The Monero Standard #2: 20 February 2022 - 2 March 2022
Table of Contents
- Recent News
- Price and Blockchain Statistics
- Fun Facts
- Merchants
- Notable Projects
- Funding
- Meme of the Week
- Study Time
- Bonus
- Donation and Contact
Recent News
Agorist.xyz, a newly-created crypto philosophy journal called "Agorism in the 21st Century: A Philosophical Journal", released its first issue with contributions from Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis, Jaya Klara Brekke, Nick Land, Amy Ireland and Harry Halpin:
Agorism is an applied, practical philosophy. Its primary tactic is called counter-economics: the sum of all black-market activity. Agorism is counter-economics wielded consciously. In the words of its founder, Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3): As more people consciously convert their work and leisure to the counter-economy, the State loses both control and sustenance, like a vampire losing blood and victims. The self-conscious counter-economy is called The Agora (and the libertarian/counter-economists are called agorists). (1987a)
Bitcoinist.com published an article titled "Convictions, Jail Time On The Rise In The U.S. For Selling Bitcoin" highlighting many new cases of people being arrested and convicted in US for selling cryptocurrencies in P2P marketplaces (e.g LocalBitcoins.com).
Joe Rogan in his podcast, Joe Rogan Experience episode #1780, hosted Maajid Nawaz, a counter-extremist activist and co-founder of Quilliam. They argued many concerns about centralization of power, media and finance and the similarity between cryptocurrency and printing press and its crucial role in people's liberty which I present in a 12 minutes video clip down below:
CryptoVigilante published an article called "Special Report to Canadians on Crypto Privacy" available free for a limited time. Be sure to send this to your Canadian folks.
/u/WinstonsThiccBooty in reddit posted a guide about how to make a "paper wallet" on Tails OS.
UkoeHB published the Seraphis Proof of Concept in Monero's CCS platform.
Kevin Wad published a video in his YouTube channel explaining Seraphis, its (dis)advantages and effects it can have on various entities using the currency. Seraphis and Jamtis are planned for 2023.
MoneroResearch.info hosting a collection of research papers relevant to improving Monero, has been launched and people can browse and edit its entries.
Morpheus tweeted about a potential fractional reserving on XMR price by Binance.
SethForPrivacy updated the "Bitcoin's Fungibility Graveyard" article on his website. Added details around Freedom Convoy tracing and Wasabi wallet tracing of the DAO hacker.
Guardian Project introduced its Orbot application's release for iOS devices; Orbot is an application that lets you proxy selective/whole list of applications through Tor on mobile devices. Now you can use Monero onion nodes on iOS devices in Cake Wallet, here's a video about it by Cake Wallet. You can find lists of onion nodes here and here.
LocalMonero Knowledge Base published "Contributing Back to Monero", be sure to check out.
Price and Blockchain Statistics
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Market Capitalization | $3.218B |
| Total Supply | 18,086,353 XMR |
| Price | $178.13 |
| LocalMonero's Street Price | $184.9 |
| Average Transaction Fee | 0.00013 XMR ($0.023) |
| Block Height | 2,570,336 |
| Block Reward | 0.6874+0.00442 XMR ($122.88) |
| Inflation | 1.00% |
| Hashrate | 2.920 Gh/s |
| Transaction Ratio to Bitcoin | 8.4% |
Price Chart
Current Hashrate Distribution
Inflation Between Competitors
Fun Facts
Are you tired about always sharing your 95 character stealth address like a weirdo? Try this:
OpenAlias seeks to provide a way to simplify aliasing amidst a rapidly shifting technology climate. Users are trying to cross the bridge to private and cryptographically secure infrastructure and systems, but many of them have just barely started remembering the email addresses of their friends and family. As part of the ongoing development of the Monero cryptocurrency project, we asked ourselves: how can we simplify payments for users unfamiliar with cryptocurrency? Monero stealth addresses are at least 95 characters long - memorising them is not an option, and asking someone to send a payment to <95-character-string> is only going to lead to confusion. At its most basic, OpenAlias is a TXT DNS record on a FQDN (fully qualified domain name). By combining this with DNS-related technologies we have created an aliasing standard that is extensible for developers, intuitive and familiar for users, and can interoperate with both centralised and decentralised domain systems.
What that means for you as a normal guy who is not into this geeky stuff? You can read this tutorial from LandChad.net to figure out how to use this feature for making life a lot less painful.
Merchants
IVPN
IVPN is a VPN provider company focused primarily on protecting its customer's privacy (not anonymity) and security. The business model is a transparent one with emphasizing on ethics and a true free (as in freedom) software approach. No email, no logs, no customer data, open-source apps and website, no cloud services or data storage, independent security audits and more... Unlike other VPN providers who falsely advertise themselves as "Anonymizing VPNs", IVPN tries to educate people on downsides of using a VPN:
Using a VPN should be part of an overall strategy to protect your privacy - but only if you trust the VPN provider more than your ISP.
They have a great blog in their website with posts related to maintaining individuals privacy, anonymity and security on the internet.
Notable Projects
How to Help Monero
MoneroOutreach.org has a very detailed article for newcomers and how they can help and contribute to the idea and philosophy of Monero, check them out. Also be sure to check this article in LocalMonero's Knowledge Base.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Online Anonymity
(Or “How I learned to start worrying and love privacy anonymity”)
A nearly-perfect source for learning how to keep your online identity safe and anonymous. It's always a work-in-progress and you can learn and contribute to the project by means they mentioned.
Himitsu Browser Extension Wallet for Monero
Reemuru has released the experimental version (v0.1.0) of XMR browser extension called "Himitsu". Currently not suitable for using on mainnet but if you are familiar with React.js and Monero's monero-wallet-rpc, be sure to check the repository.
P2Pool
After MineXMR.com gained the majority of the hashpower of the network, importance of decentralization in pool mining started to show its true face. P2Pool is a software, first intended for decentralization of Bitcoin mining but never gained popularity, designed for mining in a decentralized, permissionless and trustless setup that has the best of both worlds (solo and pool mining). Comparison between the three methods for mining Monero was documented in project's GitHub repository as such:
| Pool type | Payouts | Fee | Min. payout | Centralized? | Stability | Control | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Centralized pool | Regular | 0-3% | 0.001-0.01 XMR | Yes | Less stable due to pool server outages | Pool admin controls your mined funds, what you mine and can execute network attacks | Only miner software is required |
| Solo | Rare | 0% | 0.6 XMR or more | No | As stable as your Monero node | 100% under your control | Monero node + optional miner |
| P2Pool | Regular | 0% | ~0.0003 XMR | No | As stable as your Monero node | 100% under your control | Monero node + P2Pool node + miner |
SethForPrivacy wrote a simple and straightforward guide on how to run and mine on a p2pool node that I recommend to read.
Other
Monero Art Fund is a community effort of artists and designers who try to provide the community with the latest gorgeous designs of MoneroChan, the anime girl becoming the mascot of Monero. If you enjoyed the art, support them by donation to help them continue. We at this newsletter had the pleasure to use their arts because we're too lazy. :)
Funding
CCS
Ideas:
- whatnero_android_app
- Help Ukraine to use ONLY Monero
- escapethe3RA Monero Observer maintenance (Spring 2022)
- Seraphis Wallet PoC
- mj part time coding 2022-03
- Monero Afghanistan Expansion Strategy
Funding Required:
N/A
Monerujo Funding
N/A
Meme of the Week
Thank you The Loitering Linguist!
Study Time
The Bitcoin Standard
The Bitcoin Standard is a book written by Dr. Saifedean Ammous. The Bitcoin Standard describes Bitcoin as the "Hardest currency ever made" and tries to historically and (socio-)economically analyze the current role of currency and compare that to how bitcoin can improve things. Except there is one small issue:
Although Bitcoin is NOT fungible, the book is still a huge redpill on its own to read.
Bonus
Bonus part of this newsletter is something I may use once in a while when I don't find an appropriate category to put a content in it, so don't be surprised if you don't find it in future issues.Be sure to watch this animation about what is a currency and how it enslaves the populations:
Donation and Contact
This newsletter is one of my dedicated jobs and LocalMonero pays me for writing it, but if you've found it informative and helpful, here is my wallet address:
89gUNDWHpNBD59eqJHcyg9RRfZ9xPBqdXKgVhLiYonhtjFMtmKJDumCRD3EWvmXeogKs5Jh4jfnUhdyif2U3tbT3Liu7F3M
Thank you!
Contact Me
Found anything worth noting? Want to send something to be included in the next issue? Want to chat about something?
You can contact me on XMPP and Matrix.
Be aware that Matrix is centralized due to the fact that most people make an account on Matrix.org operated by the Matrix Foundation - That's a lot of metadata controlled unjust by just one entity.