The "sources" are extremely sus. Most CEXes have delisted Monero and no-KYC exchanges by definition don't have KYC. The addresses are not stored on the blockchain. If an address is known to be CSAM, it would be blocked off so no transactions would have been made and because of the previous point, you can't go back in the blockchain to find past offenders. The CSAM site likely has other non-CSAM porn so many actual purchases would be legal so usage on honeypot exchanges would not mean much. Reading between the lines, the article is basically coming up with its statistics via inference. (1) Most BTC blockchain activity is speculation, (2) CSAM makes up a significant percentage of BTC actual usage, (3) Monero's popularity is growing, (4) Criminals prefer privacy, (5) therefore Monero's growth is mostly from CSAM. The main counterpoint to this is Monero's increase use in coin cards, VPN and other privacy tool/services purchases, Shopinbit, etc where Monero's use exceeds that of BTC and lightning. So (1) does not apply to Monero, and it's likely (2) if it were ever true is increasingly not the case so (5) is absolutely false.
g2devi
Two things. While you may disagree with some points, his overall analysis is well thought out. While he does acknowledge that fungeability and price stability are essential to a currency, and you could convince him that Monero has these qualities, he also has two other criteria that Monero does not currently possess, namely "being declared legal tender" and durability, i.e. will it be around with a predicable price in 100 years, so you can make contracts with it. Monero fails the "official" legal tender criteria (even if you're able to live off Monero and show it's unofficially legal tender). All crypto, including Bitcoin fails the durability criteria. Bitcoin has only been around 15 years...that's just a baby currency that has not even gone through even a single serious recession. I cannot guarantee you that Bitcoin or Monero will be around in 100 years. I can't guarantee that its price is at least the current price at that time. No-one can, even though they may believe it to be the case. The only way to show that Monero is durable, is using Monero so it will endure. Eventually, it will reach the stage where all reasonable people will trust it enough to believe that it is durable. No need to worry about influencers. They will look into Monero when the need or interest arises.
As usual, Monero is mentioned as a problem (for criminals) and not a solution (no-one knows your funds). and KYC and CEX are good since the catch criminals.
Either way, the standard rule applies, always have a decoy account with enough money to be plausible that you can give up. Unlike bank accounts or CEX accounts, decoy wallets are easy and cheap and even if you're forced to give it up access, you'll be able to convince the thief and save the rest of your money.
This is not how things worked in the past. Income tax is a modern invention and if the government or anyone who was in power wanted money, they would take it and punish you if you resisted. There was nothing voluntary about it. The key difference is that governments tend to tax you either or force "tribute" per head or per property or per trade port, and your family, religious group, guild, protector, tribe, and lord would have their own "taxes", either as a percentage of what you produce or seasonal fees. Governments tended to leave you alone and focused on roads, the military, and courts. As for the military, it tended to be forced on each land owner to supply a certain number of people when the region needed it, and there were strict penalties for both avoiding military service or trying to take advantage of unoccupied land because the owner was serving. Also, people in the military often needed to pay their own way and provide their own weapons. In modern times, everything is centralized and the government has done its best to get rid of all competitions so families, religion, guilds, tribes, and "lords" have all been dis-empowered, except those who found a way to become so powerful that they span nations. Because there's little competition, there's only one organization to pay and only one organization to plan your life because there is no competition, that organization keeps wanting to grow and take over ever more of your life. Centralization is the issue, not taxes. With competition from the local groups, you may not be freer, but you will have more flexibility on which groups to pay taxes to and services are more customized and taxes are lower since no-one group wants the other groups to grow too big and will go to war to assert this. Does monero help fix this? To some extent. It forces government to depend more on property and head taxes and user fees for government services since it's possible to hide income taxes, sales taxes, transaction taxes, etc. But it's not a solution for building up the other competing groups to supplement government as has been shown to work in all countries around the world for thousands of years.
Since you're not asking about Haveno, the key question is, what are you trying to federate and what do you mean by localmonero?
This is what I liked about localmonero: (1) It had an easy to use web site -- this can be federated over onion; (2) it had many options (especially necessary if you're not using USD or EUR) -- federation reduces liquidity per mistance; (3) It had a reputation system for sellers -- this is hard to federate; (4) The arbiters have been proven over time to be trustworthy -- this may be impossible to federate without a reputation system.
So, IMO, your first task is to come up with a federated trust system for both arbiters and sellers. Once you have that, listings and trading can happen on any platform, even lemmy or nostr or Simplex or Haveno or something like robosats.
In my simpleminded approach, a wallet public key could have multiple reputations associated with it (e.g. seller, buyer, arbiter). There would have to be a way to confirm that sellers actually "sold" and "buyers" actually bought and arbiters actually arbitrated....I'm sure this could be done in a hidden ZK way by adding transaction IDs to the reputation . Could this be abused since a person can create multiple wallets and trade with himself? Sure, but that could also be done in localmonero and it did fall apart.
This is where open block chains fail. A good open block chain won't disallow the transaction, but since it is open, the owner of the wallet can be fined or jailed after the fact. Coinjoins don't work since they depend on most people doing it, most people not being KYCed, and most people not making a mistake that would cause them to be KYCed. This just doesn't happen. Breaking a transaction up into several transactions just under the limit makes you more of a target since it's obvious what you're doing. By all means, try to defeat this measure politically and form common cause with the cash/gold/silver bros, but recognise that even if you win, we're only one 9-11 or COVID-19-like crisis away from losing. The only real solution are private block chains like Monero and non-cash unit of accounts like gold, silver, rice, dried beans, or outright barter.
I've tried to connect but there are so many options that I really don't know what to do. The link has a series of node addresses. What do I do with them. There are networks, people, chats, files, channels, forums, boards. Where do I enter the node information? As far as I can get so far is that I have a New Channel listed in Activity for monerohub. I can't subscribe to it or do anything except delete it. Can someone post a few screen shots from the beginning of how to get the boards for (I assume) monerohub . No explanation beyond the pictures is needed unless there's a "gotcha" step that's more complicated or behaves unintuitively.
Yes, adopt those threads on Monero Town but do not be surprised if it doesn't change the size of the reddit population. People on reddit that have no other interests, might move to Monero Town, but most reddit users started with interests in several reddit forums and monero just happens to be one of them. They won't leave reddit for Monero Town, although they might add to their social media if Monero Town is much better than /r/monero. If you want them to move from reddit, you have to make sure the other groups are also on lemmy. My suggestion is to have a poll on /r/monero asking people which groups do people look at. Once you have that list, then find the comparable lemmy group (if there is any) and then post it on reddit. That resource would open people up to considering life outside of reddit. Without that resource, expect slow change.
If you want to start a new community on Bastyon or Brighteon.io, go right ahead. There are other communities on reddit, matrix, Simplex, and individual posts on nostr. People gravitate towards the community that have other non-Monero accounts that suit their interests. IMO, if monero.town is defederated, people who use monero.town on lemmy are more likely to either return to reddit or move to matrix or nostr or simplex rather than try yet another new platform, but if you do succeed in getting people to join, I'll happily at least look in on it to see what else the platform has to offer.
I haven't read the Monero Standard, but I do know a few things about publishing. Most people think they can write a better story than what's out there. A small percentage actually try. Of those, a small percentage actually finish. Of those, a small percentage get it published. Of those, a small percentage actually spend the time to advertise so that more than their family has a copy.
My suggestion, forget about criticising the "Monero Standard" and actually get started and follow through until the end. Let the market decide if you're right or you're just jaded.
If you don't care about the money (or if you do but aren't trying to squeeze the max out of it), then put up a blog (or lemmy group) with possible chapters in the book spread over a year or two. The blog posts don't have to be perfect, but they have to be engaging enough to gain some followers that you can gain feedback from in the comments. Once you have enough material with enough positive feedback and you've integrated the criticism of your writing, put together the book and announce it to your following and work outward from there. And try not to use the "Monero Standard" as a title. If your book is better, the other book would discredit yours since people would get confused. And if the original is better, you'd be labelled as a wannabe that was trying to piggy back off the original. Pick your own title based off of the focus your writing.
You're logically correct but people aren't...at least not in a straight forward way. There are lots of thing that have zero value but are tremendously overvalued because they get value "in other ways" which are downplayed. Take fine art. Some "fine art" is used in influence peddling. For instance, it may be illegal to give a politician 1 billion dollars, but perfectly legal to buy the politician's back of the envelop scribble as "art" for 1 billion. "Fine art" is also a common way money laundering happens and creating tax writeoffs out of nothing. As for BTC, it would not matter if there was no retail usage. As long as it can be a unit of account that can get shuffled once a month between megabanks, all legit transfers of value can happen on L2s. Banks have been at this for thousands of years. They know how to control, capture and keep the value of any commodity. What counts is trust and BTC, even after the megabank takeover will still be decentalized enough to preserve trust across banks, and if there is an issue, BTC could be swapped with something like wrapped BTC on Solana and the original BTC coins can be burned, leaving BTC as a burnt out relic. Thankfully Monero is currently free of "the system", but if privacy is ever accepted as necessary by the mass portion of the population, we need to be vigilant.
Granted, but searching bank records requires a warrant and you'd have to have one for all possible banks. Donations might be tracked (if not made in person), but distribution of donations are a whole another story since the people involved were already debanked...they could only spend the cash and they would likely mostly spend the cash in places that didn't scan bills. Even if they directly deposited the money into the bank, there would be no record of who got the donated money (remember, the people involved were debanked so the only way for them to get the cash if it were directly given to them). With Bitcoin, there's a clear trace from donator to donation collector to debanked person stored in the blockchain so it can be retrieved for analysis at leisure. With AI it's possible to greatly narrow down the path to the extent that standard police leg work and warrants can find the path with a high degree of accuracy.