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?
First, thank you for the replies 🙏❤️
The discussion was revealing for me, surprising in places, and actually actionable. I think I need to bring this up with Doug and put the thread in front of him.
The common consensus (beautifully put by @shortwavesurfer2009 and @untraceable ) is basically “heart says keep it, brain says ban it. I don’t want to risk Doug in an early-morning raid".
We all have our own risk tolerance and threat profiles: me and Anarkio are anons with undisclosed location(s), while Doug is the opposite: a public figure and a subject to an empire with extradition agreements almost everywhere in the “civilized” world. Only he can decide.
On the “heavily police it” point: it is policed. People report listings if they involve stolen IDs and those sellers get banned. To the best of my knowledge, the only thing currently allowed is services by willing adults. @TraderJoe’s ride-share driver who doesn’t match the app photo is exactly what the counter-economy looks like in practice. You can judge that from the moral high ground if you want, but it usually means you haven’t spent much time actually looking at what agorism / System D is. It’s described in Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell; I first really heard about System D from Anthony Bourdain, who pointed at that Orwell's book and popularized “System D” in the English-speaking world.
It’s also impossible to know what is actually being sold unless you buy every single listing. E.g. how do we know MiCocco isn’t selling the enriched uranium that went missing from Kazakhstan, and that all the crochet art is just code for HEU U-235 for those in the know? ))
The @samourai's fragility point is known, I’ve posted about it multiple times:
and here: https://x.com/themerit0crat/status/2076079840374010117 original ↗
On Patrickl and other places tied to other tokens mentioned by @freQniK: I already said in one of the Matrix rooms that unless it’s Monero and privacy-first without compromise, without a corporation, and without doxxed “leaders”/CEOs, it will likely not work for the Monero people.
So yes: Monero-based decentralization is the only resilient way forward for a free market and a real Monero circular economy, one restricted only by natural human rights, not by any state’s laws.
Listened to the Open Markets podcast #11 (openmarkets.pub/). They discussed XmrBazaar, and it's clear the idea is ripe: many people are independently arriving at the same conclusion around decentralization + Monero circular economy: - I wrote about it about a month ago:… twitter.com/XMRBazaarWatch/status/2075953519149125724
You're right. I forgot about our conversation in the BSX matrix room. These two current decentralized marketplaces are reliant on an alternate coin and like you say this will most likely not fly with the Moneroians. Which is cool, I still think it is pretty cool technology and I hope both Particl and Qortal succeed.
That said, I absolutely love what you guys have done with Bazaar. I check it everyday and it would be awesome to move to a Haveno like setup although I fear that will push the commoner not to use it. Where as the commoner likes to go to a URL and browse like ebay. They are unlikely going to know how to use or want to use a standalone app with integrated tor and configs that will make the head spin. It is hard enough to get the commoner to even use Monero; at least it has been for me (although I setup my 16-year old niece with Cake Wallet last year and sent her some neros).
Okay, apparently in this community I have to, each and every time, emphasize my own stance and prove that I'm no FED, and only later make some arguments that might be against my own ideas and values. Otherwise everyone will incessantly confuse the two and, no matter how many times I try to correct them, will make the false claim that my arguments=what I want/think. IDK what I can actually do to stop this oversimplificationmaxxing.
I don't fully know how these are done behind the scenes either. Can somebody teach me whether these can actually be made en masse, as selling them requires, w/o unauthorized access to the private info of others? From what I've heard, the answer is overwhelmingly no: these come from stolen identities, fabricated ones, or recruited mules who end up holding the legal bag for whatever runs through them. There's little to no way to do these in bulk w/o actually harming others. Or is there?
I want to put additional emphasis on the fact that there's practically little to no actual difference between fully and transparently allowing them vs. the current covert allowance scheme. No one is dumb enough to look at these and believe they're assistance. No argument such as "but we had the rule and only assistance/service was allowed, they're all assistance/service" would hold in an actual enforcement scenario. The state can and will easily argue you looked the other way knowingly. There are countless examples of the state doing just that, using contextual and intentional clues to make arguments and enforce against you. And under the current scheme, prickly people will keep pointing out the dishonesty in public or private :)
As I said on the forum, "I have the feeling the platform is going through an identity crisis." DN lite on clearnet is a brand direction the platform is currently taking, which seems halfway viable thus far. But then IDK what differentiates the platform from others, considering these already exist in copious amounts just a Tor browser away anyway. IDK why the platform exists if it's not actually providing something actually new, an entirely different category of resistant XMR marketplace on clearnet. From a pure product perspective, to me the platform looks like it started as the "craigslist/ebay" of Monero but turned into the DN lite of Monero. To me the first vision is more interesting and unique; the latter one isn't producing anything original, adding so much value, or bringing change or disruption to actually anything. It's a half ass replication of a model that's known to be working just perfectly fine over Tor, but trying to do it in much harder territory. I'm 100% sure somebody will read this and use half assed reasoning to discover(!) my secret inner FED, as whenever I open this topic that's the result I receive, but my questions are more like "WTF do you actually want to be?" and "Is what you want to be a viable thing that won't get killed off down the line?"
Then there's the question: if these types of listings get stripped away, will there even be any appreciable traffic left on the platform? To answer this, unfortunately, we'll need answers to the detailed platform metrics questions I've been asking about for over a year. I have the feeling the result won't look amazing.
We also need to disabuse ourselves of the false notion that this is something entirely new being tried here. DN or DN lite concepts on clearnet have been tried plenty of times before, maybe not giftwrapped the same way or built around Monero directly, but the same idea of "making it work" on clearnet underneath. It always ends up w/ you getting stopped once/if you grow large enough and become visible. XMRBazaar apparently isn't at that stage yet. Here's a summary of how it ended for others, and the likely trajectory for XMRBazaar if/when it reaches a size that gets noticed from the outside:
My role in this discussion is laying things out as they are, like some sort of armchair philosopher or consultant. I'm not trying to stop anyone from doing whatever they want and seeing whether it works or not. That said, based on experience thus far, I fully expect some people who know nothing about brand positioning, product differentiation, product strategy, or regulatory risk to yet again read what I write and not get what I'm trying to say. Because screaming "FED among us" or whatever other half baked nonsense is cognitively far easier and less demanding than understanding nuance.
We have our first "You are FED" screamer.
I say "Can somebody teach me", "I don't fully know how" and answer I get is "You're evil incarnate, twisted manipulative, FED FEED!!!"
People call you a rat because you keep doing this manipulative shit. You write a whole post that looks logical on the surface, then you sneak in that moralizing “these poor mules” framing so everyone who actually knows the game - including the mules - just pukes. Then you act confused why they treat you like a fed. That’s why.
Mules are grown-ass adults who know exactly what the fuck they’re doing. They got passports, bank accounts, whatever the platform wants. They do the video selfie, sign the extra shit if needed, hand the login over or keep the account open, and get paid in cash. Nobody’s holding a gun to their head. It’s a straight business transaction. Stolen IDs and pure fake docs exist, sure, but for anything that has to pass real KYC plus video, live mules are what gets sold in bulk because the real person can still answer the phone when the bank calls. Stolen accounts just get drained and burned. Mules are the product. That’s how it scales. You don’t know this because you’ve never had to deal with any real shit in your fucking life.
Same story everywhere. Millions of illegals pay mules for docs or use someone else’s name all the time. Your Uber driver doesn’t match the app photo half the time because the account got rented out. Adults sell access to their identity for money every single day. You can think the whole category is retarded for a clearnet site on a tiny VPS run by one guy with kids - I do - but pretending the only versions of this are pure victimization or pure theft is why people stop reading and just write you off as a fed.
Stop doing that twisted manipulative shit and people might actually hear the rest of what you’re saying.
You seem to be coalescing under my previous arguments. XMRbazaar is either a DNM or a Gray Market or a white market. Because of how they target crypto, any vaguely grey market is a black market. I hate it, but it is what it is. I even think the white market functions need to be transferred ASAP. I think old concepts of agorism were stupid and lacked imagination. We don't live in the US, we live in the USSR and if you don't understand that, you haven't been paying attention.
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.
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.
This distributed marketplace already exists on Qortal and Particl. Qortal has a Pirate wallet built in so you can buy things privately. Particl has plans to extend their marketplace to coins other than PART.
Maybe some Monero devs can integrate an xmr wallet in Qortal Hub so it can be use in the Q-Shop app.
https://paper.wf/crypto-agorism/the-dangers-of-the-states-monopoly-on-identity
i don't think sharing or selling government documents should be opposed
It should not be opposed. The state’s monopoly on ID is real, and the problems that come with it are real. I know them.
As @untraceable said: "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."
I have written the same thing here more than once -- a Monero marketplace that is meant to survive needs a different architecture. The free market we want cannot be built by putting doxxed people and their families in the crosshairs. The whole setup is fragile. One listing, one report, and the marketplace is gone and a life is ruined. There are people who did less than that -- nothing but write FOSS -- and still had their lives taken. They will not get those years in a cell without their families back. https://billandkeonne.org
pt1
I'm all for it on a free market, but can't comment really on the legalities or potential risks involved. I can speculate, but my general perspective on this is a free market and one indeed that should be free to create commerce, of any kind. Not that we want all kinds, but you don't get to pick and choose in a free market what is bought/sold, only what trades you partake in and support.
pt2
After referencing
related discussionon legalities, I'm not sure how much of a gray field it really is. Seems pretty defined, depending on the country and jurisdiction, with their rules. There is no doubt of it being potentially flagged/investigated, but I suppose that goes with anything, any market, any service.Is the deeper concern here... should XMRBazaar keep this as a service because it's needed and wanted or should XMRBazaar reduce its risk exposure, leading to unwanted troubles, hoping to maintain its uptime and longevity? I would assume that's the gist, but I could be wrong.
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
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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.