Books and Doujin Goods from Summer Comiket (C104) in Tokyo. Several new items added to the page on MoneroMarket, and now also featuring listings on XMRBazaar:

• https://moneromarket.io/u/JAnon/
• https://xmrbazaar.com/user/JAnon/

International shipping available, with Express and Surface Mail options. Please message on the sale platform for details or to place an order.

Newly Added Items:

Mignon Works: 2000 yen (x2)

• Double Pocket Clear File, A4
• Onaka Summer, B5, 24p, Full Color
• Onaka Summer1 Extra, A5, 2p, Full Color
• Download Card, "Ichigo Ero Anime" serial code
• Acrylic Character Key Holder
  • https://moneromarket.io/listing/212ae6ec-8e2e-4edc-bb34-fb6b9df75dc4
  • https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/X6vF/

YanYam, "Taming the Mad Dog": 1000 yen

• A4, 28p, Full Color
  • https://moneromarket.io/listing/dccc3cf6-8995-45a5-8182-29ead57a6c42
  • https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/LrXH/

"After School of the Fifth Year": 1800 yen

• "Shizuku Complex", B5, 20p, Full Color
• "Tachiyomi", B5, 6p, Black/White
• Acrylic Character Key Holder
• Character Tapestry, B3, 36cm wide, 50cm high
  • https://moneromarket.io/listing/0065d365-f450-4d62-a0c1-6a0d082832f5
  • https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/mCMW/

T2 Art Works, "Tony's LINE ART Works": 1500 yen (x2)

• A4, 82p, Black/White
  • https://moneromarket.io/listing/53b762be-f510-4896-8c6a-bdc2e49c1922
  • https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/GRJ6/

Chart shows silver priced in Monero. Note that it's hit a recent low, meaning it takes less Monero to buy the same amount of silver. Timing is looking good for rebalancing or if you suspect grid down scenarios playing out as the election approaches.

Which one is better? Which one is more handy? Which one is more popular?

BitPay, a popular cryptocurrency payment processor, compromises online financial anonymity in several key ways:

1. Data Collection and Sharing: BitPay collects various types of personal information from users, including names, email addresses, transaction details, and sometimes more detailed identification information such as government-issued IDs. This data can be shared with third parties, including service providers, business partners, and legal authorities.

2. Compliance with Regulations: BitPay operates in compliance with a range of US laws and regulations that mandate the collection and sharing of user data. These include:

   • Know Your Customer (KYC) Regulations: BitPay is required to verify the identities of its users to prevent money laundering, fraud, and terrorist financing. This involves collecting personal information and sometimes performing detailed background checks.
   • Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Laws: To comply with AML laws, BitPay must monitor transactions for suspicious activity and report certain types of transactions to authorities. This often requires extensive data collection and analysis.
   • The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA): This law requires financial institutions to keep records and file reports that may be useful in detecting and preventing money laundering and other financial crimes.
   • The USA PATRIOT Act: This act enhances law enforcement’s ability to combat terrorism and includes provisions that impact financial services, such as increased requirements for identity verification and transaction monitoring.

3. Implications for Anonymity: By collecting and potentially sharing this information, BitPay undermines the anonymity that is often sought by users of cryptocurrencies. Transactions processed through BitPay can be traced back to individual users, and the collected data can be accessed by various entities, including law enforcement agencies.

Admittedly, I haven't witnessed anyone in the Monero community promoting Bitpay, especially since Bitpay does NOT accept Monero payments directly, but if you find yourself in a situation where you need to use Monero, rather than fiat, to pay for a big one-time expense, you're considering swapping into a coin that will enable that transaction.

In summary, while BitPay provides a convenient way to use cryptocurrencies for transactions, it significantly compromises financial anonymity due to its compliance with stringent US regulations and its practices of data collection and sharing.

My own assessment of the OPSEC compromises required to complete this transaction is that it's not worth it. I MUST accept that I will NOT be able to spend my Monero until the retailers selling what I want to buy accept Monero natively. Until then, happy HODL'ing.

Second lot of smith'd items. 1 hanger, 4 S-hooks. Edges filed and sanded. Total weight before packaging: 246.3g or ~0.5lbs. Wrapped in paper and packaged in a padded envelope.

I made a "coat hanger" hook along with 4 "s hooks" here

I have 2 more Freemason adjacent listings.

10k Gold pin

Sterling pin

Here's some Freemason stuff. More will be added soon.

Tiny Freemason 14k Gold Pin

Deer/Elk 10k Gold Emblem

"25" Freemason pendant

"50" Freemason pin

I've added 3 more comics for sale. 1: NOVA

2: Wizard Postermania

3: Wizard #147 - X-Men's Future

Has anyone ever purchased precious metals from Veldt Gold? They are listed on Monerica, but do not have a phone number to call and require a minimum of $1500 purchase to buy anything from them. That would be an expensive mistake if it were a scam, but I'd be more confident if I was able to read some reviews of this seller.

Not looking to create any accounts, give email address out or any of that nonsense. Looking for something like StealthEX or even on-chain if it exists yet.

Selling a Silver Surfer Marvel Comic. In good condition. Packaged in a padded-envelope. Shipping within US only.

An American Penny with its "9" in the date filled. This is an error coin, likely a fairly common one. Here's the monermarket listing

The attached chart indicates that in times of great uncertainty, the market rushes INTO Monero for safety. That rush to safety in both the Crypto Crash and Covid was before all the talk of CBDC's. With the loss of privacy associated with CBDC's in today's environment, one might expect even more incentive to rush into a privacy crypto and or precious metals.

This increased incentive, countered by the reduction in liquidity by the delisting of XMR should result in a somewhat muted rise when banks fail and they're on the verge of introducing CBDC's as a replacement of the US Dollar. Incentives will be at an extreme, yet liquidity will be greatly reduced, dampening the sharpness and upper limits of peak during the heights of uncertainty.

My takeaway is that it may not go as high after a crash and you'll probably have more time to sell before it corrects, but time will tell all.

Below are the SFW Digital Scans I have done of a few books. Mostly D.I.Y stuff. When I scan more I will add them to this thread. If you would like for me to keep an eye out for any genre to later scan, please let me know.

New Living Spaces (wood framing)

Plumbing

Basic Wiring

1786-1961 Freemason, New Jersey Grand Lodge

Finish Carpentry

Zen Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

cross-posted from: https://monero.town/post/2183798

Doug mentioned that Travala might accept Monero, but after visiting site, it appears that XMR is NOT on the list of eligible payments on the flight search page. I appears there may be XMR acceptance for Hotel, but I was looking for one travel agent that could handle multiple hotels, in multiple destination trip for flights, rental cars, hotels. I'm interested in anyone who finds one that does.

Is there any efforts or movements underway to solicit Elon Musk to begin to accept Monero as payment for internet services? What an advantage to just accepting Monero and not accepting the risk of fiat currencies.

It looks like Joe has created a website inside his ecosystem that duplicates much of what is on Monerica as a part of a test.

Hello i wanted to promote my new sms sending service where you can pay directly via xmr! Prank your friends with spoofed sender or use our api for sending out OTPs!

PRICE PER UNIT: From 0.004 to 0.15 USD Depending on country and route. If you want to know specific price pm on moneromarket with your pgp key and country of choice)

FEATURES:

• Custom SenderID (Spoofing)
• Variables inside the sms
• 6 High Quality Routes
• Obfuscator (cyrillic symbols, spaces etc.)
• Route Testing
• Statistics and Reports
• Mobile HLR Verify
• Internal API & Frontend (Premium)
• 20+ Countries

PGP in my moneromarket profile

High quality wallet designed and sold by ESSENTIA at Winter Comiket 2023 (C103) on Dec.30/31st. Features a print of ESSENTIA OC "Whiteberry" on front, ESSENTIA logo on back.

20cm high x 9cm wide x 3cm deep

Multiple pockets and card spaces inside.

Selling via MoneroMarket, follow link to sign up/purchase:

https://moneromarket.io/listing/73791b1f-e0f8-419a-844e-765caf421ff9

Hey Monerista, what are you waiting for to buy the Club Atletico Libertad shirt? We carry Monero on our skin, we get the businesses in our city to accept Monero, and we have an organic adoption through sports betting, collaborate with us by buying one and being a fan of the most popular team, help us continue working for Monero and competing, protected by the most cypherpunk community, the monero community, we bring privacy everywhere.

https://moneromarket.io/listing/3d629ef3-6c57-4ce6-8485-ee95254d362c

In celebration of Bitcoin Black Friday 2023, we're offering a 10% discount on all BusKill cables sold between Nov 18 to Dec 03.

BusKill Bitcoin Black Friday Sale - Our Dead Man Switch Magnetic USB Breakaway cables are 10% off all orders paid with cryptocurrency

What is BusKill?

BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It's a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.

Watch the BusKill Explainer Video for more info youtube.com/v/qPwyoD_cQR4

If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys -- thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.

What is Bitcoin Black Friday?

Black Friday is ~1 month before Christmas, and it's the busiest shopping day in the US. The first "Bitcoin Friday" (launched by Jon Holmquist) was Nov 9th, 2012 (at the time, one bitcoin was ~$11). The following year, the two ideas merged to become Bitcoin Black Friday.

This year, we're joining Bitcoin Black Friday by offering our products at a 10% discount if you pay with cryptocurrency.

Why should I use cryptocurrencies?

We've always accepted cryptocurrencies because:

1. They're more secure than pre-cryptocurrency payment methods
2. They're a more egalitarian system than pre-cryptocurrency finance
3. They're more environmentally friendly than pre-cryptocurrency financial systems
4. The fees are less than pre-cryptocurrency transactions
5. They allow for anonymous purchases online
6. Their transactions are censorship-resistant

Security

Before cryptocurrencies, making an online transaction was horrendously insecure and backwards.

"Conceptually, pull-based transactions are really not that different than giving three parties the password to your online banking service and trusting them to log in and take what they need. You have to trust the merchant, their IT supplier; the acquiring bank, their third-party processor; the card network; and your own card issuer---and everybody who works for them and has access to their systems. If a bad guy gets hold of your card details at any point in this process, they could drain your account.
The picture shows the scope of all the entities with access to your critical card information" source

Asymmetric cryptography has been available since the 1970s, but CNP (Card Not Present) transactions to this day still don't use public keys to sign transactions. Rather, you give your private keys (that is, your credit card number, expiry, etc) directly to the merchant and you authorize them to pull money out of your account (trusting that they take the right amount and not to loose those precious credentials).

Bitcoin flipped this around to actually make transactions secure. With bitcoin, you don't give others the keys to take money out of your account. Instead, transactions are push-based. You sign a transaction with your private keys, and those keys are shared with no-one.

Even today, pre-cryptocurrency transactions are abhorrently insecure. In the US or Europe, if someone knows your account number and bank, they can direct debit money out of your account. For the same reason, losses due to credit card theft is enormous. To quote Satoshi Nakamoto's criticism of pre-cryptocurrency transactions, "A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable"

In fact, fraudulent transactions in the banking industry are so common that your bank will generally reimburse your account for any malicious transactions that you tell them about within 60-90 days. But if someone drains your account of all your money and you don't notice for 12 months? Too bad. All your money is gone.

In Bitcoin, transactions are push-based. source

Tokenization and 3DS are merely bandages on a fundamentally backwards, pull-based transaction model. But because bitcoin is push-based, it's magnitudes more secure.

Egalitarian

If you have a bank account, then you probably take a lot of things for granted. Like buying things online (with a credit card). Or getting cash when traveling abroad (from an ATM machine). Or taking out a loan so you can start a business.

Before crypto-currencies, it was very difficult to do these things unless you had a bank account. And in 2008 (the year with the first-ever bitcoin transaction), McKinsey & Company published a report concluding that half of the world's adult population is unbanked.

But with crypto-currencies, anyone with access to the internet and a computer or smart phone can use bitcoin to send and receive money online -- without needing to first obtain a bank account.

Environmentalism

The energy required to facilitate transactions in decentralized, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like bitcoin is minuscule by comparison. And, most importantly, the amount of energy used to solve the proof-of-work problem does not grow as the number of transactions-per-second grows.

Traditional financial institutions require an enormous amount of overhead to facilitate transactions in their centralized networks. Unlike bitcoin, which was designed specifically to eliminate the unnecessary overhead created by a trusted third party, pre-cryptocurrency transactions required humans to verify transactions. These humans require office buildings. These office buildings require energy to build and maintain. And, most importantly, as the number of transactions-per-second grows on their network, the number of humans and office space also grows.

Bitcoin versus other industries

---

yearly energy use, in TWh source |

This fact is often misunderstood because there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet that makes a few disingenuous modifications to the facts:

1. They calculate the energy usage of the computers processing transactions only, maliciously omitting calculating the energy usage of the entire industry's infrastructure (eg energy used by office buildings)
2. They calculate the energy usage per transaction, maliciously omitting the fact that the amount of energy expended by bitcoin miners is automatically adjusted by the proof-of-work algorithm (so energy usage does not increase as the network scales-up)
3. They offer statistics about "energy usage" without mentioning the energy sources. It matters if the energy source is coal/nuclear/natural-gas or solar/wind/hydroelectric

"...estimates for what percentage of Bitcoin mining uses renewable energy vary widely. In December 2019, one report suggested that 73% of Bitcoin's energy consumption was carbon neutral, largely due to the abundance of hydro power in major mining hubs such as Southwest China and Scandinavia. On the other hand, the CCAF estimated in September 2020 that the figure is closer to 39%. But even if the lower number is correct, that's still almost twice as much [renewable energy sources] as the U.S. grid"

source: Harvard Business Review

Nic Carter

The facts are that the energy usage of bitcoin is magnitudes less than the energy used by pre-cryptocurrency financial intuitions, that energy usage does not increase as the number of transactions processed by the network increases, and that mining bitcoin is often done with renewable energy.

The facts are that the energy usage of bitcoin is magnitudes less than the energy used by pre-cryptocurrency financial intuitions, that energy usage does not increase as the number of transactions processed by the network increases, and that mining bitcoin is often done with renewable energy.

Low Fees

The introduction to the Bitcoin White Paper (2008) clearly states that Bitcoin was created to reduce costs by using a distributed ledger (the blockchain) to eliminate the need for a trusted third party.

"Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.
Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs...
These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions."
source: Bitcoin Whitepaper	Satoshi Nakamoto

At the time of writing, the average transaction fee for a bitcoin transaction is $0.06. And unlike pre-cryptocurrency transactions, you can increase or decrease the fee that you pay to increase or decrease the time it takes for the transaction to complete (at $0.06, it will get added to the blockchain in ~1 hour).

By comparison, the way to send funds internationally through the Internet via pre-cryptocurrency banks is via an international wire transfer. Fees very per bank, but they typically charge $15-$85 per transaction. And unlike bitcoin, wire transfers won't make move on nights and weekends, so they can take 1-7 days to complete.

Also, with bitcoin, that $0.06 transaction fee only applies when you're sending money. Many banks will also charge a fee for an incoming wire transfer. In bitcoin, there is no transaction fee to receive money.

Anonymity

Though early cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't ensure anonymity like newer privacy coins, ZCash and Monero were designed specifically to provide private transactions.

This allows our customers to purchase from us anonymously, which can be extremely important for activists and journalists whose lives are threatened by their adversaries.

WikiLeaks started accepting donations in Bitcoin 7 months after PayPal froze their account

We accept both ZCash and Monero. If you'd like us to accept another privacy coin, please contact us :)

Censorship-Resistant

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are peer-to-peer and permissionless. Transactions exchanging bitcoins occur directly between two parties. There is no middle-man that has the power to block, freeze, or reverse transactions. Before blockchains were used to maintain a public ledger and enable peer-to-peer transactions, we were dependent on big financial institutions to move money on our behalf through the internet. That antiquated system allowed them to censor transactions, such as donations made to media outlets reporting war crimes and donations to protest movements.

"For me, that is one of the coolest things about bitcoin...
People can potentially use it donate more anonymously to dissident groups and causes in a world where mass government surveillance threatens freedom of expression and certainly harms activists' ability to fundraise for their work, when people are afraid they could be targeted by a government for donating to a worthy cause."
source	Evan Greer

After PayPal froze WikiLeaks's donation account in 2010, WikiLeaks started accepting bicoin in 2011. From Occupy Wall Street to Ukraine, defenders of democracy have utilized permissionless cryptocurrencies to accept international donations without the risk of transactions made through financial institutions.

Buy BusKill with crypto

Don't risk loosing your crypto to a thief that steals your laptop. Get your own BusKill Cable at a 10% discount today!

Buy a BusKill Cable
https://buskill.in/buy

You can also buy a BusKill cable with bitcoin, monero, and other altcoins from our BusKill Store's .onion site.

Stay safe,
The BusKill Team
https://www.buskill.in/
http://www.buskillvampfih2iucxhit3qp36i2zzql3u6pmkeafvlxs3tlmot5yad.onion