Opt out, use Monero.
Use Monero for what? Buying book in the morning having a blind eye on thousands of liters of water I just waste?
Monero doesnt have ASICS so is not nearly as energy intense. You mine on regular CPUs you can buy off the shelf in your local electronics store. My miner has been running for over a year and has never used a drop of water unless its upstream at the power company itself. My air conditioner uses about 5x more power and my heater uses 7x-15x more power. At least if i had more mining computers going id get enough heat to warm my room and the monero id get from it could subsidize my power bill. I could turn 1500 watts of power into 1500 watts of heat only or I could turn 1500 watts of power into 1500 watts of heat and some Monero.
Edit: Not to mention, I don’t have to pay workers to drive cars to a building that I had to pay workers to mine the minerals for out of the ground and ship thousands of miles.
Crypto is just as insecure as credit cards. The whole point of the blockchain is that everyone can see all transactions.
so I can buy illicit drugs, and…?
wake me up when I can use it to buy my fucking groceries.
If you pay for privacy oriented online services, mostly by providing a privacy respecting service, they often accept Monero.
Off the top of my had I know that Mullvad VPN and Standard Notes accept Monero, but if you look for it, there are probably more.
Other than that, PrivacyGuides recommends CoinCards as a gift card store that accept Monero payments. CC has gift cards for several popular online services. They are not yet available in Europe, but if you know that the service you want to sign up for does not enforce using the gift card in the appropriate region, you can buy it from a region that is already supported.
the world doesnt consist of the us and europe. in fact those are like, 12% of the planets population combined?
I bought groceries with Monero for years. Just buy a gift card for your fav grocier.
My bank knows my employer and which ATM I take money out of.
If you’re in the US, your bank knows way more about you than that and it’s naive to believe otherwise. A lack of credit doesn’t mean a lack of tracking; it just means your data is being pulled from elsewhere.
If you’re not in the US, you might have a better chance at privacy.
Do you have a drivers license? A social security number? A phone number that you’ve used for anything else? Utility bills? Relatives? A car? Other large property?
Cash doesn’t mean shit unless you pay for everything in cash and never use the same info (including name, address, phone number, social, etc) for everything.
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mpv https://odysee.com/@NaomiBrockwell:4/Financial-surveillance:e?r=2zW2U8ZcN8MsrJT5cgp9uunSj5LEJEDR
It’s a talking-head video presentation on a well-known video publishing website.
Given your browser couldn’t show anything useful from that webpage, @kugmo@sh.itjust.works offered a solution: just feed the URL into mpv, which happens to be excellent at playing audio/video from web pages if you also have yt-dlp installed.
Hm. The link is actually a video on odysee.com. I’m experiencing no issues on my end, and it’s even letting me watch the video in a miniplayer within Lemmy itself. I’m using LibreWolf, a privacy fork of Firefox, so I don’t know if this is an issue on Chrome-based browsers or not.
As part of just living in… the world, I already kind of assumed it was possible for some parties, credit card companies in particular, to pry in to my financial activity and also interested governments to compel banks to hand over whatever they had, and/or possibly just hand over everything about everyone to government all the time automatically. This was bad enough, however, even I was surprised and shocked to learn how bad it was with my own bank when they sent me a letter gleefully telling me that as of the date of the letter they had now managed to sell my data to even more 3rd parties. I was not, up until that point aware that they were selling my data at all, and that 3rd parties (other than the credit card company) were getting access to it not just because of powers to compel, like people might expect of governments, but purely because the bank was literally handing it over to whoever was willing to pay for it, no consent on my part necessary. I don’t know what changed that required them to apparently have to now disclose this to me, but I assume that they were forced, hence the letter. The sneaky motherfuckers didn’t frame it that way though, not “due to recent legislation the bank is obliged to inform you blah blah blah”, no just “good news removed, we were selling your data, we still are, but we used to too, and now we’re selling it to more people, hope you like egregiously unethical behaviour because we put a travesty in to our travesty so you can experience a travesty while processing the first travesty”.
I really hope GNU Taller actually get adopted by at least one bank as it got funding for coming years.
