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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.
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.