Financial privacy has practically vanished over the last 50 years. Most people are in denial about it, and still believe that their relationship with their bank or their credit union is confidential -...
For groceries and most regular purchases (including online stores), there is cash. But I do use Monero for a legit reason - paying for my VPS and domain.
If you pay for privacy oriented online services, mostly by providing a privacy respecting service, they often accept Monero.
Off the top of my had I know that Mullvad VPN and Standard Notes accept Monero, but if you look for it, there are probably more.
Other than that, PrivacyGuides recommends CoinCards as a gift card store that accept Monero payments. CC has gift cards for several popular online services. They are not yet available in Europe, but if you know that the service you want to sign up for does not enforce using the gift card in the appropriate region, you can buy it from a region that is already supported.
I use it to buy gift cards in India, currently the most populous country on the planet(for better or for worse), that adds up to... 35-45% of the world population; the figure does not even include the African and south American countries where there is a significant adoption of cryptocurrencies due to high inflation rates of the local currency.
How do you do that? Monero is one of few coins that interested me back in the day, so I am not a hater at all. But adoptation is very much lacking, and i I have no idea how you but groceries with xmr.
Coincards.com gets me an instacart giftcard. Instacart card gets me my local grocery chains, local grocery chain store gives me food. I eat food and am eating monero.
In crypto all transfers require a cryptographic signature from a private key that doesn't have to be shared. In credit cards, you literally give your private key to the merchant and trust them to take the right amount. The difference of these two security models is enormous.
Also, privacy coins are private. The blockchain isn't a ledger that shows who spent what to who in privacy coins like Monero.
you probably invested in it and lost a bunch of money. people who blindly and universally hate crypto as a whole usually got fucked over in a scam or in the markets
Besides the power which crypto helps with because it absorbs stranded power or gives a customer for steady income to a power company that can help build more infrastructure. What else is a problem with crypto?
Monero doesnt have ASICS so is not nearly as energy intense. You mine on regular CPUs you can buy off the shelf in your local electronics store. My miner has been running for over a year and has never used a drop of water unless its upstream at the power company itself. My air conditioner uses about 5x more power and my heater uses 7x-15x more power. At least if i had more mining computers going id get enough heat to warm my room and the monero id get from it could subsidize my power bill. I could turn 1500 watts of power into 1500 watts of heat only or I could turn 1500 watts of power into 1500 watts of heat and some Monero.
Edit: Not to mention, I don't have to pay workers to drive cars to a building that I had to pay workers to mine the minerals for out of the ground and ship thousands of miles.