Monero has view keys for exactly this reason, so that if you need to make a transaction public for like an audit or something, you can do so. But on the protocol level, absolutely everything is always private.

Some wallets shielding their transactions by default is still not nearly as strong as everything being shielded by default at the protocol level, but they couldn’t have that because then they would not be on exchanges.

I’m glad they mentioned Monero in the article, but sad that they mentioned it alongside Zcash since Zcash is not private by default and not many people opt into the privacy and Zcash has shown willingness to be bad to their users by helping exchanges. Primarily because they are run by the Electric Coin Company, which is registered in the United States, and therefore they have to obey the laws of the United States. So, Zcash is not a good option.

That is correct. Any cell phone sold in the United States by law is supposed to be able to dial 911 no matter whether they have a SIM card inserted or not and no matter whether they have service on a SIM card or not and also no matter whether one specific carrier in your area has no signal it will use the others instead. You may be a Verizon customer, but if you dial 911 and an AT&T tower picks up the call first, the AT&T network will serve that call instead.

Monero, SimpleX

Well the cellular network has voice over LTE or voice over NR, whether the data side is turned on or not. So unless it’s an airplane mode with Wi-Fi turned on and you go out of range of the Wi-Fi, it should just switch it from the Wi-Fi over to the cellular network.

Sounds like it’s just switching the call to the cellular network. But I could be wrong.

Use Monero.

I think you could use long-term identities online as a form of ID based on trust scores. If I go up to ten people and say I am shortwave surfer, then those people can all say yes, I have met shortwave surfer, and he is the same person to all ten of us, etc.

Op clearly forgot the /s.

If you think just because you live in a supposedly democratic nation that they are not doing these exact same things, you are either naive, ignorant, or stupid. Ignorance can at least be fixed by research.

Define larger groups because I know for a fact that it can do chats of up to at least 1,000 people because I’m in two group chats that have that many on SimpleX.

Yep, I run one in my Firefox, and I just leave it open 24-7.

I feel much better knowing that my 300 entropy passwords that are like 64 characters along are pretty damn good in that case.

Not all crypto is scams, admittedly a lot of it is, but there are some actual genuine innovations such as Monero.

I have actually stopped talking to both friends and family because they refused to use a more privacy-preserving platform.

I have dropped friends, family, and more in order to use more private communications platforms. And if they ever do join those platforms, I will talk to them again.

Is there a gun to your head? If the answer is no, then you’re not being forced to use it. And so you only think you have to use it, because it would be more inconvenient not to do so, but you can make that choice. I don’t use it and never will. And I will simply tell people that if they ask.

All social media is inherently privacy invasive because you are either voluntarily or unwittingly giving the social media data about yourself.

Monero is fungible and especially when using the one-year moving average is quite stable. The variance on either side of the moving average is about 15% and that will decrease as adoption occurs. I run a small store where I sell products for Monero at stable prices for three months in a row by using the moving average as my price point.

I’ve started to get much more interested in SimpleX as the database management is much easier and disappearing messages exist and while that is not a privacy function it is a great database management function to automatically have messages removed