"What is your Monero story?" https://stasher.news/items/339749/r/AilliA - discussion on StasherNews Here’s my #Monero story: https://github.com/Extropians/Extropy/blob/master/Extropy-10_1_Winter-Spring-1992.pdf Too bad I arrived way too late for that world: I read it 30 years after it was written. The good thing (if you can call it that) is that by then the surrender was already obvious: #Bitcoin and the rest of crypto had been gradually surrendered one “reasonable” compromise at a time. Custodial for safety, KYC for security, convenience for everything else. Slowly boiling frog: even most ideological cypherpunks didn’t seem to notice until the water was too hot. But to an outsider who had just discovered it, all crypto looked like just gambling and/or an institutional get-rish-fast asset. Zero initial cypherpunks' spirit left. Monero was the first thing that still felt to me like that Extropy article. Original post: https://stasher.news/items/339749/r/AilliA?commentId=339855

StasherNews ~Library is growing <3 and one of the very first authors the Monero community picked after the absolute legends - The Sovereign Individual (https://stasher.news/items/339113/r/AilliA) and The Anarchist Handbook collection of classic mustreads (https://stasher.news/items/339485/r/AilliA) - are books by Larken Rose ! Kicking the Dragon is the war story https://stasher.news/items/339736/r/AilliA The Most Dangerous Superstition is the foundation https://stasher.news/items/339844/r/AilliA together they do the thing almost no “liberty” book dares (AND the author accepts Monero!!!)

When will you sell your #Monero?

A new Nitter instance over Tor http://zcbxmgileoovnup5k4yj4w6r3vicqpawqc6b33rnmmsqy6n4micpzoad.onion

We all know the idea of separating money from the state. The Myth of the Rule of Law by John Hasnas was the first time I saw someone try the harder cut IRL (non-fiction): separating law / lawmaking from the state. (The real first time I ran into the idea was in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress). If you’ve never sat with that thought, Hasnas is a great introduction to the concept of separating law from the state. The "rule of law" is not a neutral machine: it is a myth that keeps people obedient to other people while calling it principle. You can read the full piece and discuss here: https://stasher.news/items/339544

What XmrBazaar’s Best-Selling Categories Reveal Tracking remains one of the most obvious pain points for privacy-conscious people in today’s surveillance economy, and it shows up clearly in #XmrBazaar’s data. The majority of listings in the top four categories (Sell product: other, Sell service: assistance, Sell service: proxy merchants, and Sell product: gift cards) exist to solve exactly this problem. You want a verified account but refuse to hand over your credit card details to a platform: You can pay someone to handle it for you and gift you the X/Twitter blue checkmark. You want to use AI tools without letting the company build a permanent profile of every conversation you have: You can pay someone to create the account and pay on your behalf. These rank among the most popular services because the free market is doing exactly what it’s meant to do: **identifying real problems people are willing to pay to solve, then delivering practical, effective solutions.** Privacy-conscious users are willing to pay premium to buy everyday goods without feeding their data to Amazon, payment processors, and data brokers. They accept an additional human intermediary (a proxy shopper) when it breaks the surveillance chain. At the same time, many of the same people actively seek pure peer-to-peer trades with no intermediary at all, settled directly in #Monero. The market is responding to both needs. Discussion: https://stasher.news/items/339262

In 2011 the counter-economy was already "the second-largest economy in the world", and that was before there was a widespread crypto economy, privacy-preserving fungible Monero in particular: "The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world. In other words, System D looks a lot like the future of the global economy." The Shadow Superpower: Forget China: the $10 trillion global black market is the world’s fastest growing economy -- and its future by Robert Neuwirth Best quotes: The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen. Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world — close to 1.8 billion people — were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes. The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure — call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan — it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is numero uno). The gap is narrowing, though, and if the United States doesn’t snap out of its current funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could conceivably catch it sometime this century. In other words, System D looks a lot like the future of the global economy. You can read the full piece and discuss here: https://stasher.news/items/339194

Point in case for “How to earn Monero (without buying it) - a short list”*→ Write for Monero on Stasher News https://stasher.news/items/339032/r/AilliA - 0.209 XMR tipped to posts and comments - 0.170 XMR curators' reward pool - 0.025 XMR biggest single tip

How to stay focused and continue to stack picos? (just some thoughts) Compartmentalize your income streams: make dollars → spend dollars when dollars are needed; make yen → spend yen when yen are needed; make XMR → spend XMR when XMR is needed. Do not burn time and money converting: conversion fees are a tax too. It is a digital-gypsy perspective: I treat it as Moneroland, just another country. E.g. I keep many exotic paper bills and never convert them back when I leave, because you never know if / when you’ll be back. Same rule here: earn a separate #XMR stream, stash it, and use it only inside the circular economy if and when you actually need to. Fiat covers the bills (preferably with room left to invest), XMR stays XMR. But at the end of the day, time is the ultimate currency. So the price is not currency. It is time. Prioritize what you love spending time on: e.g. I can earn much much more in fiat if I give those hours to my fiat projects, but I just like hanging with #Monero people more than fiat people, so I invest the hours in Moneroland :) If you are not hungry, just maximize happiness <3 “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” — Henry David Thoreau Full discussion: https://stasher.news/items/338974/r/AilliA

🎁 Christmas Gift Recommendation Thread 2026 Share your recommended Christmas gifts for 2026 that can be purchased with #Monero. https://stasher.news/items/338998/r/AilliA

#Bitcoin normalized unstoppable value transfer just to clear the way for #Monero? Bitcoiners on StackerNews are discussing why Monero use is exploding. Someone replied with this 👇 StasherNews discussion: https://stasher.news/items/338954