https://stasher.news/uploads/283
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.
BTW, there was an earlier version of the XmrBazaar’s Best-Selling Categories article, for comparison:
https://themeritocrat.substack.com/p/xmrbazaars-best-selling-categories
Makes sense -- gave me a few ideas for what to sell on XmrBazaar. Only used it as a buyer so far.
@AilliA, question: if a yellow-badge user wants buyer and seller as separate identities, can they DM you so the new account gets the yellow badge too if it's the same person?
#dontasktoask - just DM me :)
Sell product other reads like mostly kyc (or not) acc sales. List (perhaps unsurprisingly) became more Monero shaped, food category lost ground compared to earlier version of this form 25. Kashilo will have hard time w/ too restrictive listing policies given this demand distribution.
I haven’t pulled the numbers on that "other" category, so this is a listing read rather than a count:
XmrBazaar does not allow KYC account sales, only services. What fills "Sell product: other" is mostly cheap platform accounts, which is why the transaction count looks so large: social media, especially Telegram because it needs a phone number, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, AI providers, etc. It still sits in the same antisurveillance bucket: people are paying to use normal tools without attaching a durable identity or a payment trail.
That said, a physical-goods-only board with regional focus can be the right constraint for a one-person operation; it just will not capture this (larger) part of the Monero market.
As some may remember, I wrote about this topic on the forum before, w/ the legal side spelled out, and the rule showed up not long after.
Some people read that as me being against these sales, and some went as far as calling me a cop/fed for it.
None of this is about what I personally think of KYC account sales.
It's facts, evidence and argument about what's logically consistent and what isn't.
A rule unchecked: does it exist?A rule unchecked: does it exist?
"Not allowed" is what the rules say, not what actually happens.
It's only true in practice if there's enough oversight to know whether it's enforced.
W/ a noninterventionist policy nobody looks at what gets delivered, so there's no concrete mechanism to show what's actually being sold, and the claim can't be shown true even in principle.
The rule potentially removes the word, not the sales.
What happened after the "rule"What happened after the "rule"
Account sales in all likelihood didn't go away after the rule, they got renamed.
Now it's "assistance" or "verification support."
There were boosted listings from big names literally titled "Account KYC & Verification Support," BEFORE getting renamed to something more lovely, and it's still going on to this day!
Those listings read as exactly that: a KYC'd account w/ a cute label to "conform".
If you know where to look...If you know where to look...
For the keen observer we don't even need to crack open private trades.
It's between the lines, in listing descriptions, comment sections, some disputes.
The facts have a way of bleeding through and hinting at what's actually changing hands :)
An after sale review thanking the seller for what was actually delivered, or a "verification support" dispute where the buyer complains the login the seller handed over stopped working, tells you exactly what changed hands.
You handle most of the mediation AND the disputes, nobody is more exposed to this than you ;)
NuancesNuances
I know you understand these, probably better than most people here, and I get that "does not allow KYC account sales" is the public facing, press release version.
A platform like this operates in a grey area.
My point is the press release version doesn't hold up once you dig even a little under it, and people do notice and talk about these inconsistencies :)
The accurate version is closer to "we remove listings that say they sell KYC accounts."
Stating what it actually is and isn't, accurately, humbly and honestly, matters more than one might realize.
I'm not against being clever, I'm just for logical and consistent cleverness :)
Hopefully I'll turn this into a proper forum post at some point, w/ the listings and numbers laid out, to show more comprehensively that this just doesn't hold up to reality.
An analogyAn analogy
A border checkpoint w/ a "No drugs" sign.
Nobody expects every car to get searched.
But if there's no way to detect drugs crossing, the sign alone doesn't show the rule works.
All you can claim is that there's a sign.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, especially when nobody's looking.
https://i.ibb.co/bg7CfQpJ/xmrbazaar-trilemma-v4.png
Under report driven enforcement, any two hold together, all three can't:
You can't establish that something is being effectively prohibited simply by declaring it prohibited.
If you have no systematic way of checking whether the rule holds in practice, you have no basis for claiming that it does.
A statement about reality needs some way of being tested against reality.
Otherwise, you're merely asserting what you want to be true, not establishing what actually is true.
The distinction between declaring a rule and establishing its effectiveness in reality shouldn't be foreign to you :)
My suggestion would be to either adjust the scope of the rule so it's internally consistent w/ the rest of the policy and what's actually enforced, or show me where my argument breaks logically. How the rule reads =/= what's happening in reality.
Same as any real-world rule: official US immigration procedures exist, but do they stop all illegal entry? Street drugs are illegal yet still get "imported". Perfect enforcement isn’t the point, even in the almighty US. The goal is to protect the platform.
…so my goal is clear: freedom, unless it’s absolutely necessary to act. But what’s yours, River?
From what I can see, it looks like some kind of revenge against some guy (the same pattern as SpadeRuby). That's just sad and disappointing, honestly ((
Which guy?
I never even mentioned a name, and I don't have any personal problems w/ anyone on the platform, besides rude people and scammers I mean, I can't name one single person RN, and this's no way shape or form directed towards an individual. This's a very wrong reading that has no basis. And I'm highly confrontational, if I had a name, I would have no problems providing it :)
*SpaleRuby is the 2314657856345675th LLM bot that I reported that was going on over GitHub that was spamming replies w/ begging money in exchange of fixing low hanging fruit "bugs." Half of them were half assed LLM slop "improvement suggestions". These are in the folder I gave to you in great detail. Had you bothered to check the provided evidence perhaps you could've came to the same conclusion it was just spam on Monero repositories of all... What you saw in isolation is very recurring and routine pattern on a lot of platforms, including HN as you yourself pointed out. This's a routine cross platform intelligence sharing potentially about forming a concrete LLM policy. We already have another LLM bot what I would say "spamming" replies w/ "engagement" currently on forum. You may not think/see the need for concrete LLM policy on the platform, but I think there very much is such as potentially requiring LLM controlled accounts openly declaring it so people know what they're dealing with... I have nothing against LLMs let alone a single specific LLM, I already said this before...
Honestly I think the saddest part is that I'm going around taking lots of time to lay out missing pieces on the platform for improvement purposes, helping keep it clean but here I'm being accused of being vindictive that has nothing do to w/ it. I'm truly deeply sorry for somehow giving this impression that I don't think is my doing. This's just poor reading of what I'm writing, doing and intentions. Coming from you especially of all people is especially saddening :( You yourself pointed out the importance of not everything being about a circle jerk mere days ago... (then deleted and brought back again)
When I'm making an argument about something usually the main point is making an argument about something, my mind works in a lot of argument shape. Arguments and argument making comes first, why to make them usually comes later, sometimes never. There does not have to be an additional reason for me to make some argument, itself is the reason. I understand this's not how a lot of people work, and I'm used to at this point being misunderstood and all of my arguments being attached to something, and because they tend to be against the current, sometimes something negative...
Instead claims like revenge against LLMs maybe consider the value of showing people working on your puzzle some courtesy/empathy to say "No comment" which also provides no clue, instead of ignoring :)
...the guy whose service you used yourself, the one who pointed out in trollbox that it was hypocrisy to report something you'd found useful (which it is, imo). Your argument was that he shouldn’t have brought it up because of “business ethics” which is probably true, but it doesn't cancel out the hypocrisy part ;)
And BTW, I’m not accusing you of anything, just saying how it looks and feels from my side (ofc I can always be wrong). Your efforts are valued more than you might realize, Reaver: when the bazaar gets too mature for my rebellious fire (“my free-will / free-market mindset is not (or soon won't be) a good fit for this platform. People like me are good for starting things, but (from organizational life-cycle theory) often bad for the maturing stage. I always knew it...”), and Doug needs a rec for the next better for "law and order" admin, your name will be the first that comes to my mind :)
> ...the guy whose service you used yourself
You "reason" on factually incorrect evidence. I have not purchased any acc neither from him nor from anyone else. I asked them how it works. You're calling me hypocrite based on false premise. I have the records. You have the records as well. How about find me that purchase or apologize? My argument was privacy, but yes business ethics as well but my argument was partially theoretical bc I purchased nothing :) Inquiring about something and doing the purchase are two different things if that matters to your "reasoning". I am a p2p trader myself, sharing DMs w/o permission for petty quarrel is treason in my book, I can only hope any half decent trader can agree. Ethics is a hard to find commodity these days. But I hold no grudges currently :) I think him of a lowlife for this for sure! I rarely have high expectations for people thought, lol. Privacy I hope you guys remember that the foundation of the community? Supposedly.
Yes you're wrong, lol. Also I might be a serial killer and also advocate for not having hitman for hire listings on the platform because it raises risk profile of the platform alone. There is no hypocrisy or contradiction here. One is my own personal life and belief, other is what I think is best for the platform. These two stem from different reasoning and logic, they need not to overlap. I like to think I am rather not bad in not confusing personal belief/ideology w/ business logic, something I recommend to you as well. Why did you remove Flock listings after making 4th amendment argument? (which was a rather poor attempt) I have the feeling you're having hard time making distinctions between these concepts?
I like and aim for order yes, and I believe in systems and rules, yes. And yes as platforms grow and mature that is the thing that scales. The hypocrisy I see here is you trying to feed me the marketing material you know to be BS yet for some reason you couldn't help yourself trying to feed me out of the platform. At that point I was no longer sure if you truly not understand how logic of it works or if you are high on your own supply? The bigger hypocrisy is the fascism running on the platform that you try to terrorize people for speaking about illegal listings you know exist, yet threatening them with banning if/when they speak of it if they can't provide %100 proof. Very pro freedom of speech of you I guess, in line with your values? Need I remind you it took mere hours for someone (Ashley Jones) to prove you wrong and you deleted the two listings she provided under illegal category? Funniest thing is guy called Nazi was victim of this, lol. Have you considered there might be better ways to maintain order than turning into something you sought to destroy? :P Do you even see the authoritarian trap you are falling into? I know that post you wrote but even w/o that post the ideological and realities of the situation clash on the platform is visible and looks hypocritical on occasions, yes.
Feel free to include more false accusations of hypocrisy based on factually incorrect evidence and reasoning if you please or if you want debunked. I am very pleased to see these surfacing :) I may have more in store for you as well...
All these might come off like I turned antagonistic on you or something. It's not. You are still one of my favorite people in the community. We all have headway to grow, me included. And I personally am not against KYC acc sales of any form unless it's harming someone. It was funny to see people calling me Fed just because I made a point related to platform's risk profile, unrelated to my personal beliefs. As I stated I believe the value of the ability of being able to seperate these two. You ameteur accusers needed not to make it elaborate, you should have used the grey area (kind of illegal tbh) nature of the p2p Monero trading I do myself. That's 10x better accusation than a kyc acc I did not purchase, lol.
https://xmrbazaar.com/forum/topic/299/
Having to be replaced or supplemented because you are unwilling to take stupid laws seriously is pretty based. Common @AilliA W.