#XMR people, maybe you can help me.

I'm interested in a phone and SMS only sim card provider that isn't EU only that takes XMR. I've found some interesting things that might work, like simsup (physical sim is EU only, esim doesn't specify any countries at all) and jump.chat which looks promising, but it's a phone number bridged to XMPP and I'm not sure that will work for me yet. Everything else I've found are just SMS burner numbers and mobile data plans and things like that. I'm just looking for cell service with no data that I can use long term with the same number for xmr. Ideally with no KYC.

Does anyone know of such a service?

thats great but 99.9999999 % of all phone users are not. Encouraging usage of monero on android is a bad idea and bad for monero. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use any crypto with android.

Problem is most android operating systems are insecure, bloated with hardware manufacturers dubious junk (proprietary) , google's (proporietory) apps deeply embedded, and most phones are rarely updated or out of service for updates. Why would anyone use location tracked android for privacy transactions. Its a shame there aren't desktop linux apps for this.

Surveillance isn't just in the streets; it's in your wallet.

bitcoin going up against fiat doesn't mean that the network scales better, that the fungibility issue has been fixed, or that the user experience has been improved.

bitcoin today is not much different than it was 3 years ago. it's technically worse, due to the lightning network becoming more centralized & less liquid, while the liquid federation has even fewer users.

the improvements are marginal and are due to developers figuring out workarounds to compromise on the fact that there's no new soft fork update.

there is some progress in the field of custodial solutions (ecash, federations, etfs), but that's not really bitcoin. it's something else that bitcoin was supposed to replace.

what bitcoin does have is a new wave of institutional investors who pulled some strings to remove some mainstream media fud in order to make it easier for them to dump on retail.

don't fool yourselves: these companies don't report their earnings in btc. they are not here for a new monetary standard and don't hope to one day move into citadels.

once the opportunity arises, they will dump their reserves on the newcomers and cause the next bear market.

and when we finally see the hopium get smoked, once everyone is done pointing fingers to find the heretics who didn't do as they said, the builders will have to step in and pick up the pieces in order to provide new technological legitimacy to the project.

we only have a few months left, and then i hope we return to making bitcoin work much better – not banks, not federations, not ecash mints. bitcoin as peer to peer electronic cash.

I'm really digging the 9 I got from you. I assume there's no "find my phone" on that. I disabled location services for everything except Waze, which I need for navigation.

Imagine signal not being a honeypot for metadata.

Imagine Signal would have implemented Monero instead of MobileCoin...

i got a lilygo t-beam but its only text

Last week I set up a Station G2 in Johns Creek, and I've gotten pings as far north as Oak Ridge, TN (137 miles)! I wasn't able to talk to Johns Creek from TABconf though. I think we're just missing some reliable hops in the Norcross area.

I want things like BIP300 to happen too but I'm too pessimistic to let myself believe it will ever happen. they are too dysfunctional to do anything like that ever again and there are too many bad actors poised to do social engineering attacks against any more serious innovation. bitcoin can only scale via custodians now. I hope it changes but I am done holding my breath.

i became interested in bitcoin because of its potential to build a parallel economy that offers an alternative to the censorship-friendly & orwellian mainstream financial system

so of course i want it to become private/fungible + scale to onboard millions of people at a cost much lower than western union/banks

so i get angry when i see a bunch of suits hijacking the narrative by providing “education” that makes sure hundreds of thousands of new community members only want to use it as a pet rock and actively oppose any improvement whatsoever

it’s a sybil attack on consensus which effectively freezes the ability to do any network upgrades

if guys like saylor can decide which dev gets funding and from where, then they discourage the medium of exchange function and manipulate the narrative on something as significant as self-custody, millions of people miss out on the once in a generation opportunity to fix the broken money system

if guys like saylor amass this much influence, bitcoin is effectively a delegated proof of stake system

i’m fine with finance bros using bitcoin for whatever. bitcoin is for enemies, right?

but when you weaponize your army of trolly ngu simps to effectively stall the progress of the project, i will do my best to remind people why i came here and what the mission used to be until just a few years ago

use bitcoin as a pet rock if you want, but don’t try to tell others what they should do with something that’s supposed to be freedom money

don’t ruin the lives of millions of people living under tyranny only because you want to see your number go up and you’re afraid of regulators

i may not have the same platform as saylor and i may not pass arbitrary purity tests from high priests, but at least i am honest and willing to use my significantly smaller platform to remind people why bitcoin was created and what it should ultimately become

I told myself I wouldn't buy into meshtastic until the devices can do something cooler than instant messaging, like bulletin boards or something