Let's Talk About the Retard Tax

the thing with amazon tho is that, still need a card thing linked to the account else there's risks of shotgun kyc by amazon directly, and even with legit debit card, they can still shotgun kyc regardless..

for P2P like on haveno, the cash by mail do have an understandable margin due to the added risk from that payment method
and hey, it's a free market, if more offers, more competitions then maybe that added fee would be more closer to the coinmarketcap price lol
and like, which offer would you pick in this case?:

• offer from a peer that you already traded multiple times with and it's been working, is consistent but has a higher premium price
• or a newer offer that you havent traded with and might be a peer that has less experiences dealing with that payment method, but the premium price would be less than the first offer

and you could always place your own offer at your own price anyways
you could:

• set a fixed price
• or a price that is x% of the coinmarketcap price and it would automatically adjust with the price movements of the coin

so the other offers shouldnt matter, someone could always cancel their offer with high premium to buy in your own offer too, free market like whatever lol

and yea seems like xmrbazaar do have that issue of more sellers than buyers
(thought to myself: guess is not really an issue in case of the videogame thing if auction house type thing, will have to figure out the itemization eventually, lots of sellers could be nice there, idk, still havent done any progress in weeks and still stuck, will get unstuck eventually tho)

@H1XMR The idea that there should be a discount to encourage Monero use is a common myth. Offering a discount for using Monero makes little to no difference.

Let's be clear on what the pain point is that Monero solves: privacy. Privacy comes at a cost. Don't want to have your grocery receipt at checkout associated with your phone/ email/ address/ etc.? You lose the memership discounts they push.

CoinCards has a "regulatory liquidation fee" for spending Monero. No other coin they offer forces this. They must do this due to Canada's exchange situation. Despite this, Monero is the biggest or second biggest coin used every month.

It's not a tax on being stupid, it's a tax on wanting privacy. And there really is no ceiling to how much people will pay for privacy. This is where most people in Monero go wrong and make businesses that lose money and end up asking for donations to exist. Discounts actually have the opposite effect in this situation. Paying less to use Monero is not a smart strategy so the entire framing of this is wrong.

XMRBazaar, it's not a good business model. They earn nothing no matter if someone sells a house or a paperclip. They may claim this is for legal reasons, about not holding funds, which may be true but it doesn't give them any incentive to help things get sold. They allow too many low quality junk listings and ones that should not make it, like Rx pills, get listed. Nothing on that platform should go live without moderation. We were the 1st sponsor in their banner but have decided not to continue. Being rotated in a banner based on page load is not ideal for a sponsorship. Monerica does not do this kind of thing for a reason. There are ways XMRBazaar could become better and more reliable but it would require a lot of work.

CoinCards has a "regulatory liquidation fee" for spending Monero. No other coin they offer forces this. They must do this due to Canada's exchange situation. Despite this, Monero is the biggest or second biggest coin used every month.

thanks making me doublecheck on that, i thought they delisted after being disapointed in monero community after someone did a computer thing and stole their monero or somethin
but seems like nah they actually still accept monero, so, awesome O_O

Being rotated in a banner based on page load is not ideal for a sponsorship. Monerica does not do this kind of thing for a reason.

isnt your banner being rotated on moneroforum tho?:

@lIlIIllIIIIllllII They had some type of theft that they blamed on someone who used Monero but Monero is too big a part of their business to drop it.

Yes, that wasn't clear when we started though.

@monerica damn, this is P2W af, that sucks
i mean the swap exchanges having their own liquidity, i didnt even know that was a thing so that's awesome

but like, you clearly been super active on the forum, even making new websites and whatnot
meanwhile am not even sure they even have an account? i mean, they probably do, maybe an user account idk but damn...

@lIlIIllIIIIllllII It's very unfortunate what happened to CoinCards. We have made many videos showing how to use their service. They have sponsored conferences, BTCPay Server's development and Monerica so we want them to be successful with Monero.

Some of the tags were ones that came out of research and being asked to add them. No KYC and own liquidity exchanges are the backbone of the entire Monero economy. They are the ones who make practically every conference and website capable of operating.

The cost of making websites is so low at this point that in the case of Monerica, with an existing audience, it makes more sense to build an entire site instead of just buying ads. If a domain + hosting costs $250/ year, then how does it make sense to pay $200-350 a month to be rotated though? It doesn't. We will make more websites to bring more value to our sponsors.

@lIlIIllIIIIllllII While I mentioned RetoSwap since I believe it suffers from the same issue, it is a little different from XMRBazaar, as black market currency exchangers are this greedy everywhere around the world, not just Monero. Nonetheless, I wasn't blanket blaming all peers on RetoSwap, but it is a large number on that platform that are doing this. Cash By Mail is its own trouble so it makes sense there. And since you asked me which offer I'd take, I don't have to, I have 2 different methods of acquiring Monero that are completely private and still cheaper than the most 'generous' peer on RetoSwap. My post was for the other newcomers who are interested in Monero for the principles only and not because they want to buy drugs privately to put up with whatever marakups they find.

I admittedly never tried creating my own offer, I never heard anyone share that it actually got them better rates.

@monerica I fundamentally disagree with your initial point. I greatly believe offering a discount would help adoption. My first exposure to Monero in actual commerce was Mullvad's 5% off XMR banner, this planted the first seed, so I totally think it's a necessary component if we're looking to increase usage and not just make big stacks through the Retard Tax off the hardcore ideologues and drug users. Also, when I say discount, I mean just that, 5% or so, nothing crazy. Furthermore, the discount could have 0 to very small effects on the seller, if we factor in all the fiat payment providers and the cut they wouldve taken, it may end up about the same for the seller so there should be no harm there.

Monero does solve privacy, but that's not what all the currency should have to offer, I believe it's sound money in all situations, not when I selectively desire privacy in certain transactions. Sound Money shouldn't come with Retard Tax on top of it, especially when most of the time it's simply exaggerated. Whenever I'll have to sell some XMR for fiat in the future, I know when I post the sell offer on RetoSwap, a "privacy has a price" moron would take my no-retard-tax offer to sell it later for profit. It is what it is though, still better than sending that Monero to CEXs.

Perhaps this whole conversation will change once Monero gets delisted off all CEXs and price discovery comes in. Either it'll be the best thing that happened to Monero or the other way around. Form experience, unrestricted black market currency traders will ruin an entire economy for their own benefit.

Your observations about XMRBazaar business model are interesting. We have a marketplace website here that also charges nothing on listings, but has premium plans for better listing exposure, so not unlike XMRBazaar right now, and this local marketplace website is quite successful, so I'm not sure about this being an unsustainable business model. They should definitely moderate and remove low-quality listings though.

@H1XMR Discounts may work for some people who are motivated to action based on small financial incentives but it's not the real use case of Monero. The point is that there is a premium for privacy and there are examples of people paying it.

XMRBazaar does have boosted listings but it doesn't seem to be that effective at sustaining their business off. If this was the case, they would not ask for donations and have sponsors who are not listed on their site like they do now. Boosted listings are probably the best way for them to be profitable but it needs to be done differently.

@H1XMR You are completely right! It's like people are being punished for using Monero,when it should be exactly the opposite.