I see you edited the comment, suspect. Anyway there is only one instance so it is useless to tell someone about haveno and not mention the only usable instance.

Haveno is exchange software it is not an active exchange where you can trade. RetoSwap is the Haveno instance that is running an actual usable exchange.

All of fiat is a scam, I’ll take my chances with crypto.

You are an obvious liar.

There is a decentralized and anonymous exchange where you can buy Monero for fiat currency. https://retoswap.com/

If you already use a common exchange the best is to buy Bitcoin Cash then run it through CashFusion to break the link, then you can use it to pay for goods and services privately.

CashFusion - True Privacy on Bitcoin Cash - https://odysee.com/@backyarddirectors:c/cashfusion-true-privacy-on-bitcoin-cash:c

Thanks for the info, this likely explains why they dropped private payments. Large corporations hate privacy for their customers but love it for themselves.

I was speaking of plausible deniability on the social level not from a criminal perspective.

A VPN would stop them in their tracks because there would be no logs to read except you connecting to the VPN on the ISP side.

You can also use a VPN -> Tor -> VPN in which case it is almost impossible to trace anything unless you examine the whole internet connection map which is thousands of hours of effort.

Thanks for the reasonable and level headed reply. Sick of hearing “they are already tracking every thing” from numbskull TV watchers.

Still the point remains, if you are advertising yourself as a pro privacy service and not accepting crypto you are suspect and should be avoided. All points considered crypto is still the most private way to pay.

If anything they should be dropping credit cards due to privacy concerns.

No one is going to go through all that effort to make sure it is me doing the browsing for marketing purposes. You are talking about thousands of hours of work.

I am not talking about doing anything criminal. I am talking about using an easy anonymous form of payment to thwart the vast majority of general spying.

The point being is if your VPN refuses to accept crypto it is most likely because they are selling your data and they cannot sell it for any good price if they do not know who you are explicitly.

When you pay with crypto you have plausible deniability. Your IP is not you and you can just say someone visiting was using your connection.

It would cost thousands of dollars, if at all possible, for someone to prove you are the actual person behind an IP, if you pay with legacy payment systmes you are legally confirming that it is you.

Thus for marketing purposes your IP is totally useless. So it remains a fact that paying for VPN with crypto is the only way to go.

It is best to use crypto everywhere possible anyway as the legacy financial scam system crumbles.

Best thing to do is just to try it. Backup up your data and install Linux. Use Linux Mint.

Looks like it’s time for us to step up and fund what we like and use.

Just visit congress.gov and you have your list.

https://retoswap.com/ is the functioning instance of Haveno DEX. The main project does not run a live network.

Would be awesome if Freetube could automatically check if the video exists on Odysee and play it from there if YT copy is unavailable or blocked.

Really glad I do not have a google account and avoid all of their services. 🙂

Yes, Odysee is much better than YT, they will not block you for using a VPN and you can use burner a email to sign up. They also do not have annoying ads every 3 minutes, they have zero ads. Sad that so many creators refuse to post their content on other platforms and continue to support YT’s tyrannical monopoly. Still there is a pretty good selection on there.

I think you may be a bit off the mark on that prediction. Bastyon already has an order of magnitude more users than Lemmy.

https://bastyon.com/bastyon_team?s=be343ea63fce804e1aad0047d3eb3a9135f9d1afa317a44cad034d58483f1bc0

This is only the website, there are also ~100k app users.

what advantages does it have over hosting your own fedi server

Specifically in the context of this post you cannot be forced to collect any data on users or be prosecuted for not collecting because you are not hosting accounts, they are on-schain. Fedi is a very different type of platform and not really a direct alternative. Bastyon is trying to compete with twitter mainly IMO.

You do not get any special access or control by hosting a server because it is just a node that relays data. This makes the network more robust and faster as a user’s app will connect to the fastest nodes for a better experience.

Here is an in-depth article about the platform

https://www.publish0x.com/at-scottcbusiness/the-guide-to-bastyon-and-pkoin-xznxqdk

How does Bastyon work? - https://bastyon.com/help?page=faq

You do not understand the platform and are speaking out of ignorance. You do not need to run a node to use the platform and no one can stop you from joining.

If you run a node you participate in the network, your user does not reside or originate from your node it is distributed as all metadata is stored on chain.