I thought the more important point is whether airplane mode really makes your phone ping the towers. If it has any cellular connection, it is obvious there would would be triangulation.

You don’t evwn need to “scan” anything - you can copy and paste the steing they provide into, for example, KeepassXC, and then thoroughly back up its database.

There is friction in form of having to create an account and avoiding getting suspended or asked for a phone number, which t today seems about as easy as carding.

For $100, you could rent a VPS for a year and host whatever chat service you want on it, with whatever rules you want.

Yeah, fair. Still, Graphene was very easy to install and I think that my mom would’ve been able to use the web installer.

At least Android has degoogled variants.

Well, there was a strip that ends with Calvin touching his rear and saying “What a grouch”. So while I don’t think he consistently gets corporal punishment, his mom can get mad enough to lose control.

I guess profiles also help?

I do use cash when possible indeed! But Monero is for things that you can’t physically receive in a store’s office, like a domain name. It’s not a lot, but it is necessary. Gift cards are not available everywhere, and the ones available somewhere would not necessarily work in other countries.

I think cash-like anonymity is something we do really need in online payments. For me personally it is not critical. But I would still not like my VPS and domain name KYCed to me, for example if, say, something like censorship evasion is prosecuted retrospectively.

That doesn’t have any of the privacy and anonymity features. I’d have to read more on this project, though - did hear about it before. Also, what’s relevant right now is that it’s not accepted as commonly as even Monero (which in itself is sadly not as common as Bitcoin).

Alternatives - like what? I understand the concerns but for now Monero is the closest we have to “digital cash”. Hope there would eventually be a more energy-efficient successor.

They even admitted this, lol. “Oopsie, our flagship server implementation doesn’t scale. Here, we made a commercial version for your bigger deployments”.

If the initial swap is from Bitcoin, there is Bisq - that’s been around for much longer than Haveno. Not tried myself, though.

My issue is that it is just much heavier. My XMPP server consumes a fraction of RAM and CPU that my Matrix server does.

However, unlike Signal, you can exclude external participating servers entirely.

(I heavily prefer XMPP to Matrix tho, even though I host both)

yes

For me it’s pretty much mandatory because Youtube is normally blocked :/

Not everywhere. In A LOT of places, KYC when getting a number is mandatory. There are still a lot of “gray” sims that are sold after being registered to someone else tho.

Yeah. The big chains like this, as well as government-owned places like public transport or libraries, are pretty much guaranteed to have such KYC. It is not an ID indeed, but the numbers are required to be KYC as well so it is implied. I could just buy an illegal non-KYC number just to not give out my real one for sale, but that’s a bit too bothersome for little benefit.

Not always. Where I am, for example, it’s law to KYC users of wi-fi hotspots, usually by phone number. Good news: there are a lot of places that don’t bother and just have the wi-fi behind a password. Bad news: whether you find such a hotspot is very inconsistent, even within the same chain. So I don’t bother and just always use my phone as a modem.

Also, apparently bypassing authentication may be as simple as stealing the MAC address of someone who has already KYCd, but that sounds like it would be even less consistent.