Weird to not share the original post from OrangeFren about this:

What's wrong with firewall punching? I don't see how Tailscale (in combination with Headscale) for example isn't the perfect way to connect to a trusted node? 🤔

I heavily disagree here. The correct way forward is to increase privacy with clients connecting to a potential malicious node and reducing the potential impact the bad node could have. Making connecting to a node harder isn't a great way to adoption. Have sane defaults for normies and the potential for pros to perfect their privacy needs.

You might want look at these two: https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/dispelling-monero-fud/#you-cant-audit-the-monero-supply https://www.moneroinflation.com/ I honestly think Monero is nicer to handle than self-custodial LN, but you might be more skilled/capable than me. And yes Monero UX still has some rough edges, but I hope that the synching complains are gone after the FCMP++ upgrade.

*use Monero

Honest question: what makes Monero a shitcoin for you?

The "🤯 maximalism" was about the amount of people voting against it. I still don't get how anyone could seriously call Monero a shitcoin.

Holy shit, that level of blind maximalism 🤯🙈 Also if you're a merchant and you're NOT accepting Monero, you're missing out 🤷‍♂️

Not every 'we/us' has a socialist connotation. For talking about things it can be useful to group certain people/users by similar usage of stuff etc. No need to freak out about that. Also funnily enough Monero is currently a better SoV than BTC ;)

At least we Monero users have some data to backup our claim of being used ;) (spoiler: it's more than BTC&LN)

Reality wants to disagree with you:

Yes, Tailscale is always turned on on my phone. My Moneronode isn't the only service my phone wants a permanent connection to.

First off, those are MULTIPLE links to different services that publish their payment numbers (your answer seemed like you only read one). Second I only quickly checked ShopinBit's officially reported numbers and there peak was ~$1.7M in 2024 for ShopinBit and ~$1.1M for ShopinBit EU. So yes, obviously this is a very limited dataset. Not a lot of corporations are publishing their krypto sales data sadly and probably none of those does like $100M+ revenue a year but it nevertheless shows that Monero gets definitely used outside of darknet markets on normal everyday/legal stuff.

It should NOT! I'm connecting to my own node via a direct vpn connection. I really don't understand why I should slow down my connection to my node using Tor/I2P. Also for friends and family that can also connect to my node via VPN it's the same logic. I do not understand why anyone would connect to his own node via TOR/I2P. For use with an unknown remote node, yes then I understand it.

I sure hope so!