time ring signatures. After signing a transaction the user provides, for the purpose of verification, not his own single public key, but the keys of all of the members of a group of users. An observer is able to then verify that the real signer is a member of the group, but cannot exclusively identify the signer. So long as all of the other participants in your group are valid signatures, and linked to valid ring signature groups, and all of the participants in those transactions are valid and link back to still valid ring signature groups... ect all the way back to the genesis block, than no doublespend is possible because for each and every ring signature group in the signatures progeny there is an equal number of inputs and outputs. All of this is accomplished without any need for trust, without any denial of service attack vectors, and without the need for any form of centralization. All members of a ring signature group are equal.

Inorder to satisfy the requirement of unlinkability monero utilizes a scheme which allows a user to publish a single address from which, in addition to some random data from the sender, a one time use public keys may be derived. Hence, there is no such issue as "address reuse" by design and no observer can determine if any transactions were sent to a specific address or link two addresses together.

Coinbase know your bank account, know you BTC address. It's possible to trace it, NSA can use law or soldering iron to retrieve your BTC address from coinbase. Easy way to hide - transfer BTC to exchange, buy monero, withdraw, transfer monero to another wallet with mixin 7+, transfer to another exchange, sell, transfer to new BTC wallet, pay from it. Weird =)

And you must use several accounts and VPN. Monero can give you anonymous transactions, the rest of your activity can be traced anyway.

Look at FAQ on http://www.monero.cc. Good and short description of Monero anonymity essence.

It goes both ways. More than half of the young (<50) Americans think what Snowden did was needed. Anyone in the politics opposing Snowden is going against the public opinion and tarnishing his own reputation. The louder you cry that Snowden must be burned, the less you are trusted, and the more obvious it is to all that you only live out of the scraps the system feeds you to keep you a functioning Senator.

I should stop. And I will. Any political post by me in this thread earns the exposer an immediate 20 XMR, and if it is questionable whether the post was political, final arbiter is ArticMine.

This assumes that the NSA is the biggest threat arising, out of the United States, to personal freedom and liberty and that includes financial freedom. The evidence points otherwise as private sector organizations such as the NFL (National Football League), MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) etc., post a much greater threat. A good list is those organizations and corporations that supported SOPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_official_stances_on_the_SOPA_and_PIPA. One must also watch those organizations that withdrew their support under pressure such as Apple. The fundamental problem here is that the only effective way to protect "intellectual property rights" is to centralize control over computers and devices such as cell phones and tablets away from their owners and into the hands large corporations such as Apple and Microsoft. This is typically done by using a combination of propriety software at the operating system level, DRM and the fact that the majority of the population are not "nerds" and thereby less aware of the threat and less likely to fight back. Centralized control of networks in the hands of big telecom also another way, so battles over net neutrality can actually become battles over personal freedom and civil liberties with big telecom on the side of tyranny and oppression.

There are crucial lesson here in the Snowden leaks. Most of the NSA spying depended on the data collection habits of large corporations as best demonstrated in the PRISM program. A list of the the corporate enablers can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#mediaviewer/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg. One of the simplest routes to privacy and individual personal and financial freedom is to withhold personal information from the corporate enablers.

Some of us that "have been pushed over the edge" use GNU/Linux as their primary desktop OS (less than 2% of the population) root their Android phones in order to lock out the manufacturer and telecom provider, consider Apple's IOS only suitable for the telescreen in George Orwell's 1984, avoid social media such as Facebook etc. Crypto currency such XBT and XMR becomes part of a portfolio of tools and not the only tool used to enhance personal freedom and privacy.

Good collection there ! Worth putting all together to let observers read and form their own conclusions about the motivations of these thread posters.

You mean exactly like we have on the OP? Here:

GUI
All current GUIs are in beta, but they should be fairly safe to use because they work through bitmonerod and simplewallet from the main code.

• Qt GUI (Cross-platform) by Neozaru
• Windows GUI by Jojatekok

Maybe set up donation addresses exclusively for the development of the GUI wallet? Might help in assessing how important it is for the community.