Last time I was bored I joined a Facebook crypto group.

Do yourself a favor and... don't do that.

Naw, brother. It's not like that. Just introspective hell right now, with everything coming up, and my partner being out of town.

Still have some work I need to trudge through, and just can't find the motivation lately.

Know what I mean ? Winter blahs starting to get to me. Can't wait to move out of Montana end of March. Hate the snow.

Moving further South.

Looking forward to pursuing passion projects, that I really can't start on now, for... reasons.

I am so very, very bored.

Malaise sets in.

... stares out from behind a cold, frosted window. alone in the darkness. all is quiet in the wilderness. the herd is safe and sound. slow exhalations build up condensate on the window. a hand reaches out from beneath a swaddling blanket and aimlessly draws trails. the forefinger begins to chill.

I was looking into opening a Bitfinex account and ran across the fact that you need to deposit$10k to start, is that correct or is that just for fiat transfers or some such thing? Sounds nuts to start with that much on an exchange that will probably tank when the Tether train crashes and burns. Also IIRC all it's fiat portals have been shutdown by the Fed (correct me if I'm misremembering).

This. Some days I sit in disbelief at the ignorance of what can be refered to as "the masses".  The intelligent to  stupid ratio seems tipped in an unfavorable direction.

It often seems as if everything in day to day living is based on the simple task of manipulation.  I say "simple" because it often seems way too easy to sway the opinion of "the average person" or make them think they need something that may be completely worthless.

Ty Warner built a net worth of $2.5 billion by selling animals stuffed with fucking beads.  Hell... the guy who sold Snuggies even made a cool $200 million.  No one needs a beanie baby or a snuggie but, they were manipulated into believing there was a need for them.

Crypto is overrun with everyone and thier cousin making alt coins and promoting them. Shit... the other day I saw a coin called "DeezNuts" https://deeznuts.in. I wonder often if as we approach mass adoption that marketing and advertising will push an undeserving coin with poor tech ahead of Bitcoin as "the masses" gobble it up.  Sure the tech behind it might be shit but, that's not always never, or rarely the most important thing to "the masses".

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.

well now...
just got my head wrapped around this merit business then I see we
now have copper members.  Theymos has been busy I guess...

I feel like this is the *real* reason. The delusion these people feel is trying to justify the "reasons" why they are doing it, but they can't ignore the underlying reality.

Also, will it surprise them when Bitcoin does indeed do another 10X or 100X? It will, the only factor is how long it will take. Bitcoin is held by < 0.01% of the world population. Not every millionaire in the U.S. has any bitcoin. Wall Street hasn't even begun to up-leverage Bitcoin, because they don't have a way to do it effectively yet.

It seems like no one is sure if you can deposit or withdraw crypto. I searched online for some more info and found lots of people asking the same question with no one having answers. I would speculate that you can not make withdrawals in the form of crypto.

So... just found this:

" Cryptocurrency prices are notoriously volatile. To counter that, Robinhood Crypto gives users an estimated price, and once users confirm a buy or sell order, they scan a gamut of trading venues, exchanges and market centers to find the lowest offer, TechCrunch explained. To account for wild price fluctuations, the service puts a 'collar' around your order; If it can't find a price within this margin, it will wait until one surfaces to execute your order or inform you."

Sounds like an awful lot of work for no fees being charged.

IF THEY ARE NOT ASSLESS THEY ARE NOT CHAPS

They are only doing BTC and ETH atm. With the size of the average Robinhood account being under $1000, I don’t think front running will do much good.

I don’t use Robinhood but I get the impression they are more reputable than Coinbase. 

fast and secure money transfer is the most important feature. Privacy is important. Buy monero,mine monero. win and win.

It was a good read, he may want to swap out fight with deter though. I love it when a good read diasy chains me to another!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7fqrse/hypothetical_us_gov_makes_xmr_illegal_now_what/


QFT!

Empowering people through privacy (self.Monero)

 by oneoffephemeral

[Note that before posting it here I was looking for the official forum, but since it seemed to contain mainly topics related to developement I decided to give reddit a shot.]

Recently, I started looking into cryptocurrencies and, for mainly ideological reasons, discovered Monero. Since the concept of privacy is something that keeps me busy for quite some time now and that it seems to be an important part for the Monero project, I wanted to share some thoughts.

Problem: the narrative

Most of today’s discussions revolving around privacy are misguided. This can be explained by a presupposition trigger called “I’ve got nothing to hide”. A simple example:

You need to go to a public toilet and lock the door. Why? We all know what you’re doing in there. You’ve got nothing to hide.
A drug dealer goes to a public toilet and locks the door. Why? Chances are that he actually has something to hide.
While the end result may be the same (a locked door in a public place), the motivations for doing so are very different and can be summarized in two words: privacy and secrecy.

False dichotomies

When discussions initially intended to debate privacy end up being about secrecy, we face another implicit assumption: part of our governments’ job is to protect the public (e.g. by fighting crime). Since we are part of the public we would want for our governments to be able to do their job. Unfortunately for us, we end up feeling guilty about wanting to take a shit in private because in doing so we could hinder our governments to fight crime. They need to be sure that the drug dealer is using the public toilet for its intended purpose. Huge dilemma:

Government wants to fight crime
Secrecy helps criminals
The end result of privacy is identical to the one of secrecy
Conclusion: Privacy helps criminals or “We’ll have to get used to letting the entire world watch us taking a shit because we don’t want anyone to think that we are the bad guys.”

Is secrecy, and by extension privacy, bad?

At this point we’ve established the following:

secrecy is a tool used by criminals to cheat and deceive
privacy is a tool used to shit in peace + the “benefits” of secrecy as a side effect
Now, if we don’t want someone to come to our house and beat us up, it seems plausible to try and make sure that this someone doesn’t find out where we live. If our address was private we could actually choose to keep it a secret, thus making it difficult for that someone to come to our house in the first place. This in turn broadens the definition for both privacy and secrecy as follows:

privacy is a tool that can be used to enable secrecy
secrecy is a tool that can be used to protect ourselves
This leads to the situation that secrecy and privacy have conflicting use cases if we frame the discussion using simple binary thinking such as good vs. bad. “Now, this doesn’t seem to be that unusual...” thinks the guy who just bought a new knife to cut his steak before moving on to stabbing his annoying wife. And he’s right. It isn’t…

The real question is: who are we?

For argument’s sake, let’s be a “criminal” job applicant. Our goal is simple: we want to beat our competition for a given job. We decide to hack into their computers and gather as much information as possible. Knowing their weaknesses and strengths allows us to emphasize our strengths in ways that go beyond the scope of this small thought experiment, but let’s just say: we may find ourselves at a bit of an advantage.

Now, let’s be “criminal” politicians in a democracy with anyone being a potential competitor (democracy, right?) and hack into their computers and...wait a minute! Are we idiots? Why be “criminal” and bother with hacking at all? We’re politicians, let’s try and convince people to share their information willingly. How could we do that?

So we’re politicians and our mission is to get the upper hand over our potential opponents (which could be anyone in a democracy, but for simplicity’s sake let’s call them: the public) by increasing our knowledge about them. Unfortunately, the public’s not only comprised of idiots and asking them to share information about things they’d rather not share will prove to be difficult. After all, they don’t want us to go over to their house and beat them up (since we’re politicians we know better and would simply send someone else to do the job anyways.).

There are two things that really work to our advantage here:

The conflicting definitions for secrecy and privacy
The public’s perception of privacy
Being able to choose the same terms for different use cases allows us to obfuscate what we really want to achieve. Basically, we can shape how the public thinks by setting the stage with terms they believe to fully understand, leading them to engage in our discussion without questioning our motives for initiating it in the first place. After all, they trust that they understand a seemingly simple word that is part of their basic vocabulary.

Now, the trick is that when asked about privacy, people don’t think about taking a shit in peace, but rather about the locked door. This makes it virtually impossible for them to distinguish between privacy and secrecy and, by extension, between a space “without other people” and a space “protecting us against other people”. The former works without the latter, but the latter depends on the former. Of course, we don’t want them to think that secrecy can be beneficial, so we just add a drug dealer into the mix and we shift their focus from “the knife to cut the steak” [useful] to “the knife to stab the wife” [devious]. As long as people think

privacy = locking the door when doing harmless things
secrecy = locking the door when trying do hide “harmful” activity
we should easily be able to switch off their sense of self-protection at will.

But what if we’re the good guys and bad people want to hurt us? Short answer: we’re not the good guys. In fact, sometimes we are the good guys and need protection, but sometimes we are the bad guys and others need protection against us. Being aware of that can be a bit difficult at times.

In the context of Monero/cryptocurrency

Because of the unpredictable nature of a human being it makes sense to enable protection for all by default. If we can agree that privacy enables protection in form of secrecy, a project like Monero makes sense to me. While researching Monero or what is intended as a privacy-focused project, I ended up asking myself the question: doesn’t that look like the perfect example to try and make illegal? The first thing that came to mind was that a tax system as we know it (at least in my area) would be under serious threat. But the truth is: it should be. It is inefficient, leads to corruption and transparency doesn’t work. Following the money is impossible and even when documents are released they don’t make any sense to anyone who wasn’t somehow directly involved in the process (which means the majority of the public).

One user in this thread suggested that governments should have to crowd source every project. I came to the same conclusion. I have a feeling that we live in a system in which we are forced to throw money at our governments simply because it is assumed that we should trust them to do the right thing...which seems awfully hard to me if they collect money regardless of what they actually accomplish (or not). Changing the people working for the system won't solve anything, but changing the system itself could be pretty exciting. No idea whether this will be possible with something like Monero, but reading about the project seems at least to fire up some of my dormant neurones...

I already carry signature in a popular forum ,spreading news about monero,as a individual person thats what i can do ,but if monero team spends money on further social media campaigns and motivating people who post in forums and social media it will be great

Too bad that no big social media campaigns about monero,if we have some decent social media campaigns 2018 is the year of monero ,i personally think next to bitcoin the only coin next to it is monero,(maybe ethereum and monero might share the 2nd place but not ripple or anything)

quietly unignores JJG

I do not understand why people believe this

BTC goes where?

How's that swamp draining going?