#Monero Twitter as I see it

Emerging complex systems are inherently unpredictable. We can outline broad incentives and directional shifts (like declining returns on violence with increasing decentralization), but any detailed model or blueprint will likely fail (which outsiders will almost always interpret as a gotcha - "your system failed!"). The future emerges from countless local interactions, not from central planning or precise forecasts. Humility, not playing gods, is key. Here is an illustration of the humans' common saying "I'll believe it when I see it"… meanwhile, you see👇

If you know some history, it has shown that when situations become desperate, any state can make it illegal for its citizens to own assets like gold or crypto. Executive Order 6102 in the U.S. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102), Poland’s 1919 regulation, Australia’s Banking Act 1959, the UK’s Exchange Control Act 1947, and many others all prove it. View quoted note →

This is a single-image argument for why you might want decentralized, P2P, non-KYC solutions like RetoSwap for already privacy-by-default Monero. Context: https://xcancel.com/chaserxy/status/2053497160746856713

There is a trending discussion on X about Ayn Rand's 1959 Claim: Free Markets Prevent Monopolies (https://x.com/i/trending/2053589247001608560). Many argue that centralization and monopolies are natural. Yes, because there was a long historical period when Return on Violence (ROV) was high. Centralization, monopolies, and the very idea of the state with its monopoly on coercion and violence all emerged when violence became highly profitable: - Hunter-gatherer societies had low ROV. Nomadic, with little to seize and easy escape, violence rarely paid. This kept them decentralized and resilient. - Agriculture flipped the equation. Fixed assets and stored wealth made conquest profitable, fueling empires, feudalism, and colonization. High ROV built the centralized world we know. - The Industrial stage further amplified high ROV: with advanced weapons, bureaucracy, and mass organization enabling even larger, more efficient centralized states and state adjacent monopolies. - Now the Information Revolution is driving ROV down again. Tech, cryptography, and mobility make large-scale coercion less effective. High ROV can change (and it IS changing!) but only with the right tools and only by and for people who value freedom more than comfortable inertia. Individuals who actively build and participate in parallel/counter economies are the ones CREATING SPACES where ROV becomes low and, in the long run, can become obsolete. Not for everyone. Only for those who choose it. Decentralization isn’t a trend. It’s the next stage of (at least part of) human society. *** Full Excerpt from The Sovereign Individual (https://www.lopp.net/pdf/The%20Sovereign%20Individual.pdf): THE FOURTH STAGE OF HUMAN SOCIETY The theme of this book is the new revolution of power which is liberating individuals at the expense of the twentieth century nation state. Innovations that alter the logic of violence in unprecedented ways are transforming the boundaries within which the future must lie. If our deductions are correct, you stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation state, creating new forms of social organization in the process. This will be far from an easy transformation. The challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happen with incredible speed compared with anything seen in the past. Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life. (1) hunting-and-gathering societies; (2) agricultural societies; and (3) industrial societies. Now, looming over the horizon, is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization: information societies. Each of the previous stages of society has corresponded with distinctly different phases in the evolution and control of violence. As we explain in detail, information societies promise to dramatically reduce the returns to violence, in part because they transcend locality. If the new millennium, the advantage of controlling violence on large scale will be far lower than it has been at any time since before the French Revolution. This will have profound consequences. One of these will be rising crime. When the payoff for organizing violence at a large scale tumbles, the payoff from violence at a smaller scale is likely to jump. Violence will become more random and localized. Organized crime will grow in scope. We explain why. Another logical implication of falling returns to violence is the eclipse of politics. There is much evidence that adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth century nation state is rapidly eroding. The death of Communism is merely the most striking example. As we explore in detail, the collapse of morality and growing corruption among leaders of Western governments is not a random development. It is evidence that the potential of the nation state is exhausted. Even many of its leaders no longer believe the platitudes they mouth. Nor are they believed by others. History Repeats Itself This is a situation with striking parallels in the past. Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain. This widespread revulsion often comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. So it was in the late fifteenth century, when the medieval Church was the predominant institution of feudalism. Notwithstanding popular belief in "the sacredness of the sacerdotal office," both the higher and lower ranks of clergy were held in the utmost contempt-not unlike the popular attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats today. We believe that much can be learned by analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and the situation today, when the world has become saturated with politics. The costs of supporting institutionalized religion at the end of the fifteenth century had reached a historic extreme, much as the costs of supporting government have reached a senile extreme today. We know what happened to organized religion in the wake of the Gunpowder Revolution. Technological developments created strong incentives to downsize religious institutions and lower their costs. A similar technological revolution is destined to downsize radically the nation state early in the new millennium. The Information Revolution As the breakdown of large systems accelerates, systematic compulsion will recede as a factor shaping economic life and the distribution of income. Efficiency will rapidly become more important than the dictates of power in the organization of social institutions. An entirely new realm of economic activity that is not hostage to physical violence will emerge in cyberspace. The most obvious benefits will flow to the "cognitive elite," who will increasingly operate outside political boundaries. They are already equally home in Frankfurt, London, New York, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them. The Sovereign Individual explores the social and financial consequences of this revolutionary change. Our desire is to help you to take advantage of the opportunities of the new age and avoid being destroyed by its impact. If only half of what we expect to see happens, you face change of a magnitude with few precedents in history. The transformation of the year 2000 will not only revolutionize the character of the world economy, it will do so more rapidly than any previous phase change. Unlike the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution will not take millennia to do its work. Unlike the Industrial Revolution. its impact will not be spread over centuries. The Information Revolution will happen within a lifetime. What is more, it will happen almost everywhere at once. Technical and economic innovations will no longer be confined to small portions of the globe. The transformation will be all but universal. And it will involve a break with the past so profound that it will almost bring to life the magical domain of the gods as imagined by the early agricultural peoples like the ancient Greeks. To a greater degree than most would now be willing to concede, it will prove difficult or impossible to preserve many contemporary institutions in the new millennium. When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of the cave dwellers.

🚨 TOMORROW (Wednesday, May 6, 2026), at block 2997100, the Monero FCMP++ and Carrot beta stressnet will hard fork from the current testnet.

GitHub

Release FCMP++ & Carrot beta stressnet v1.1 · seraphis-migration/monero

Overview This is the v1.1 release of the FCMP++ and Carrot beta stressnet software. This release includes a wallet scanning fix (#346) and minor cl...

On Thursday, MoneroTalk will host core developer and MRL researcher Justin Berman, who has led the implementation of FCMP++ and Carrot over the past two years. You can ask questions live via XMRchat:

Tip monerotalk | XMRChat

XmrBazaar just hit order #5000🎉 5,000 successful P2P Monero trades! The 1st successful clearnet P2P crypto marketplace. Satoshi had a draft marketplace in an early Bitcoin beta client in 2008 but never launched it. XmrBazaar is growing, used daily, & proving that Agorism works! Read Crypto Agorism: Free Markets for a Free World by Anarkio: a true 100% agorist living his vision and quietly building XmrBazaar behind the scenes. https://agorism-archives.medium.com/crypto-agorism-free-markets-for-a-free-world-d9c755e6ef11

PSA: Bisq v1 has experienced an exploit in its trade protocol that allowed an attacker to drain a portion of available offers. The impact is limited to offers that were actively taken by the attacker. Funds held in users’ Bisq Bitcoin wallets are not affected. As an immediate mitigation, an emergency mechanism was activated to disable trading by setting the required trading version to 2.0.0 — a version that does not exist. This effectively prevents the attacker from continuing the exploit. source:

Bisq

PSA: Trade protocol exploit discovered, investigations ongoing

Bisq v1 has experienced an exploit in its trade protocol that allowed an attacker to drain a portion of available offers. The impact is limited to...

I suspect more Brazilians will soon discover Monero ;)

True #Monero adoption is adoption at the root: food production / farms. This is THE foundation, without which there is no economy (circular or otherwise), no autonomy, no sovereignty… nor life itself. Nothing warms the heart more than seeing this kind of listing on #XmrBazaar 🌱

Soil Data Collection | XmrBazaar

Shop with Monero: I provide professional agricultural data collection services in Central Iowa and surrounding areas. Services include: ...

Aaron Swartz, I wish you could see this ♥️ Sci-Hub just launched Sci-Bot - an AI that answers scientific questions by searching its database, without asking / faking permission from the gatekeepers. The fight for open knowledge continues. The dream lives on. Link: sci-bot.ru View quoted note →

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. "I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy source: https://ia800101.us.archive.org/1/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf

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Big win for the vintage car market + I've heard the Toyota Hilux is literally unkillable, time to learn how to drive stick shift.

Looks like* "centralized decentralization" is the new compliant privacy. (*judging by my X timeline)

The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the U.S., and perhaps the world. Honor those who dared to reject the comfort, stability, and retirement benefits of the Black Chamber. Few can.

12 March 2002 Congressional Testimony - NSA/CSS

National Security Agency Freedom of Information Act

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Few know that the 'Encryption war' never ended: it began centuries ago and never stopped. The 90s “Encryption Wars” was just the feds tripping over their surveillance fetish in broad daylight. Early cryptographers died unrecognized because their contributions couldn’t be acknowledged. Bletchley Park’s cryptanalysts remained classified long after 1945, so thousands of codebreakers returned to civilian life, sworn to silence, and while conventional soldiers could boast of heroics, those who fought actually pivotal intellectual battles had to dodge questions about their wartime service. Turing’s family had no idea what he did. Neither did Marian Rejewski’s. The Navajo code talkers got medals for fighting but with gag orders, etc., etc. I can continue forever... The cipher war never stopped, it just went silent: if people don’t realize they’re at war, they don’t fight back. TL;DR: The state’s crypto war never ended; they just got better at 'hiding the bodies': the state conducts cryptographic research today that won’t be declassified for decades... if ever. You don’t hate the state enough. While some might argue that it's justified against external enemies, the next stage of the encryption war could target us. 'If a noticeable exodus to this parallel economy emerges, the state's greatest "national security" threat won't be foreign foes: it will be us - people who just want to be left alone.'

Want to get Monero a birthday gift? 🎁 Monero’s birthday wishlist 👉

CCS - Funding Required

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Happy 12th Birthday, #Monero! 🥳 She has entered her teenage years: old enough to see how f*cked the system is, strong enough to rebel, and burning with a fierce, raw desire to fix what's broken. Deep thanks to all her guardians throughout these years - the Monero devs and this unbreakable community - who kept her safe through every storm and helped her grow into this powerful force. The teen years are just the BEGINNING: explosive growth, unstoppable energy, and real rebellion are ahead💥

imo all major AI providers will start KYC'ing customers very soon... the same way it happened with crypto. (mandatory reminder: the whole crypto thing started on anti-state.com forum) View quoted note →