Recently, the option to trade and withdraw (!!!) Monero was suddenly gone for about a day without a word from them on what is going on. I would stay away.

Oh right, sorry. You need a whole damn lab setup that combines the Foss one with another Foss tts. Tutorial, shouldn't take too much compute, the more tricky part is getting the right voice model. I'd recommend a gawr gura one ;)

for FOSS: https://github.com/voicepaw/so-vits-svc-fork alternatively https://elevenlabs.io/

This is currently being looked into.

Could be but I don't think so. We have seen increased transactions around summertime before, imo it's people buying stuff to use during summer vacation.

There's also the fact that more and more xmr transactions move away from binance-like-CEX to instant swappers. Oh and of course, the binance delisting was officially concluded 2 days ago and it was the last chance for people to withdraw their coins.

On matrix the meetings are held and people just generally hang out. There is still r/monero & r/monerosupport as well as monero.town but that one's a bit less accessible for people new to Monero.

The serai coin is mainly used as stake and pair for liquidity pools, it's not supposed to be used for payments. Imo taint is less of an issue, you're only at risk when not using Monero and that's the case no matter if you got the coins from Serai or any other exchange.

Yeah, just dming me on matrix would be enough :)

Im quite happy with the pace monero.town is growing, especially since it was initially only set up as a fallback in case the subreddit gets banned.

Serai requires it's own coin for the design to work, there is no real way around it.

Most of the regulars are hanging out on matrix. There are actually a lot of exciting things in the pipeline: Monerokon, Haveno, Serai, FCMPs, etc.

People have said the current bullrun in general is boring and the excitement is nothing compared to the last one. And Monero isn't even participating in the current bullrun :P

So what? It takes 3 days to sync an ETH node, 10 days for a chia node. These aren't lightwallets, this is network infrastructure.

Many nodes are actually ran on raspberry PIs.

I very much doubt that considering how raspberries don't have physical AES and already took +3 weeks to sync before the transaction spike.

We could easily exceed 2TB every 10years.

I'd be perfectly fine with that. Right now you can get 2 TB SSDs for about 1 XMR. At the current rate (and it's been similar for decades) they will be worth less than 20$ in a couple of years. Monero turns 10 this April and we are currently at only ~200 GB. And we still have pruning!

Storage isn't the limiting factor, it's bandwidth.

Great post 🚀

Really like the idea but see some problems with it.

the demand for illegal narcotics from people smart enough to use Tor Browser is probably at the end of its elasticity

While this is likely true, it doesn't get easier to use Tor depending on whether you want to buy a fake Gucci sweater or black tar heroin.

I do believe Monero still has massive potential in swallowing up many P2P drug transactions should CBDCs be used to really clamp down on cash and when that happens, other sectors will be affected as well: "You're carbon credit allowance for this month has run out, no more meat for you."

I don't actually think 150GB per year is an issue. This still gives you +5 years on a 1TB SSD. That's half a decade of time, Monero is only 10 years old. Plenty of time for storage to advance.

Agreed. Currently we are at ~190 GB with ~8.5 GB growth over the last 3 months. This is just 34 GB per year and a 500 GB SSD would last another 7 years at the current growth-rate. You can already get 2 TB SSDs for less than 150€. Storage really isn't the issue, the biggest limitation is bandwidth.

Space nodes are at best useful as a marketing stunt. It's really the worst place to put a computer. A node in a bunker is much safer and is actually maintainable after its initial deployment, if you need coverage anywhere on earth, Elon has already spent billions for you to utilize starlink :)

I'd propose to instead do a fundraiser to buy our own version of the cyberbunker where we can set up a real beefy node, host events, set up a hacker space, etc ;)

As far as I understand it, you can use it to sign a message with your private key and someone else can verify it with your address and this prove you actually own that address. Can also be used for logins, I believe mitra.social has that as an option.

Based on the current liquidity on samourai swaps and BasicSwapDex, I doubt there is THAT much volume going unnoticed but there is definitely some. I'm very interested in what SeraiDEX will reveal about Monero.

Very interesting statement 🤔

I love seeing stuff like this :)

Congrats on 6 years! Cake is an awesome wallet 🎉