Max

My new phone runs GrapheneOS and I love it.

One recommendation that I would give people is that it does not need to be an all-or-nothing jump into the abyss. It can be a bit disheartening when you try to get rid of all the privacy-invasive things in your life and you get cut off from your family and friends.

After some failed attempts, the strategy that I have found more successful is that I have new phone that I installed GrapheneOS into, and I keep the older phone with whatsapp. The older phone is in Airplane mode connected to WiFi at my home. It is effectively a landline. I can still use it once or twice a day to check on my family through WhatsApp without having to broadcast my location all day to Meta. This way I don’t need to install any sandboxed Google Play services into my new phone. The old phone is the sandboxed Google Play. I also use the old phone for verifications, 2FA, and any other things that I don’t want to contaminate my new phone with.

Over time I am finding that my GrapheneOS is perfectly functional. The main difficulty is the chats services that are used by my family, friends, and work-related “group chats”. I have convinced some people to join my XMPP server, including my mom (wuhuu), but it is an uphill battle. That’s why the other phone is still essential for me.

Finally. Someone noticed 🥹

Having 55% of hash doesn’t mean you’ll make profit by attempting a doublespend

But a pool could be turned into a malicious pool by an adversary that takes control of it. A clear disadvantages of centralization is that it creates a single point of failure.

Even a malicious pool could at worst mine empty blocks for a while.

Why is this the case? I still have not studied the Monero protocol yet.

The creator of the tool is the admin of lemmings.world, and the tool is hosted at schedule.lemmings.world. So, if you have a user at lemmings.world, you can use this tool without having to trust a third-party.

If you don’t have a user there, you can create a user in that instance for the purpose of creating scheduled posts. Removing the need to trust two parties rather than one.

And, of course, since the source code is open anyone else can attach this to their own instance! Pretty cool.

Ah, do you mean “hate speech”?

Aah, ok! That at least explains what they could have been thinking.

But, of course, this is a terrible idea!!

Both sides? “Oh yeah, the front looks a lot like the ID I lost, but can you please send me the back side too so that I can confirm?”

TIL. That’s an interesting craft!

I think it is difficult for others to tell you whether it is “worth it”, because that is very personal.

For me, personally, transferring my family and friends to Signal is not worth it because Signal requires a phone number. If I will invest such an effort, I would rather help them migrate to a service that does not require a phone number - such as Matrix or an XMPP server. But needing a phone number to register might not be a problem for you - in which case Signal could be a perfectly reasonable choice.

But… Even then - is it worth it? Again, it is up to you. I tried, but my success has been limited. The reality is that I still have a phone with WhatsApp that I leave at home and I check it every day or two. I tell people that if they want to reach me, the best is to use e-mail. And to my closest friends and some of my family I did convince them to use my XMPP chat so that we can be connected more often. No one really left WhatsApp, but at least we can have some fun conversations on our own server, which is nice.

But I am not going to lie, I am sacrificing a ton of functionality and convenience. For me, this is worth it because I think that it is GOOD not to be available through the phone all the time, and I am idealist when it comes to not giving big companies our data. But for some people these sacrifices might be unsustainable, and it might not be worth it.

So: I don’t know. Maybe it’s worth it?

Probably paypal just covering niche without any clear understanding just because stablecoins under the hood is very similar to paypal , just using different rails

Yes, that is what it looks like to me.

The thing is… it would take such a small modification to this system to change the world. If PayPal were to implement this such that the PayPal payment can be made by transferring the crypto into the seller’s account directly and anonymously without the buyer having a PayPal Balance account, and then PayPal is willing to exchange the seller’s PYUSD for fiat directly on the site, this would be such a significant step in the crypto revolution.

as for freezing accounts, it became common among centralized stablecoins

Yeah, from what they have written It appears like this is necessary feature to comply with regulations.

I am thinking about how I might be able to get a practical use out of PYUSD. Maybe if I kept all of my assets in crypto, then it might be useful to be able to get PYUSD and pay using a paypal account. But I have a lot more fiat than crypto available, and by using PYUSD I lose most if not all of the benefits associated with a crypto payment - plus gas fees. So I don’t see why I would chose this option over a normal fiat transfer.

I guess I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the real use case. Is this more than a marketing gimmick?

Ah, it’s always in the small-text (Note [2] at the bottom of https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto/pyusd):

PayPal Balance account required to access cryptocurrency. When you buy or sell cryptocurrency, including when you check out with crypto, we will disclose an exchange rate and any fees you will be charged for that transaction. For currencies other than PYUSD, the exchange rate includes a spread that PayPal earns on each purchase and sale. Learn more about cryptocurrency fees.

So, it is not clear to me whether you would be able to exchange monero for PYUSD in some non-KYC exchange, but from this I gather that the only way to actually pay a vendor using PYUSD would be to have a PayPal account that is tied to your identity.

Furthermore, their smart contract has a built-in “asstProtectionRole” that allows them to uni-laterally freeze the balance in any account.

You can find the read-me in their github project here: https://github.com/paxosglobal/pyusd-contract

Here is an excerpt:

Asset Protection Role

Paxos Trust Company is regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). As required by the regulator, Paxos must have a role for asset protection to freeze or seize the assets of a criminal party when required to do so by law, including by court order or other legal process.

The assetProtectionRole can freeze and unfreeze the PYUSD balance of any address on chain. It can also wipe the balance of an address after it is frozen to allow the appropriate authorities to seize the backing assets.

Freezing is something that Paxos will not do on its own accord, and as such we expect to happen extremely rarely. The list of frozen addresses is available in isFrozen(address who).

You can see the actual function here.

I don’t see this as much of an improvement over using PayPal and a bank. Maybe it can be useful if you want to move crypto into an asset that you can pay with in regular online purchases without going through an exchange. But PayPal will still play the role of the intermediary that knows you. Storing value in an asset that can be frozen by PayPal is absolutely not desirable. So I think that this coin is kind of a gimmick.

But it could have a positive influence in that online vendors might become more accustomed to accepting crypto payments, and it could help adoption in the long run. Let’s hope.

There is also a “purge community” button. But I have learned that if I purge a non-local community the purge is so complete that your instamce forgets it ever existed… And it can simply be fetched again!

You have a good reason to be proud. It’s awesome!

Great work!! Are you working on some other next project now?

Funny thing is that those of who left aren’t there anymore to comment that we did leave… So anyone who is still there is probably looking at the others who stayed and saying “See?! The protest didn’t work because we are still here!”

1. I purchase Monero through Kraken

2. Not sure

3. It is not exactly the same as KYC, because KYC is about the exchange verifying your identity, keeping a record of who you are, keeping a record of your transactions, and the crypto addressees that they send you funds to.

It depends on what your goal is and who is looking at your finances. If you want to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Monero to avoid paying taxes, then your bank and potentially the tax authorities will pay attention to a massive transaction leaving your account and disappearing into a non-KYC crypto exchange. So, from that point of view, it is effectively similar to KYC.

But if you are interested in privacy and the per-transaction amounts are not massive, then both the bank and the exchange will still have some record of the transaction tied to your identity. But the bank is unlikely to take notice, and the exchange, being a Non-KYC, will not verify your identity nor is it under the same level of pressure to keep detailed records. Still, some of your information is leaked and it is out there.

Monero is very private, so even with KYC you can pull it off the exchange and your identity is immediately disassociated from it.

Depending on how much you want to buy, and who you know, one way of getting it is to buy it from a friend or an acquaintance.

Noooope

Hairless cats are my favorite. So pink I guess.

I like to think that I am a good person…

I see you!