Saki

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…