I think you’re talking about a number of things that have nothing to do with each other. Yes, communists and anarchists have the “just one thing” in common and don’t seem to understand anacyclosis (i.e. all political systems are unstable and flow into each other), but both are a response to the current system. It is not a coincidence that the tea party and occupy walls. Communists accept that governments are going to take over everything, so if that’s going to happen, it should work for the people (it won’t…it will just make it more abusive and self righteous). Anarchists see government abuses and think that getting rid of governments will fix things (it won’t, it just replaces abused laws with “might makes right”). Each are pushing in different directions of anacyclosis and each will fail. So far, the most stable political system is a mixed system that contains multiple systems, but even this seems on the verge of collapse.

WRT Open source, it’s not about communism. It actually encompasses many contradictory political theories. Even the self proclaimed commie himself, Richard Stallman had no issues with selling open source programs or paying for maintenance, so there is some nuance you’re missing even for the open source commies. Let’s not even mention the more nuanced views of Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux). I’ve been using Linux since the 1990s when it was real bear to use. I did it because I was feed up about being controlled and spied on and nickel and dimed and planned obsolescence. Plus i wanted to know how it worked. I could take a Unix programmer from 1980 and drop him in front of modern Unix and he could start producing useful code. There’s no way I could do that on Windows. Linux is good because it’s motive for existence is usability, not profit even though profit can enter into the equation. Yes, you may have to pay for something advanced now, but if it’s needed and if it’s not niche, it will eventually be developed by open source and create a more advanced ecosystem upon which more innovation can be build and paid for if it is good enough.

WRT Lemmy, it depends on which forums you visit. On my forums, I tend to see more apolitical and privacy focused people (i.e. they don’t want their info shared to the collective), so your impression may say more about you than Lemmy. WRT Nostr, look at the top 20 tags for any week of the year. Over three quarters have to do with either Bitcoin or Nostr. Yes, other topics exist but for the most part Nostr is a bitcoin maxi echo chamber that tries to chase away all non-Bitcoin conversations. It’s being ruined for any non-bitcoin usage.

WRT cloudflare, agreed, even the monero.town owner agrees so it’s not about ideology. He said he’s not technical enough to know another solution since not using cloudflare resulted in weeks of downtime. Give him a hand on a solution…you can even open up a CSS to fund this work, and you can be sure this will be taken care of since cloudfare prevents Tor from being used.

Regardless, the world is complex. If you see the world as “Just my one thing” alone, you might be a victim of your own analysis.

Kewbit, if you look at my previous response, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and encouraged you to get an emotionally intelligent friend to tell your side of the story. If this is the response, it’s clear that whether or not you were sincere about completing Haveno mobile and whether or not you wished to scam, you’re far too petty an immature to work on the CSS, so the CSS was correct in its decision to close the CSS. It is a pity since Haveno mobile is a much needed part of the XMR ecosystem and I hope someone completes it.

As for BasicSwapDEX, the code is finicky and is difficult to install but it does what it says it does. It needs a lot of improving for the newbie to get right but it does work and it does have liquidity. I’d say it’s about six months away from being as competitive as Haveno, and its potential for automation makes it a worthy part of the XMR ecosystem. If BasicSwapDEX mobile could ever be developed, it would be even more competitive.

Thanks Kewbit. I hope this is a misunderstanding that can be resolved. That being said, it’s unlikely many people will beta test a binary without source code, especially if the main reason to use Haveno is to avoid KYC. IMO, it’s probably best to address the drama and move on. Since you’re likely gun shy about speaking out, it’s perhaps best to contact a diplomatic friend that can help express your side and why you don’t feel comfortable releasing the code and what would it take to do it.

IMO, there would only be two reasons why you’ve sent out a follow up post here: (1) You were sincere but made some bad judgements (e.g. timelines, amount of work, how much XMR you needed, “life got in the way”, overreactions that cascaded, the code is uglier than you thought and wanted to clean it up, etc) and you hope there’s some way forward, (2) You’re hoping to make more money either through binary back doors or selling data or convincing people to fund the rest of the project outside of CSS so you can scam them.

I haven’t decided which conclusion to make. At the beginning of the last crypto crash most people were angry at the original Haveno team for halting work when the price of XMR crashed with many calling that team scammers. They made a poor judgement on pricing and could have avoided the drama if they priced their work in USD (paid with XMR). Of course, if XMR continued to go up they’d miss out on the USD gains, but fair is fair. Either you want security or risk. Choosing one and then complaining about not choosing the other isn’t fair. When they continued their work once the XMR price appreciated and released, all past accusations were forgotten (I know I did until tried to remember an example) and they were and still are appreciated for their hard work.

If you are sincerely #1 and are able to express yourself reasonably, there is a way back. If not, #2 will be the conclusion most people will make and releasing the binaries without source code will reinforce this conclusion.

I agree with Bobr. As someone who regularly keeps friendly relations between several parties who “know” they are “in the right” I can tell you that it’s unlikely the complete story is being told once emotions take over. When that happens truth takes a back seat to “being right”. From reading the logs, emotions were inflamed far too early with kewbit threatening to stop right at the beginning. You can’t lead a horse to water. At that point, the CSS should have dispassionally lay down the law without insult or consession and either negotiate an end to the CSS or negotiate new timelines and expectations.

My reading of that likely happened is this. Kewbit appears to have classic engineer delusions. Engineers naturally overestimate their abilities and underestimate the difficulties. Experienced engineers or well managed engineers know about this tendency and add buffers and contingencies “just in case”. Kewbit likely thought he could do more than he was able to in the time period, but “knows he is just needs to get over a minor difficulty to make up the time”. When he missed his deadlines, he became defensive and the emotions on both sides started there and escalated.

Could the drama been avoided? From the CSS side, yes. Calling Kewbit an exit scammer automatically ends any hope that can be resolved and brings needless drama. When the deadline was missed and attempts at negotiation (which are not likely show in the published logs) failed, the CSS should have been withdraw and a settlement should be made. At most, it should have been announced, “Due to on project completion disagreements, the CSS has been withdrawn. Anyone else that wishes to take over the CSS may apply with a plan.”

Isn’t possible to do it on RandomX? Yes but not on Monero since that’s not its purpose and it hurts anonymity (review the Mordinals reaction).

Why the F will you sell JPEGs with the Monero mascot that I can download off of Google images for free? Yes, it’s fugazi as is most of the “modern fine art” market.

That being said, NFTs are available on CEXes and there will be an easy XMR to this NFT atomic swap so it might be an on/off ramp for some people.

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).

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.