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re: Anti-surveillance
I wrote on my Substack What XmrBazaar’s Best-Selling Categories Reveal
Tracking remains one of the most obvious pain points for privacy-conscious people in today’s surveillance economy, and it shows up clearly in XmrBazaar’s data. The majority of listings in the top four categories (Sell product: other, Sell service: assistance, Sell service: proxy merchants, and Sell product: gift cards) exist to solve exactly this problem. You want a verified account but refuse to hand over your credit card details to a platform: You can pay someone to handle it for you and gift you the X/Twitter blue checkmark. You want to use AI tools without letting the company build a permanent profile of every conversation you have: You can pay someone to create the account and pay on your behalf. These rank among the most popular services because the free market is doing exactly what it’s meant to do: identifying real problems people are willing to pay to solve, then delivering practical, effective solutions.
Privacy-conscious users are willing to pay premium to buy everyday goods without feeding their data to Amazon, payment processors, and data brokers. They accept an additional human intermediary (a proxy shopper) when it breaks the surveillance chain. At the same time, many of the same people actively seek pure peer-to-peer trades with no intermediary at all, settled directly in Monero. The market is responding to both needs.
https://stasher.news/uploads/282
Crossposted here if you want to discuss this topic separately: What XmrBazaar’s Best-Selling Categories Reveal
That is the uncomfortable part and thank you for the data. kashilo excludes services and digital goods by rule and your numbers say the demand sits exactly there: proxy shopping, assistance, accounts held on someone else's name. Gift cards are allowed. Proxy shopping is a service, so today it is out.
I chose "physical goods only" to keep fraud and legal exposure small for a one-person operation. Whether that is a principle or just caution I have to think about properly, not promise in a comment. What I take from your piece tonight: the winning category is "break the surveillance chain", and a used-goods board does not do that on its own.
re: Gift cards are allowed
From personal experience, gift cards are impossible to verify. See, for example, my mediator's terms:
I do not mediate gift card transactions because it is impossible to determine the cause of disputes when a buyer claims a card is empty or the code is invalid. There are three possible scenarios:
- an issue with the card itself;
- the buyer is a scammer who drained the card's funds and is attempting to scam the seller; or
- the seller is a scammer who provided an empty card from the start.
As a mediator, I lack the knowledge or evidence to make an informed decision.
Thank you, also for sharing kashilo in five places before I ever asked. "Never heard of it" is the honest state and the thread agrees: reach first.
Escrow: no custodial variant, agreed. The ceremony complaint is the useful part. If an escrow needs a ceremony the user notices, it has already lost. FROST with offline arbiters is the path I will read into and trust for it has to be earned in public and in small amounts first.
Your two personal reasons hit hardest. Safety: blind meeting points hide the address, shipping exists, but nothing yet hides your address from the seller, like a parcel locker. That gap is real. And "spend Monero only on what only Monero buys" reframes the whole category question. A used bike is fiat's job. Anti-surveillance hardware, privacy phones, the things that keep the parallel economy running, that is what a Monero catalog should be full of. I did not see that clearly before today.