No but it’s a good thing for a few reasons (1) XMR really needs to focus on it’s primary mission. Blockchain based smart contracts make privacy harder. (2) There is no consensus on a good smart contract language is yet, especially for UTXOs so it’s best to wait until a standard emerges (note there are several challengers to EVMs that might yet replace it), (3) Once something is on the public blockchain, it’ll stay forever so it needs to be done right the first time so we need a mature smart contract standard (see previous point), (4) It can be handled by a parallel merge mined chain for added flexibility and experimentation so XMR might never need it, (5) the comining implementation of FCMPs has featurres that will make it easier to do, so any effort spent now will need to be thrown out. (6) Most common smart contracts like automatic payments and smart contracts and payment channels can be done by using time locked XMR and checkpoints (with clear roll back rules) and step signatures. These can be integrated into wallets to run in the background, so it might not even be necessary for most cases to hard code opcodes onto the main block chain. All you need to do is leave your phone on to handle the checkpoints. Atomic swaps and the “Monero Subscriptions Wallet” already prove this is possible. All that’s needed is a more full featured wallet extension library that handles all the typical smart contract cases (i.e. currently there are thousands of smart contracts out there…most are abandoned and only a handful are actually useful. We could implement those).

Given Monero’s anonymity and the media lock out, it would be hard to know how popular Monero is in Russia. Haveno isn’t the best measure of adoption. Perhaps Russians prefer swapping Monero for other easier to acquire crypto on Russia-agnostic DEXes? Remember also Russian citizens are masters of covert communications. Back when computer programs were on cassette tapes a common strategy was to embed programs and documents in the middle of extremely hard to listen to music like high volume death metal or MERZBOW Woodpecker #1. Any guard charged with finding illegal content would have to listen through hours of ear-bleeding and harsh music before they could detect that “something” was being hidden. Perhaps there’s an active trade in the underground market which the average citizen is a part of. Perhaps they have an active independent street exchange as is available in Argentina (from what I know, street vendors tend to give the best rates).

these sanctions are actually hurting the individual citizens more than the government to whom they should be targeted.

Of course. That’s the point. Sanctions rarely ever harm the leaders. Do you think 1000 times harsher sanctions would affect the North Korean dictator one bit? Sanctions are meant to cause so much civilian pain that the governments has no choice but to yield or risk revolution. Causing revolution in the enemy to weaken it is an extremely old and effective strategy to win without fighting. The US would not likely exist without the support of the French of the American revolution against the British. Of course, the french monarchy might still be around if it did not go bankrupt funding the American revolution, thus causing its own revolution, so this strategy has its dangers.

You do not need to fight governments. You just need to make them irrelevant. As much as possible, reduce your government dependance footprint.

I think you miss what the poster and I are trying to say. On LocalMonero and on Bisq2, you could purchase without deposit based solely on the reputation of the person. That is all the person was asking. I commented that if Haveno had a field in the seller information for private contact (e.g. simplex, signal, etc) the trade could be done outside of Haveno since other than listing the sellers and contact information, Haveno would provide no guarantees. That’s an acceptable risk for many people to start off - you just don’t risk too much on first contact. Unfortunately I’ve checked and , Haveno doesn’t provide this feature yet…IMO, it will as it incorporates Bisq2 features or at least adds a contact field in the seller information.

I installed Haveno-reto but haven’t used it yet. Is it not possible to contact the seller directly (without deposit)?

If so, then why not just contact the seller directly and handle it out of Haveno? Other than listing an order book, Haveno wouldn’t be providing any value in mediating the order since only one side is actually using Haveno.

Give it time. I never used LocalMonero since I was happy with instant exchanges but I came close to using it just before it got shut down. At the time, there were only 2-3 acceptable sellers of XMR for Canadian Dollars and the best one kept having banking issues. There are currently 2 acceptable sellers of XMR for Canadian Dollars, which means that in Haveno’s short life it’s getting close to replacing LocalMonero for me. My hope is that eventually it gets integrated with Unstoppable Swap and BasicSwapDEX (and maybe Serai DEX) since there’s no technical reason it can’t automatically mirror the offers. Once that happens, it’ll have more than enough liquidity for anyone.

May I suggest that you don’t convert to fiat and instead buy either gift cards and debit cards or buy items directly with Monero? This avoids all the KYC issues with offramps and helps the Monero economy. If you need the cash in hand, then buy a gift card for something you normally pay with fiat (e.g. amazon, gas, phone, vpn, etc) and then use the money you would have spent on those items or bills for whatever you need the cash for.

Also agreed. Having atomic swaps for BCH, LTC (MimbleWimble), and ETH would be fantastic. IMO, we don’t need liquidity pools if we could have a simple UI that would allow us to say “I have 30 LTC to convert to XMR” and it allows you to divide up your 30 LTC into several XMR offers and then press “start” to execute the batch process. Sure you might only be able to convert 29.3 LTC to XMR using this method, but it would be completely peer to peer and could be done without the need for an arbitrator or liquidity pools or (if it’s loaded into wallets) any separate software like Haveno that you have run on your computer. It would also allow someone to convert large quantities of one crypto into another safely without arbitrators. And if I’m not mistaken, the trade could be done in parallel so making a trade of 50 smaller exchanges would not be significantly longer than a single trade.

Objectively, ZCash has the equivalent of FCMP++ right now but there are a few issues. Firstly, most ZCash transactions are public so the anonymity set for ZCash is small and even smaller when compared with Monero which has a lot more users. Also, because of the former issue, every time you switch from public to private transactions, it taints your wallet just as it does with coinjoins in Bitcoin. There’s also a much smaller purely private ecosystem (e.g. Haveno, Atomic Swaps, Serai, Tari, DarkFI, etc), since there is less pressure to do things privately. That makes it easier for ZCash to cave to governments request, even if it didn’t have a company to target. It also lacks other features like Dandelion++ to help anonymity or P2Pool and RandomX to help avoid centralisation. Pirate chain, being a fork of ZCash, solves some of these issues by getting rid of the public blockchain but it is smaller and dependent on ZCash for new research so it is not viable yet.

No comparison, I like hammermann’s the best. The only real criticism is that white text on black “burns my eyes” and is harder to read, so I’d much rather an off white font is used. The offwhite that’s under the Monero coin on the side is about the right brightness. The only caution I’d give is that although the Roadmap is cool and both new and old users want to see it, it might be best to keep it off the front page since it’s unlikely that it would be updated regularly and it might be easier to maintain on a different page (or offsite, e.g. github).

Both socialism and capitalism are real. Socialism itself on the large scale is undesirable and impossible. It can be approximated on the small scale (say less than 20 people) in a very tight nit community (e.g. family or tribe) where there is strong social pressure and environmental pressures to pool resources and help each other, but the moment the community grows so large that you do not know and interact with every single person and do not have a strong bond with every single person, the community fractures into factions, with some factions dominating over other factions and eventually become the elites with special privileges ruling over the plebes which have privileges at the mercy of those in power.

Capitalism, OTOH is simply a system where there is a free exchange of capital which is anything of value. The main critique he has is that because there is no absolute free exchange change of independent value, there is no capitalism. This is the same mistake people who don’t believe in free will make. Yes, there is no absolute free will. I cannot will myself to be on the sun drinking ice tea with Socrates. But that’s not what free will in finite entities means. It means, given the limitations of your circumstances, you can make a choice. If someone paralyses you and puts you in a sensory deprivation tank, you can still have more free will than your captors since you can choose how you react to your circumstances.

Similarly, most hard assets depreciate in some sense. Rice is a classic store of value, but pests can get to it. Gold and silver wear out with time and their value changes dependant on availability and speculation. Fiat deflates. Properties depend on the ability of you to protect it and environmental factors. Yet all can be considered assets despite their imperfection. Similarly, all trade has restrictions. I can’t send some property in the Sahara to the Caribbean. I might transfer “the title” between people of these countries but I cannot guarantee that anyone accepts such transfer as legitimate. I can’t easily transport a large quantity of gold or silver or any commodity including fiat with there being a risk of confiscation by either thieves or governments. But to the extent that I can have and transfer value, there is capitalism.