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:

Decentralization Is The Only Way Forward

XmrBazaar has already proven that demand for voluntary, private exchange exists and can be served today. It remains a vital on-ramp and a living laboratory. But the long-term resilience of the Monero counter-economy cannot be built on architectures that still contain centralized dependencies: the very points that make strikes possible in the first place.

Better VPS providers or cleverer Terms of Service will not solve this. The only durable solution is infrastructure that no single company or jurisdiction can switch off. This is why the next evolution must shift toward genuinely decentralized systems like Bisq / Haveno / RetoSwap, or Nostr or similar decentralized layers, where active traders can run their own nodes and relays. The community becomes the infrastructure. One abuse report can no longer take down the marketplace. The network simply routes around the damage, just as the OG cypherpunks always envisioned.

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.