Saki @ Saki @monero.town

New to Lemmy. A privacy advocate. Interested in number theory.

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2 yr. ago

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I have three possibly theories about the "21".

1. The white hat is implying, “Windows 10? A nice OS. So you’re going to use Windows 11 soon? Well, this is what happens when you’re on Win 10 or 11.”
2. The white hat likes the digits 69, thinking it looks sexy.
3. There was a boat accident, and the hacker accidentally hit the wrong keys.

A bad move. Your "Tails donation" link is itself not Tails-friendly. Have you actually ever been on Tails? Get the details right.
\ Here: https://nitter.oksocial.net/intercambio_app/status/1718590127985905924

I have a Bitcoin joke, but the fees are too expensive to deliver it

I vaguely remember I had a Tails joke, but I seem to have amnesia.

The scary part is, that the US can do something like this if it wants to. A service provider saying “We’re privacy-friendly. Your email address is all we ask.” could end up this way. Think about so-called bullet-proof hosting providers or so-called trusted no-long VPN providers.

The only safe way, if any, may be that you never show them your IP… (much less any identifying information)

1. Bisq is Non-custodial. It’s listed #1 in kycnot.me too. Your fund is always with you. It’s Pure P2P. Which is better than Trocador but it does have both good sides and bad sides. See 4) and 5) below.
2. If you’re just taking an existing offer, Altcoin Instant, then the trade window is one hour. It’s rather quick and painless, certainly safer than Trocador, except the rate may be better or worse (it depends).
3. If you’re just taking an existing offer, Altcoin, then the trade window is 24 hours. Not suitable if you’re in hurry. But you don’t need to “sit there and wait”. 24 hours means, it’s enough for you to check it twice a day. Otherwise you can go out or sleep or do whatever. (This is when you’re a maker. If you’re a taker, you can take an offer instantly.)
4. Good thing: Since it’s non-custodial, you can freely cancel your offer any time even if you’re a maker; your fund is always with you, there’s no custodian who might freeze it.
5. Bad thing: Since it’s de-centralized pure P2P over onion (Darknet) not controlled by someone in the center, if you’re a maker, you need to run Bisq 24-hours. You can close it and turn off your machine, but then your offer is not visible. It’ll be visible again, if you restart Bisq, though.

A philosophical point to think about: “That’s inconvenient.” “I don’t like to wait.” — That’s a conventional customer-provider point of view. This is pure P2P, peers on an equal footing are helping each other with no central custodians. In a way, you could be a volunteer, who sells XMR to those who want to try it. When other sellers are doing say +5%, you could make with −1% (meaning “Hey, try XMR, I’ll share mine cheaper than the market price"). Of course, this will be often taken very quickly, because it’s a nice offer. Why do that? Well, you might be generous, or perhaps you got XMR when it was less than 100€ so spot −1% is actually selling high for you, or you just want to make it easy for new people to get XMR because of philosophical reasons, with some self sacrifice.

Bisq is one of the largest DEX, if not the largest, where the top 3 currencies are EUR, USD and XMR. The OP asked “Is there any way to swap a coin to xmr?” Not mentioning Bisq is absurd and unhelpful, no matter whether you like it or not.

Then again, obviously Bisq is not something Monero users generally love very much. It’s BTC-centric. I only seldom, if ever, use it myself. Another thing is, a peer-to-peer trade on Bisq is secured trustlessly by 2-of-2 multi-sig by the seller and buyer. While this is cool, it’s something not yet practical with XMR, so frankly I kind of feel a sense of inferiority about that. I hope the XMR version of this platform, Haveno, will become usable soon! Because what happens to Binance could happen to any CEX, including Instant-Swap CEXes or Cake (?) or anything. A pure P2P may be inconvenient but it seems critically important.

Cool! A new instance is always welcome due to rate control problems :)

For privacy reasons, it’s recommended to use random instances randomly:
This is a Javascript-less randomizing portal
http://7tcuoi57curagdk7nsvmzedcxgwlrq2d6jach4ksa3vj72uxrzadmqqd.onion/
And this is a list for normal users
https://searx.space/

Knowing a few unlisted instances can be a forte (less likely to be rate limited)

Another thing, less known but possibly interesting is https://4get.ca/ its image search may be powerful, though the site started to show an in-house captcha

https://metager.de (German) https://metager.org (English) -> One quick way to view Tor-blocking sites: ANONYM ÖFFNEN is handy for non-Tor users too, because it filters a lot of annoying things (unnecessary JS, Cookies). Onion available except this proxy is clearnet. It’s like ixquick from like 10 years ago (no more existing)

Allegedly the “evil hacker” had stolen 2,675.73 XMR, and now allegedly someone “returned” 2,696.73. This feels suspicious, especially 0.73. Thoughts?

PS nitter.net unblocked Tor again. A Tails-friendly link just in case Tor will be re-blocked
https://nitter.oksocial.net/watchfund/status/1732391070216908886

The OP would like to do coin-coin right? Then Bisq is a good DEX.

If you’re a taker, just buying Monero, then the rate may be bad (Trocador might be better rate-wise). If you’re a maker, selling BTC for XMR, then the rate may be good—but if you try to sell it too high, obviously no one will take it or you’ll have to wait for a long time, so it’s not good when you’re in hurry. If you sell BTC nicely, just like +0.5%, well that may sell like hot cakes (assuming that there are many people who want to sell XMR for BTC, which is admittedly questionable).

A fun project would be: factor Mersenne numbers! Naive trial division -> optimize your code by only trying valid candidates (you’ll learn about quadratic residues, Jacobi symbol etc.) -> You’ll soon realize that trial division only goes so far, motivated to learn new approaches. The P−1 method may impress you, it’s powerful. Enjoy coding that. -> But then, you’ll be frustrated by even stronger opponents here and there beyond M100, which the P−1 method can’t factor. Now you’ll be so ready, even determined, to learn ECM. At this point, you’ll find using elliptic curves is actually not so difficult, because it’s just like P−1. And yay, 20- or 30- digit numbers are no longer your enemies, they’re just small fish, elliptic curves rule!

Before you know it, you’ll have a clear, intuitive vision about “an elliptic curve over a finite field”. Try to understand why ECM works. Try to count the number of points. Everything you experience with ECM is related to ECC too.

I’m not that good; know enough to know that I don’t really know much. Just a hobbyist; posted ℍappy ℍamilton Day! here.

Yes, Monero is community-based. That is warm and fuzzy, except frankly, this Lemmy instance is not always very peaceful… its users tend to be vocal and variously a bit weird.

XMR is an interesting experiment and, although not perfect, rather successful so far. Several privacy-friendly companies accept XMR as you can see on kycnot.me so it has its ecology. Like you said in your OP, this might be what Satoshi really wanted to create.

For many people it’s difficult to get out of the box—ditching Google, Windows, &c. You have chosen and joined Lemmy (Fedi), even though there may be a more “popular” place elsewhere in non-libre world. That’s why I said thanks!

Thanks for joining monero.town :) Not only it’s a good crypto—it is a great privacy tool, recommended e.g. by privacyguides.org, accepted (as donations) by the Tor Project (which is endorsed by the BBC, the New York Times, etc. and now also by Amnesty International), by Tails.net, and many other privacy advocates.

You might be thinking about “investment” but the implications of Monero is much, much bigger—among other things, you may question today’s privacy invasion by some oppressive governments or monopolizing companies like Google.

Gandhi said that whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it's very important that you do it, 'cause nobody else will.

Also, if you happen to be a math geek or a cypherpunk, this thing is based on Elliptic (Ed25519)—something deep and fascinating for number theorists to study!

XMR/BTC is easy on Bisq, a DEX but BTC fees are crazy!

Wait. While Trocador is an option, it’s just a front end of CEXes, not a DEX. You might be still KYC’ed there, so it shouldn’t be the best (first) option. Just a possibly convenient option.

I value the freedom of free software. A fork is good in that context.

PoS has at least one good aspect: it’s perceived as “green”. Other than that, afaik PoS tends to imply that only a few rich people can determine whether something is okay or not. The Monero network, on the other hand, is carefully designed so that any one with any CPU can participate (at least in principle). This design philosophy feels good.

In retrospect, I should have added a black line or something so that this QR thing will not really work.

Btw, did you read this blog post by VC? Most probably he’s talking about active people including you (Kyun).

One thing I've always been pleased to see is when people draw inspiration from cock.li for their own service

Re: anonymous domain. Your suggestions aside, here’s a bit more neutral view. Which is better?

• Option A: A pro-privacy, proper company is willing to cooperate with you so that you can legally get a domain anonymously and use it for e.g. VPS. (A proper company in general. Not necessarily about Njalla.)
• Option B: Using a fake phone number, etc. lying both to the registrar/reseller and the hosting company. As soon as they know that, you may lose your domain.

The said blog post is actually an ad. The author is a business person who wants to sell their virtual phone numbers; understandably their suggestions are biased.

Purely logically speaking, using a fake name/address and a temp phone number to get a domain is an option one can try, especially if they don’t need to renew the said domain (e.g. exit scamming within a year). That said, it will be safer and better if a hosting company is cooperative, willing to register your domain under their name without asking your personal info at all. It’s understandable that some people are not sure about Njalla, though they do have a long track record. Now, IncogNet is a newer option, not Njalla.

Apparently the owner of IncogNET is pro-free speech and truly believe in privacy and anonymity, even if it’s US based [Ironically, recently the EU has more oppressive]. But this is not a recommendation, DYOR.

They provide onion and i2p in their hosting plans, which is cool (get an anonymous domain/a hosting plan there, and anyone can get an onion version of their website for free). Afaik IncogNET is based on Fran’s (Frantech/BuyVM), which are generally trusted among privacy advocates, with a very long track record. However, there is one bad thing about IncogNET: while they do accept Monero, currently you can’t p2pool on their VPS.

Agreed. It’s an option worth considering (even EFF said so)—in fact a bridge itself could be run by something like Team Cymru (Augury), removed in TB v11.5.4. On the other hand, a VPN could collaborate with “them” so you’ll have to trust them… adding yet another unknown.

There are many ways to de-anonymoze Tor users indeed. Like Keystroke fingerprinting or Deep Packet Inspection… Usually a local ISP is not a big problem but it depends. The fact remains that even in a country with heavy Internet censorship, currently a nation-state can’t block Tor (via Bridge or Snowflake).

Can’t tell; I don’t watch video—not only none of yours, but in general, unless it seems really interesting. A few people find your videos informative, so you’re helping a few users, nevertheless. Don’t mind me…