There's a current rule on XmrBazaar that allows legal or technical assistance, guidance, or consultancy services to help users set up accounts, e.g. platform, offshore bank, exchange, or similar accounts (with Liberation Travel cited as a legitimate example). It simultaneously prohibits identity fraud, including selling or providing unauthorized access to any accounts tied to another person's identity.
A related discussion exists on the legal and risk angles of selling certain types of accounts.
Looking at XmrBazaar's best-selling categories (#339262), these services and related privacy workarounds (proxy merchants, etc.) rank near the top: they appear to address clear, recurring pain points for people trying to navigate today's surveillance economy without feeding every platform permanent data.
Some people argue (#340814) the current rule is hard to enforce cleanly in practice and that the platform would be better off banning the whole category to reduce legal/optics risk.
I wanted to ask stashers what they think, as potentially more objective outside observers than only XmrBazaar users (and TMBK we have quite a few XmrBazaar users here too ;) )
I also prefer talking here because on the XmrBazaar forum the discussion tends to get skewed and heated (as there are involved interests) and honestly I feel that I’m not really seen as a human there anymore. More like some official entity with the banhammer... Here I can still just feel like a regular human/user.
So, fellow agorists, what's your take?
A lot of good replies from the users @OldNorseAnarchist , @samourai , @untraceable and i wanted to uptip them all, but didn't because i only agreed about 80%
My takeaways: these users are most likely family folk. I know @untraceable had a daughter a while back (i sent some Monero on a 5 year lock to his daughter's Monero strategic reserve :), and Doug has a family as well. The point is real, public facing family folk are taking a greater risk than an Anon running the same thing. Although I never utilized them, I personally don't want to see them banned because Xmrbazaar is our best chance at what we are trying to achieve and the ideals we truly believe in. Also, im an Anon myself with no family, waiting for my midlife crisis, and feel i have very little to lose at this point after the tragedies ive had to endur. i write code anonymously for projects that straddle the line for this simple fact: i realized i lost so much mentally, physically, finacially, and my dreams were crushed because of the state. It is my end goal to never stop fighting and never give in.
So, i think the idea of Doug transfering legal ownership to an Anon would be best for Doug, his family and for Xmrbazaar so it can continue to be the grey market hub we all imagined we wanted to see. however, the admin should absolutely moderate anything that crossed the other side of the grey area into black like id fraud. These things are very hard to know what truly is going on with the services unless you yourself buy one and investigate what the result of the provided service is.
If i were family folk i would certainly agree 100% with those users replies. My ideals are different because of this.
I agree with the risk difference. A public name with kids is not the same exposure as an anon with nothing to lose. But transfer of ownership is not something we get to demand. XMRBazaar is Doug's successful business venture, not just Monero community infrastructure. Telling someone to hand over rights because it would be better for the rest of us is the opposite of the market we claim to want. The code and setup also are not resilient. One abuse report already took the VPS down once. A next-gen Monero marketplace that can survive this environment has to be written from scratch -- distributed nodes, no single switch. XMRBazaar should stay strictly on the safe side. That hardened version has to be created and managed by trusted but completely anon people. Not the ones with a name and kids.
I think you should allow it, but remove its display eligibility from the front of the site and it should be policed a bit more heavily than the other listings. They make the site look scammy and they attract legal attention. I don't have a problem with these services, but I think that there is an undertone of identity theft/account stealing that is implied. Obviously "assisting" with KYC is a good and legitimate service, but that doesn't mean there aren't also many illegitimate ways to do that or that there may be connected illegitimate secondary services offered. Currently, a lot of the goods and services on the front-page seem scummy. If a normie landed on xmrbazaar would they say "let me explore, I bet they have what I need" or would they say "this site is not for me, it seems sketchy"? I would bet it's the latter currently. By the way, in case you haven't noticed, I am an anarchist and a free market absolutist so none of this is me saying "I don't think the buying and selling of these goods should be legal or available" just that I don't think the current frontpage is reflective of the current stated desire for xmrbazaar to be like the eBay/Amazon of Monero. Right now it's like the Silk Road Lite of Monero. That arguably lands you into a worse middle category that doesn't meet the needs of a DNM consumer, but also dissuades the white market consumers. There are people in the Monero community who value the grey, but I think focusing on that demographic is really capping the growth potential of the site. Remember that OnlyFans wasn't initially designed for pornography, but now if you say you have an OnlyFans, people don't assume you do fan fiction or art.
I think having stuff like this on the xmrbazaar is the kind of shit that will get Doug thrown in with Ray. That would be disastrous for the Monero community. I don't think we have a sub for him.
I totally agree with your last edit, @OldNorseAnarchist.
I support full freedom -- the real kind @AilliA wrote about, absolute, minus the red market: https://themeritocrat.substack.com/p/voluntary-markets-in-an-involuntary
And I still voted to ban the category. Because this is not a free world and we are already losing people. The Samourai wallet devs are in jail right now. All the rest of us can do is post #FreeSamourai and send donations while they sit there. That is the whole support system. Hashtags and tips. That is it.
Douglas has two small kids. One of them is a newborn. He does not get to be the next one. He cannot afford that risk and we cannot afford to watch it happen again. A free market in this environment only survives if it is run by absolute anons. RetoSwap style. No faces. No families on the line. Anything else is just volunteering the next person for a cell.
Honestly, the more I think about it the more I'm leaning towards total ban. I think the grey market stuff crowds out the white market stuff. Doug needs to be preserved. Putting aside his family and freedom for a moment (which I'm not downplaying the significance of), but instead thinking tactically:
We don't have enough normal people who have their real name and face out there, who don't scare newcomers, who are advocating for the fully (in terms of legality) legitimate use cases for Monero. He can and will talk IRL to real people and advocate for the cause and won't say edgelord shit that will preempt a lot of those conversations from happening. He can sign his real name on contracts. He can organize IRL events like monerotopia. He can found the Nodo. Most Monero people are thermonuclear (myself included) to institutions and normies. This doesn't mean that we aren't valuable, it just means that we need an army of people like Doug (even if it's a small one) before we even remotely consider risking his ass in another crypto persecution case. Honestly, I think he should shift all ownership of xmrbazaar to someone else. I think xmrbazaar should clamp down and be strictly white market only, publish the code open source, and some other team should run xmrgray off of the xmrbazaar code base. These prosecutions are egregious and they've already shown that they will throw all sense of normality or precedence or legal process needed to nail the real freedom people to the fucking wall in crypto.
Every person has a role. The ones who can put a name on a contract and walk into a room are not the same ones who can run things that threaten the status quo. If we want a free market it cannot use the XMRBazaar code and it has to be built differently from XMRBazaar. It cannot be a website on a VPS that one abuse report can kill. It needs its own more resilient code, on distributed nodes or Nostr or some other layer that has no single switch, run by anons who can disappear. That is the only structure that survives the environment we are actually in.
the pain is real. you cannot open these accounts without handing your life over. that is why the category sells. assisting someone with their own account is not the same as selling someone else’s. ban the second. keep the first. if the site only keeps the clean stuff, it becomes another store that already exists. the point of monero is the stuff the normal stores will not touch. hide the ugly listings if they scare people. do not kill the door.
A big part of Monero is about helping users not shoot themselves in the foot. Allowing users to do illegal stuff on a clearnet site is letting users shoot themselves in the foot on top of risking the site and Doug. The category is too risky. There's a bunch of DNMs where you can spend XMR on that stuff. Go do it there. I vote ban.
For clarity, everyone should look at this excellent enforcement trilemma by @SoulReaver from one of the linked comments
https://stasher.news/uploads/805
The status quo is 1+2 which effectively allows illegal KYC account sales. Statement 3 is required to mitigate risk to the site. The options then are 1+3 or 2+3.
How would you even implement 1+3? It looks impossible to me. That leaves 2+3. Banning account services as a category effectively allows for 2+3 (account service sales are assumed guilty) which is the compromise I advocate.
I am with @untraceable. I like how they put it, their heart says keep it, but their brain says ban it. I do not want to risk Doug in an early morning raid. So I would say either ban it or police it more heavily and keep it off of the front page as somebody else in the comments mentioned
My heart says keep it, my brain says ban it. Specifically account sales which violate a law (KYCd exchange accounts specifically, not telegram or X or snapchat accounts).
The middle ground would be keep the current rule and police it heavily. I didn't want to reply to this post because I don't like my own logic based answer.
In an ideal world it would be no question. Allow it, encourage it even. But we're not naive. We still have to operate under the all seeing eye of the state. We have to pick our battles carefully to stay alive and fight another day. People selling these services won't stop selling them, and the people buying them won't stop buying them. They just won't do it on XMRbazaar.
Is there a way bazaar can flag certain very specific phrases in listings? Or display a warning when the user is trying to create a listing titled "KYC'd exchange account" for example? That might make moderation/self-moderation easier so that the current rule can be kept. If bazaar can display a strong effort to combat the problem listings, that might be enough.