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---
layout: fr
title: CTO for Monero-dedicated Marketplace from the team behind MyMonero
author: Paul 'endogenic' Shapiro
date: May 20, 2020
amount: 3061.54
milestones:
- name: Full proposal funding
funds: 100% (3061.54)
done:
status: unfinished
payouts:
- date:
amount:
---
Final edit: May 20 2020
Started writing: Early May
# Index
#### Main Proposal
1. Introduction / Why
1. Acknowledgements
1. The New Thing
1. Why this is big / New team
1. Operating Structure
1. Costs
#### Addenda
1. MyMonero's Financial Contributions
1. Why this new project must be independent
1. Where we can go with MyMonero hosting
1. Open-sourcing MyMonero
1. Closing Remarks from Paul
# Main Proposal
## Introduction
*Friends,*
*Moneroans,*
*countrymen,*
*lend me your seeds...*
To whom it may concern in both the Monero and global cryptocurrency communities,
To the friends I've made among the principled individuals attracted to the Monero community, and any others who stand for its perceived common ideals,
This is Paul 'endogenic' Shapiro – part-time Monero contributor; full-time managing partner, CEO, and lead developer at MyMonero since 2016; and occasional right-hand of *the* Monero core team member and founding lead code maintainer, Ric 'fluffypony' Spagni, himself.
I come to you for the first and, if this proposal is funded, only time on the Monero FFS/CCS fundraising platform after a particularly unexpected and shockingly illuminating journey over the past few months.
I believe that in January-March 2020, I cracked most or all parts of how to rapidly bring Monero to daily life in a huge range of sectors from small to global scale, and invented a new system I think I know how to roll out to increase the number of daily transactions on the Monero network by probably more than 3-4 orders of magnitude over the next year or two if it works even moderately.
### My past work on Monero
I've mostly been taking one step at a time since 2016 and have learned a lot while evangelizing Monero in the fintech and blockchain worlds, and on crypto-Twitter ([1](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1262425781407342593), [2](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1202818116188856320), [3](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1251982407974055936), [4](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1205762088066539520), [5](https://twitter.com/MoneroTalk/status/1234257120138268679), [6](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1204875328201592833), [7](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1244102739317141504), [8](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1204267046760001537), [9](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1239728447716548608), [10](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1128091595042168832), [11](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1239631395422638080), [12](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1205590316750950400), [13](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1097888650744991756), [14](https://twitter.com/tweetingpauls/status/1130856011479310342)).
In February I attended Stanford Blockchain Conference 2020 and talked with developers of new, fake privacy projects.
Here are some of my talks and interviews on Monero:
* 2020: MoneroTalk interview #2 announcing new MyMonero infra tech – [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvcVsV5JHpE) – [more info](https://www.monerotalk.live/paul-shapiro-mymonero)
* 2019: Monero wallet code quality talk at Monero Konferenco - [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY0iE0cBXbc) – [more info](https://www.monerooutreach.org/monero-konferenco/paul-shapiro.html)
* 2019: Introducing Monero and privacy issues to the Nashville cryptocurrency community – [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELNAhy3MjHs&feature=emb_title) – [more info](https://hashedhealth.com/meetup-mymonero/) - **scroll down for talks by Surae, Sarang Noethers, and Tari's Naveen (who introduced us to Hashed Health)**
* 2019: Talking about building wallets with Monero to the Nashville JS community – [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzoD2HYXgLo) – [more info](from https://www.meetup.com/nashjs/events/kfhvnnyzfbrb/)
* 2018: Talking cryptocurrency usability on Justin's panel at the DefCon-Monero village (uncredited) - [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4YeocHrLq4)
* 2016: First MyMonero desktop redesign presentation and partnership announcement in 2016 – [video](https://youtu.be/lpQSoQy0xUw?t=2250) – This is the first Monero meetup I attended – fluffy flew me, pigeons, and vtnerd out to SF at the end of 2016... This is the meetup where I shared our collaborative design for the upcoming new lightweight wallet solutions for Monero at the Noisebridge hackerspace in SF, during the good old days... before fluffypony's horribly betraying MEA.business token preannouncement when everything changed and the world became... dark. And yes, I am being *completely( sarcastic, because he was just being the chief entertainment officer of Monero. This was before he had his grey hairs.)
Aside from last optimizations, minor but longstanding bug fixes, and code simplifications, since 2016, MyMonero has shipped all the exciting things we'd planned for the lightwallet server-side, like
* subaddress support,
* a cross-currency exchange provider-selecting API, and
* a major API modernization that solves issues in our original, eventually [standardized](https://github.com/monero-project/meta/blob/master/api/lightwallet_rest.md) RESTful lightwallet API like the need to like poll the entire set of transactions.
The MyMonero desktop and iOS launches of 2017 were a big step but still need design and feature expansion work. In January 2020 I did a complete 'v2/v3' redesign which integrates new wallet usability idioms and is built out of ~15 simple reusable UI components (unreleased til this proposal). Proton Native v2. Android first, then native desktop and iOS, then web with a single codebase.
### Realization
I spent the latter half of 2019 doing enterprise and institutional bizdev with Monero, but was failing to cover monthly salaries. One day I asked myself who would be easier to close deals with. Then I realized I should be working with merchants.
Everyone knows that "merchant adoption is important", but after working on it for a couple months, I eventually learned that people don't seem to know how fundamental the changes really will be when some parts of our economic activity are done with a cryptocurrency.
The business case for us to work with merchants was relatively obvious. It's prohibitively expensive and complicated for merchants to hire a developer to implement their own Monero payment integrations, and a high percentage of top-quality vendors don't even want to bother with a web presence unless it's free, perfect, beautiful, exclusive, or otherwise worth their spare time.
And among the millions of accounts historically scanned by MyMonero, users hold a considerable amount right in the app which they want to spend – but the points of highest friction are locating trustworthy merchants who take Monero (there are in fact some online directories); obtaining the correct destination payment address; and reliably placing it in the MyMonero app along with the right amount. QR codes help a lot. So it made sense to me people should be able to buy stuff directly within the app. But I didn't spend any time working on it til I put down enterprise bizdev and focused on this new thing.
Something started to take shape as I solved the issues necessary to make it a viable system and business. I had no idea about the importance of what I was going to discover in March 2020, as I was hit by dozens of profound, sudden, major realizations about Monero's potential but very specific place in critical parts of global commerce at ever-growing scales.
So many candidates for listing in the app seemed connected in meaningful ways which led me to some powerful ideas. I didn't really figure anything out. Things are obvious in retrospect. But I am able to disclose only part of my wider strategy in this proposal. I've told I think 5 people – mostly close friends, some in Monero – about these secret plans. It'll make sense why I had to keep things under wraps.
One of the people I happened to tell is a CTO who you might call a major cryptocurrency heavyweight. Everyone reading this knows of and probably has used what he built. A while after I told him what I'm really working on, I asked if he'd be our CTO. He's so fascinated by it that he has agreed to work together on this unpaid on the condition of eventual funding.
In this proposal, I take some risks publicly disclosing the first, less strategically sensitive aspects of our new project – even though I could build these systems quickly on my own – in order to offer the Monero community the chance to help fund a mainstream industry veteran as my new projects technical lead.
His joining full-time would free me up somewhat from having to lead development on the server-side of the new project, as well as speed up certain incredible possibilities in 2021-22 beyond even my immediate secret campaigns, as well as provide me an experienced partner to be an advisor in what will be a big-leagues effort on the bizdev front alone (which is my responsibility as CEO). He's already given me a few pieces of solid advice that come from perspectives obviously obtained through significant high-level operating experience.
## Acknowledgements
### Evolving the 2014 Lightwallet RESTful API to the 2020 Unified Push API
A few months ago, MyMonero released a **complete, drop-in, open-source Javascript client implementation** for our (also newish) real-time push WebSocket API for Monero wallets (with support for subaddresses). No such complete, drop-in client implementation has existed for Monero before, not to mention this being the first push API for clients (the likes of which Bitcoin has had for ages since it can scan without viewkeys) – and this new client implementation isn't like wallet2, because our implementation implements mainly only the client-specific business logic that you'd want a singular implementation for – with the option even to pass custom transport. Some early adopters are embedding it and it's been available on our GitHub for some months.
I see this new API as the next generation for Monero wallets – I think functionally it's got the scope to replace every existing API to the Monero daemon and wallets which are intended for applications. I know I'm choosing it for new Monero wallet projects, myself.
### RPC
What reasons are there against replacing the wallet- and block-RPC APIs with this? I've written a PoC which [(currently partially) mocks the RPC APIs](https://github.com/mymonero/mymonero-rpc-server) by backing out to our WS API implementation. Scanning can be done in a 'lightwallet' system, or browser via woodser's work, or your local device via mymonero-core-*.
When scanning code implementation is separated from the API or application-integration method, core devs can evolve that code while app devs will no longer have to choose between RPC and direct wallet2 integration (have fun!) and other methods while nor wonder which implementation has the latest.
We've already seen redundant implementations be a real problem. Such code does end up getting scrapped so the remainder of the project can continue iterating. It's not that the original authors were unskilled; Monero code collaboration was often optimized for maximum capture of usable contributions or continued iteration, and functional expansion (in some senses, for project survival) via almost a thousand autonomous technical contributors so far.
### What made this proposal possible
Lee ('vtnerd'), Nathan ('ndorf'), and I ('endogenic') had to do a couple years of work just to make the subject of this CCS proposal possible by:
* bringing Monero wallet code far enough into the future to make it embeddable, and making that practice repeatable at 6-month hardforks;
* implementing scanning, deadlock, race-condition, and other bug fixes to the LWS system;
* designing a realtime, push WebSocket API to solve issues with the legacy LWS API design; Bitcoin has long had realtime block explorers; We had to find solutions for Monero-specific features like frequent blockchain reorgs – a definite issue in which data is only pushed, never "pulled". We have full, rigorous documentation of our WS protocol and API linked in the existing full JS client implementation;
* adding performant subaddress filtration support in the lightwallet server and new API for rapid deposit monitoring;
* designing and implementing a hybrid mode to unify the full and lightwallet coding interfaces.
Nathan also had to build out a server-side cross-currency exchange-provider-selecting API to make this new project have the widest reach.
I also completed writing the [C++ common app biz logic library, with tests](https://github.com/mymonero/mymonero-libapp-cpp) in early 2019 to support all platforms in one go, and began UI-bridging-integration, but found the extent of the bridging code indicated significant maintenance overhead and build time anyway. I may have been able to automate bridge code generation from a custom DSL, but then I got diverted in 2019 to do all kinds of critical devops, bizdev, legal/tax, outreach, and WebSocket things.
#### MyMonero 2019 Bizdev
I spent most of the latter half of 2019 developing solutions for potential enterprise and institutional customers around the world by marketing the valuble expertise and new technology only found at MyMonero at a critical time in Monero's adoption. I learned some interesting things about regulation compliance and AML risk management, and one of my pitch-deck slides is being used in collaboration with the Monero Outreach Project to produce a release with some of that information.
I discovered Monero has extreme potential in those markets – the world needs us, or at least, something with strong privacy and secure settlement, but *their* side takes time and in some cases, one or two dominoes. Integrations with MyMonero tech are in fact happening. They'll need guidance in the future. I've got connections with a few banks in Asia, and almost all the top CC exchanges, … when they are ready to do any Monero projects they'll look and see vtnerd and ndorf's recent ZMQ work and MyMonero's LWS / wallet API unification and moderization work, with a complete client-side implementation for WS API on our Github, and see Monero now has good support for scalable deposit monitoring, and can easily be audited to standards of compliance, likely now with more confidence than other currencies given the pressure that's been on Monero to make it possible.
About ten software wallet companies indicated they would integrate our new WS API in 2019, but we have the only server implementation of it at present, and it's a new API, so it'll take time for any crypto wallet company to prioritize it unless it's a necessary part of a way to make money.
Some less fortunate things happened. I almost closed about 5 other enterprise customers in summer '19 for our RESTful API - but the sequence of their approaching me, plus the timing of our open-sourcing an implementation of our own server for the community, plus our monthly minimum price being *slightly* too high (oops) pushed a couple of them to direct their existing internal dev resources to optimize OpenMonero so that now the ones who need to use our service are mostly only those who have more than a few hundred users, or uptime requirements, or who are fed up rebooting the Monero daemon, or who need high security.
Some companies who owe us money folded. There were other very established groups who were going to actually license our back-end systems from us for a pile of cash and got us to develop a license agreement but pulled out at the last second claiming they didn't need it. Luckily they still contribute to mymonero-core. We figure they ended up our OSS work and info to make a system capable of handling their requirements. We coincidentally observed significant load on our system from odd sources, and other stuff I won't mention. Our system is probably still by far the fastest and perhaps one of the most secure, as we can scale to millions of accounts with realtime push support to the client, subaddresses, etc.. In the end, we survived, and it only made our own application's experience that much better. I can't wait to use the new app with the new severside, myself. It's going to fly. So I'm pleased to say MyMonero spent little time on distractions getting here – even including my campaign to build a shared app library in C++, as it was the best choice for a unified codebase at that time (given we had native UI written already) before the Proton Native v2 announcement, which is allowing us to actually unify the codebase and skyrocket feature iteration rate. I'm also excited that everything we wanted to do in MyMonero in the past but which we didn't get to do, is present very conveniently in the next version's design.
#### Unpaid Major Contributors
Dan 'pigeons' has done a huge amount of work to support MyMonero servers as a virtually uncompensated contributor to MyMonero. Monero core team member 'luigi' has also remained a strong technical advisor, contributor, and user support resource for years. So far they've done all of this out of the goodness of their hearts, love for Monero, and belief in the MyMonero project. Let me note as well the hours upon hours of time put in by the Globee support team and by Ric 'fluffypony' himself doing support for MyMonero users since 2014. Ric put a gigantic amount of time into helping ramp me up and collaborating with me on MyMonero features and design since 2016 as well. Ric also invented SecureBrowse ([GitLab](https://gitlab.com/securebrowse/securebrowse), [article](http://www.brianch.uk/projects/securebrowse/)) to solve phishing problems for web wallets for good and sponsored MyMonero to have Urbane Security perform a formal audit of the new scheme (it passed with flying colors and we collaborated to produce exciting technical expansions). This enabled us to stay published on the web without concern of browser resource integrity compromise.
I would also like to send a shout-out to other unpaid contributors like the original designer of the new MyMonero desktop app [Matt D Smith](https://twitter.com/mds) who hooked us up in 2018 with virtually every single tweak to the iOS app that you see which makes it more accessible in a mobile context compared to the desktop app. Now that we can unify the app (client-side) codebase, we can more efficiently deploy the translation work the community did for the MyMonero app but which didn't get published yet – as well as making it one-third as time-consuming to implement the accessibility enhancements I've wanted to do like scalable font size and light-mode support from some community design contributions. The new app design also addresses a lot of those issues.
#### One quick thing: The Monero Open Firmware Initiative
During the biz dev process of 2019 I also did a ton of work with multiple cryptocurrency hardware companies around the world and have handshakes or signatures from **6-7 very enthusiastic, high-profile, well-capitalized hardware companies** – some of which are ready to devote dev resources given technical guidance – for a new open source project we're calling the Monero Open Firmware Initiative which Matthias '[parasew](https://twitter.com/parasew)' Tarasiewicz and I have started and hope Monero will adopt. Some companies I was talking to requested help writing firmware for Monero since (a) Monero code frequently changes aside from implementing different cryptography than other projects and (b) has significantly greater signature sizes memory requirements, and (c) every company (Trezor, Ledger, ...) has had to write their own firmware so far, and (d) it doesn't make financial sense for most companies to put in tens of thousands of dollars to build custom Monero firmware that has to be continuously maintained, much less move on it immediately, even if they did have a good amount of cash and as much as they believed in Monero. At fluffy's recommendation, I contacted 'parasew' to see if he'd like to help us develop common/shared Monero firmware for all these companies, in connection with the information I was able to obtain about the unique architectures of each of the companies' devices. A few groups have sent us test devices. Actual code development was put on hold pending the confirmation of operating structure, while parasew was organizing all of the incredible events for Monero for CCC in Dec 2019, and then during the adjustment to the nCov event. Matthias now has his lab set up to do hardware analysis, etc. Legal and tax research have gone in.
The idea was/is these companies would use MyMonero hosting, since the devices aren't typically going to be scanning, themselves, anyway. If they want to scan, they'd benefit from coding to one (hybrid) API from the start. The user experience would be better if users at least had the option of not having to run the Monero official client - and in most cases, these companies just wanted to have Monero work as easily and quickly as possible for their users in the companies' own desktop and mobile apps that talk to the devices or in some cases, in MyMonero. So in connection with this in December 2019 I expanded mymonero-core to open up hardware device support - which taps into the existing hwdevice support in the Monero official code – we transpile this along with the other code via the aforementioned WASM pipeline.
Matthias and I expect to have an initial set of repos and design documents ready for the community to participate in development of shared firmware code on within a couple months maximum. I know he'll be excited to have the community's technical involvement after past attempts, and I believe we'll end up with a cohesive, useful, maintainable result from this effort. He has a few skilled people already involved, so he'll share what's been going on soon. One idea is certain concrete subcomponents can be specced and given to different contributors or dev resources. Calls with certain partner companies continue despite no work to re-engage anyone from our side yet.
#### A note to Monero core devs on our hwdev code
The only code problem I suggest the dev community look into with its hardware device support (which I have been communicating with 'dEBRUYNE' and 'xiphon' about at length) is the need to abstract the transport code in the e.g. Ledger and Trezor implementations to change it from synchronous to asynchronous. Contributor 'vtnerd' knows all about these problems and would probably do an excellent job fixing that code's design.
## The New Thing
From January to March 2020, I believe I uncovered a way to increase the number of Monero transactions per day from our recent ~10k/day by 100k–1M tx per day or more over the next 2-5 years on the basis of activity driven solely by a set newly invented, but simple systems. The variability in duration is based on how quickly we can execute on what is actually a far bigger vision than what I can disclose here for the moment. I've fully design all initial phases' technical system architectures (linked below) and the entirety of a new wallet app user interface. Then I excessively validated / de-risked its initial merchant signup phases (with over 200 real businesses and individuals – many of who had initially said a strong NO to using cryptocurrencies – suddenly giving me their card and ready to get free money), and partially executed its development and business operations. None of those 200 businesses were even on the much bigger list of groups I planned to approach when I was writing the initial phases. The 10x increase in n txs per day I mention above is a conservative estimate bound of "if this thing remotely works at all" and to me, that is now only a question of whether I build and release any of the many possible initial phases.
'Customer validation' hasn't been a stressful process at all – I listened carefully to what merchants were saying and found answers already in this new invention. I've developed a few sentences that often instantly get me a director's card or a handshake to sign up from the owner after talking about specific concerns.
All we need now is YOU, the Monero user who thinks fiat is stupid, and who wants to grow the circularity of Monero's economy, partially because exchange fees are also stupid and gigantic, but also because Monero is the future. As you'll see, what I share here is alike what I hear a lot of people have been waiting for as well. If I do my job over the next year in implementing and scaling of a handful of *other*, secret, high-value, surprising campaigns that I'll be playing very close to the chest for a year or two, we should see such immense pickup due to this system because it will place Monero inevitably at the forefront of whatever scale of daily small, medium, and large commercial, industrial, global, and backbone activity, with new, superpowered techniques that have been able to crack existing power dynamics. (Please DM me your suggestions for industries you would like involved in Monero. There are no outlandish suggestions.) There are a variety of ways to look at the Fermi problem of what this new set of systems will help accomplish. 10^5 more transactions from this new system might be so stupidly low to us in retrospect 5 years from now that we all laugh at 2020-endogenic while we sit in our space-lambos drinking space-champagne because trillions of transactions occur in daily life under fiat systems. I'm not yet able to disclose the majority of the path I see to that end even though it's very specific and concrete and requires basically no additional capital or exposure, among many other key points, even though it's surprising, and in retrospect, obvious.
I planned to finish coding the new systems and launch in the time since I finished its design a couple months ago, but it seemed important to keep studying it, which ended up continuously paying off in the above-hinted massive ways. The new system is designed from the start to be built as rapidly and inexpensively as possible. Even the secret new system expansions I have in my mind are able to be designed with the same minimalism but will invariably be more complex in practice.
Despite having architected these systems to enable me to build them quickly on my own, it looks like this project was destined to be bigger than me, too: A handful of significantly talented volunteer and future-pay contributors suddenly came out of the woodwork – without apparently knowing we were working on something new – most of them people who DM'd me thanking us for my work on Monero and MyMonero.
I didn't spend any time on this new concept over the years til this January 2020 except for a couple hours here and there in the years since 2016 on some constituent puzzle-pieces - like encrypted metadata backup shared by multiple wallets (I recall vtnerd suggested looking at saltpack in 2018? and Ric mentioning a spend 'keyring' in the lobby of the hotel in Jan 2017), and the concept of listing featured vendor websites? in the app for a fee in 2017 (h/t fluffypony) – and on what I only recently realized are some related user-interaction concepts from a years' prior different startup called [Bondsy](https://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/05/23/bondsy-an-iphone-app-for-trading-just-about-anything-with-your-friends/) I was lead dev at.
The reason I hadn't spent time on what I present here while I was at MyMonero was I actually thought it would be a diversion from MyMonero's core purpose to pursue this bigger vision before other monetization strategies - but to be honest I had only the faintest idea of how awesome it would be even though I already knew by December 2018 that adding just one more thing - the ability to buy right inside of MyMonero - was really compelling. But I think I wasn't professionally ready to actually design it, and its ultimate scope, until recently, as well. I've actually had to intentionally put a hold on any additional expansion of our campaigns and strategies to focus down.
### 1. Intro: Merchant signup form
I think the way to the future of global commerce with Monero starts with everyday merchants, vendors, and mom-and-pop and small business owners, including a new wave of knowledge workers / consultants – especially given how much is going digital.
These are the types of businesses that would benefit the most from exposure to new markets – and especially to the Monero community – because these will find less competition from the various mega corporations and their (literally) unlimited advertising dollars.
The sizeable Monero community is interested in spending Monero directly and will jump through hoops to use a vendor if they take Monero.
The link below introduces a new "lightweb" marketplace that connects these two mutually beneficial groups in a format easy for merchants to manage, and both simple and delightfully featureful for existing Monero holders to use.
The first step in publishing a curated merchant on the marketplace is to onboard them, which requires both a conceptual introduction to Monero as a payment medium, plus a few sentences to understand the benefits offered by the marketplace itself. One of the most interesting special things about this system is orders are submitted directly to the merchant. This means the merchant gets a direct line to buyers, which therefore requires careful curation on our part.
I started reaching out privately to specific people - but I have a list of about 400 other groups in my *original* strategy who I haven't even started to talk to yet! But I initially targeted them because they ought to be easy shoe-ins due to e.g. already accepting Monero.
Point is, bizdev even with people unfamiliar to Monero went *way* better than I could have expected.
The first thing merchants see after I talk to them is the signup form. I link it first because it's a good introduction to the entire thing.
I encourage you to pause now and take a close look at this signup page, as it further explains the concept and has some rough screenshots to give you a better sense of what is being created. (Ignore the pricing sheet which is outdated and originally meant as a spam barrier.)
After you're done reading, please return and continue reading my case for how you can help, and I provide other information about the conditions of this proposal that are crucial to understanding what this means for the Monero and MyMonero projects.
Note: I should mention here that though this is branded for MyMonero, we're going to be released under a new, independent project and brand, the reason for which is explained below.
[Monero Marketplace Merchant Signup Form Link](https://www.cognitoforms.com/MyMonero/MyMonero30MarketplaceMerchantRegistrationForm)
------
### 2. Tech specs
Full technical specification of the new marketplace systems (at least, the initial phase) - as well as notes on technical proposals for Monero:
[Monero Marketplace System Tech & API Spec](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSOn4LbV8AqypUlzpH2uSOu9iJXmDhXSy7s1zia6CqQs78f_AYTAqlhNqMZvQc-GFTLSUgWMJZQsqHY/pub)
#### Multiple outputs
This document contains some technical proposals for the Monero community.
One of them plugs one of the biggest remaining fungibility gaps in Monero – the variability in number of outputs on transactions. I've discussed with luigi, surae, Isthmus, and others, and chances are that fixing the number of outputs at two is not optimal, even if it's an easy way to plug that fingerprintability window. Allowing for multiple outputs allows us to do stuff the community has been requesting like managing how many outputs compose a balance, so we can continuously spend Monero in real-life settings, instead of waiting a long time for a wallet balance to unlock. I know a Cake Wallet dev mentioned he was interested in this. Aside from making a marketplace actually usable (imagine having to wait 10 mins between purchases from different merchants – based on how a Monero marketplace w/o money transmission would actually work), multiple outputs also allow the marketplace operator to make money off this thing without being a money transmitter so there's a viable business.
There's a path to solving the current privacy leak caused by unconstrained output count without limiting Monero usability to 2 outputs, although note it won't be possible to detect randomization of number of outputs on new transaction submission as a consensus rule enforcement mechanism, so we may need to simply "drown out" any manually chosen output-counts or output-count attacks with more activity. It may be a worthwhile to hold a discussion during a #monero-dev meeting to confirming consensus strategy on number of outputs.
Multiple outputs (or same functionality) enables support for many creative donation schemes which made some of our social cause partners for this marketplace very pleased.
To make this a viable business for any of us at all (to automatically gather a commission fee, since billing merchants is not viable, especially not at scale) and to facilitate donation schemes, the only alternative to Monero supporting multiple outputs (or multiple payments in a transaction) is for us to be a money transmitter (as far as I know), which means we'd probably have to shut down if multiple outputs are disallowed by community consensus with no alternative.
Using multiple successive transactions on the client-side to accomplish the same goals is not a viable solution because a client can't be made to reliably send multiple transactions where there is a long delay between them.
As an alternative, as Monero evolves, we may be able to add primitive-level or intentionally designed mechanisms to accomplish all of these goals now that we are becoming aware of this being of potential broad utility to Monero.
Side-note about wallet balance output compostion enhancements: Any system where the user specifies denominations they want their wallet balanace to be composed of will be interactive, even though default or derived values can be passed for change denomination. I have been noodling on this here and there for a few years and have some interesting ideas. For now, it can be intelligently automated.
------
### 3. New App Design
As the spec and designs hint, this inbox system also implements the distributed backup of your collection of wallets' metadata, including things you would not want a third-party knowing – like transaction secret keys and your list of contacts, which are among the things this system was originally designed to enable MyMonero to privately back-up for users. The backup system, aside from being 'Monero-native' in protocol, doesn't rely on a trusted third-party like Apple to store that data, and works across every platform. Check it all out in the Figma design prototype - metadata backup is fully and deeply but invisibly integrated into the client in details that I have not documented or which might not be obvious.
It also might seem at first glance a little odd that the secondary (example) wallet is 'buried' below other things in the feed but (a) the app will auto-order wallets by latest activity and will continue to surface things you may need to see and (b) the second wallet will only be there after having been manually added and seen moved to the top of the list.
I warmly welcome design collaborators. Because it's Figma, we can work together on this. The idea is that a minimal set of components are used to construct the entirety of the UI while leaving the interface domain- or task-specific. We have a couple designers interested in helping out – including the original MyMonero desktop designer! – but what you see so far is what I did on my own in a couple weeks while learning Figma, so it will need to be further refined.
[Link to the interactive prototype of the new app design](https://www.figma.com/proto/iWVdhNAABV9bXvQDZFDbZz/MyMonero-App-3.0-Universal)
-----
### 4. What this new system enables, to start...
Once I validated certain initial categories of customers who want to use this initial system - without even talking to anyone already accepting Monero - I started thinking differently and eventually, bigger. I discovered some really, really cool stuff.
I've told some of my new plans/opportunities to only a few other people. Once I validate just a few initial cases, I have clear steps for expansion into other locations and sectors.
In order to make this a viable business, a mechanism by which the marketplace can obtain a commission fee from purchases needs to remain in place or that Monero implement a viable alternative. Right now the buyer includes our fee as an additional output in the amount specified by the merchant, like other donations. This will allows me to make contributing to Monero viable for my team.
As you can see, this introduces, among other things, a chat system on top of lightwallet servers.
A bug-free implementation of what we present here ought to be very private and secure and appears to be HIPAA-compliant.
So the marketplace isn't just about selling physical products. Anyone with knowledge other people might need can use this to make money from their home or on-the-go at any time. A few of the people I sent this to started to get *really* creative and it's extremely easy to do so given the flexibility of the system. If you're interested, drop me a line. Right now I'm only really listing people as exclusives in their categories. If you want to participate with your specialty, let me know, and I'll get some more details from you, confirm, and look at scheduling. I already have signups for experts in certain real-life practical domains and I have a lot of targeted, personally interesting, strategically relevant work to do there as well – but am open to suggestions. To be honest, I'm not even that interested in the knowledge-work/QA aspect of this system - just figured I'd mention it since so many of us are in fact experts of some very useful things. If you don't want to answer a specific incoming question, you can just refund it; or you can choose how many times you wish to follow up with someone. If the user reports no answer or some abuse then we can investigate and yank the merchant.
I want to be careful in the process of how I involve people who are new to Monero. But you who are reading this are likely already very familiar with Monero, to the extent you might feel ready to make money on this system out-of-the-gate given the ease of the UI as orders and payments just appear on your phone, desktop, etc. One example: there's a particularly solid car mechanic I met who can answer questions in his downtime to earn spare cash, and as he has just started a new company and is killing it, he plans to train an apprentice within the year to bring unknown questions to him; Other fun examples: remote therapy, interviews for pet adoptions, chat with celebrities, and much more
Keep in mind this system is easily expanded with support for photo (v1), chunked audio / video sharing (v2/3), encrypted location sharing, hosted digital content delivery, and all manner of other high-value expansions to the marketplace. I have strategic plans for each and am prioritizing specific ones. So the marketplace operator (us) has significant incentive to invest heavily in the chat experience and its capabilities, and from a technical perspective I have concrete, easy, and well-trodden steps to implementing each of the expansions detailed in the document and those which I've had in mind.
There are endless possibilities on the marketplace itself. I'm designing things to be relevant to the Monero community and its economy as a priority. You'll see a bunch of examples in the prototype.
#### Mature mode / KYC
The marketplace has a mature mode for 21+ audiences (default off).
KYC information is submittable as part of the single-step order process – required photo and text fields, which the app can even securely store for you under your own metadata if you want – and have it autofill when purchasing something like a firearm for in-person pick-up, or fiat or crypto-money from private desks.
I'm experimenting with a variety of shops and (even some bars in a certain city) on new ways to KYC. Presently, obtaining that information sometimes requires (a) physical transfer, which we know now can be problematic, and (b) physical scanning by an often prioprietary ID scanning device, which then stores the data on a variety of state-level systems. This is a secure storage method for KYC info which puts no burden and minimal risk on the merchant while providing them a permanent, exportable record of it.
I'm also chatting with some special casinos about providing creative ways to interact with Monero. The integration for very basic but engaging experiences is trivial on our side as they often effectively need to merely expose an authenticated API as a randomness or "win/lose" oracle.
### 5. Teasing some campaigns, ideas, features, and implications
* Innovative new UI design for sending and depositing in multiple currencies, with direct and deep integration into the marketplace
* **Mandatory settlement to Monero for merchants**
* Fiat payout is a certainty but I'm going to do it right and am in discussions with banks, and doing some other very interesting things.
* Suppose you were to send your KYC info and purchase a drink at a bar in advance of your arrival at the pick-up station. After the merchant verifies your info, the marketplace server provides the merchant with a unique token that they scan with their app to verify that you are allowed to pick up the drink. This token issuance is simply a random number generator. The same principle applies to sending purchase pickup information to a vending machine server. The reason I mention this aspect of the system is that I see Tari integration as a strong potential candidate here. It's a nice balance of ephemeral and permanent storage with the potential for issuance and trade features.
* One of the development contributors who pinged me is the creator of xmrauctions.com. An integration between our systems is designed. We have strategies for growth-hacking their supply side for listing auctions, and then the marketplace can provide more of the demand side by listing certain products for instant purchase in Monero. For the record, he's awesome – and is working on this and the marketplace back-end completely unpaid.
* Bunch of homegrown Monero-related projects, plus confirmed partnership with CypherMarket (we're working on some freaking cool and useful privacy- and cypherpunk-oriented physical products), plus a partnership with SparkArt's warehouse and fulfillment infrastructure to produce and ship a few existing Monero-specific projects, and more!
* Approached by a few manufacturers and new factories asking for who to sell new runs of things to and how - I've suggested the Monero community and it's been a solid match on their side, so I'll be applying the work done on these new systems to provide them the ability to accept Monero for scale orders
* Working on involving local farmers (including CSAs) and the best local artisans, as this system strongly emphasizes local discovery – which is incidentally the aspect of the UI that I am most keenly aware may need refinement as I intentionally left it somewhat generalized for the purpose of evolution.
* This system opens up an already designed way for market participants to earn Monero through barter with unexpected solutions to typical barter system friction-points
* Multiple, low-hanging, incremental, **repeatable tactics to get governments involved in Monero**, in ways they will actually be happy about it. I won't need to lobby for any of these initial ideas and they don't require any sort of grand permission or meetings. I can't say too much - I'm going to work on confirming things and report back - but suffice it to say it's going to be awesome, genuinely hilarious and fun, wholesome, and beneficial to everyone.
### 6. Other Philanthropic Opportunities
* Specific 4H / Girl Scouts / Boy Scouts campaigns
* Of course, all manner of privacy and civil liberties oriented entities, including MAGIC and OpenPrivacy, who already accept Monero
* Social welfare and health organizations (I will remain open to curating certain local religious organizations as well, etc.)
* Local education and museum causes, state parks, etc. - particularly excited about this category as there is a ton of very fun stuff
So, so much stuff… I would rather just see what really works!
### 7. For the Monero CCS
As we see economic activity increase, and circularity of the economy established, there will be less need for value to exit Monero, and there will be hundreds to thousands more businesses visiting and strongly incentivized to support these CCS proposals.
If we get any financial success from this project at all, I'll obviously also crush a number of enhancements to the CCS, such as the ability to accept other currencies and if we have money for the attorney, eventually, fiat.
But before that, we will of course be listing Monero FFS/CCS proposals in the marketplace, and are collaborating with the advice of e.g. rehrar to do this in the best way. I won't be playing favorites, per se, but on the other hand, anyone is free to pay us to create a product listing that sends money directly to, e.g., vtnerd, and I'm not sure I'd turn down money to do that.
### 8. The Monero Research Lab
This new marketplace project is by and for the people who actually use Monero, and who plan on contributing to it for the long haul, even though cross-currency exchange is deeply and innovatively integrated into the v2/v3 design with novel interaction solutions.
I never understood why so many insist on having their own settlement-layer projects when we have the scope we need in Monero.
How can we account for the destinations of money pumped into forks, or the actual value yielded by projects like Ethereum? What did we confirm through projects aside from Bitcoin, Monero, Zcoin, etc. that we didn't actually know already? (That people still fall for ICOs, largely)
Monero belongs as a "first-class citizen" in software which is as beautifully designed as products by Nike and Apple. But is there a clear user need for wallet support for more than one primary settlement layer? MyMonero and Monerujo are virtually the only wallet companies dedicated to Monero and the community – the remainder mostly integrate Monero as yet another trading pair to monetize while waiting for the next big thing.
I recall excitement about building new systems and processes on top of new Monero-secured primitives in logs from #monero-research-lab and #monero-dev in years' past.
That's why, among other things, **every transaction in this new marketplace will have an additional output that goes directly to the Monero Research Lab general fund**, except in certain cases.
I don't personally want surae and sarang worrying about money again, given their work ethic and track records, but let's think about this another way for a second. The people sustaining, securing, and guiding the creation of the system on which we're supposedly building the future of all human economic activity... are worried about having enough money.
Their proposals have been getting funded relatively quickly so far, but I still sense fundamental doubt on their part. They should be getting 1.5 - 2x the salary they request and whatever lab equipment they need, with maybe 2-3 years advance pay in their wallets. We might as well hand them our own wallets to escrow. Their work to confirm technical matters is largely what secures this network – not our hashpower.
Surae and Sarang are also people whose work brings them personal joy. These two extraordinarily bright individuals deserve to live above the threshold of financial worry. Let them think about having families, instead of spending time worrying about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They'd be able to focus on longer-term research for Monero as well.
I plan to use this marketplace to help contribute towards that goal. They should be earning >$300k/yr. People who can't approach what these individuals do can easily make $250k/yr *anyway* (in the US) mostly on a degree if they know who to talk to and how. The pair of them could and might walk anytime and go earn twice that without compromising their ethics, and even feel an improved sense of personal security, themselves. They'd also be satisfied with their past contributions on a cool project if they had to walk away, but it would be very bad indeed for Monero if two skilled, trustworthy, loyal people who still want to work on Monero had to leave because of financial limitation – because it would mean the CCS would be broken. I don't *expect* that to happen, but the marketplace will at least be a virtually free-to-build, purely additive backup income stream for them that will scale in some relation to at least a subset of Monero's economic activity. The money can be sent directly to them rather than be held in escrow (our option and preference as an independent entity), hopefully adding to efforts to smooth out gaps between disbursement of their CCS funds or mitigate concerns of control.
### A note about 'malicious' removal of fee and donation outputs
In January's documented analyses of this system's design, it's very clear that a client could be developed which can place orders with merchants while removing the additional outputs placed on marketplace transactions that pay the marketplace operator fee (stipulated by the merchant) or donations that the marketplace wants to enforce, such as for MRL, in the official marketplace client.
Mitigations exist for this due to the design of the system. The marketplace server has the merchant's viewkey, and provisions both the subaddress for order payment as well as the subaddress for the marketplace fee, etc.. The marketplace is not designed to do any scanning of the merchant's account, but since the viewkey is required to provision subaddresses, the marketplace could be enhanced to notify merchants when orders lack outputs paying other fees at appropriate amounts, so the merchant can reject the order. I'm open to considering letting merchants choose whether to fulfill an order even if our fee is not sent, if the fee amount is below a threshold and not, say, a flat fee negotiated for, e.g., a high-ticket item.
I don't expect the most people to use a modified client, especially on iOS, for which a developer account is required along with manual side-loading a modified app, but it will be possible because the new app will also of course be open-source. We may also be able to communicate with Apple to pull imposter marketplace clients - that may be enough for profit and funding new campaigns - but I'm still also not sold if publishing on the App Store is worth it if they require profit-sharing on every purchase, although perhaps the iOS build could handle that by including an additional output with their 30% take.
### 9. The demand for a good marketplace with zero-fraud payments
It's easy to find comments in which people state the need for a system like this, but if anyone else has figured out what a complete system like this will actually enable in the world, they are also keeping it a secret.
* [https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1262484111140073473](https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1262484111140073473)
* [https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1224782543364509702](https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1224782543364509702)
* [https://twitter.com/RelevantPeter/status/1225902409584717825](https://twitter.com/RelevantPeter/status/1225902409584717825)
* [https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go/issues/1638](https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go/issues/1638)
* Facebook announced on May 19 2020 what appears to be [another attempt at a direct competitor](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/facebook-shops) but without any of the privacy, fungibility, zero-fraud, or market exposure benefits, for starters
* New project is codenamed "Crossroads" (sadly the Esperanto word is not usable)
## Why this is big / New team
I've mentioned this new marketplace project is going to be so important not so much because of what is shared in this proposal, but because it enables a shift of a certain power dynamic in a way no one seems to be thinking about yet.
For the past couple months, I've been talking closely with one of the highest profile veteran CTOs in cryptocurrency, who I felt I could trust, so I decided to get his feedback on the wider vision (I was still partially starstruck by it as well). He's now so taken with the project that he - despite having a wife finishing a graduate degree and kids - has decided to use some of his runway to forego finding another job and has entered an evaluation period working in the CTO role of this new project – falling back to a part-time role if I can't cover his expenses quickly enough and we either have to bootstrap or he has to take another gig. He has offered a few months of **completely unpaid** time on his part and seems to be one of the people who gets Monero.
Funding this proposal would provide his salary for half of one year: enough time for us to start making enough money through the system to pay for him and hosting costs, in my estimation, but also easily enough time for me to bring an extraordinary pitch (in the form of this app and revenue, among other things) to A16Z's CryptoFund II for a seed raise (we will therefore be representing Monero to the VC world). He needs a $200k/yr salary for existing expenses, which would itself be a pay cut just to work on this. He's gone out on a limb by not taking a job in the two months it's taken me to get my act together even though his next step will be huge wherever he goes – so let's reciprocate with some faith in him, too. His track record will speak for itself when you find out who he is.
In my opinion, this is an important, solid, and inexpensive chance for our community to send a signal to the mainstream tech world that it is possible for a high quality operator to risk starting a Monero-dedicated venture with virtually guaranteed return to the Monero community and receive relatively modest funding to carry it out.
## Operating Structure
**Important notes:**
As much as we wanted to launch this under MyMonero, the internal situation at MyMonero does not appear to be conducive to the operation and best interests of the marketplace, nor its partners, nor present and potential team members' long-term shareholding or profit-sharing concerns. There are probably some conflicts of interest in the current structure.
**So this proposal's funding won't go towards "MyMonero" or any work that will be owned by it.**
**A new structure has been formed and the new project will be completely independent.**
*Details for understanding the situation are below in Addenda.*
Paul will also no longer continue to pay for MyMonero hosting out of his own pocket due to the situation detailed in Addenda.
## Costs for this Marketplace Proposal
* Half of one year (6 months) funding for CTO; A yearly salary of $200k USD is a hard requirement as he has a family (described above), so we ask for **$100k USD** for him to build and execute on this plus **$5k USD** to cover USD-XMR exchange fees, volatility, and tax prep overhead. To cover the second half of the year's salary, Paul will apply to raise a seed round within 2-3 months with the [A16Z's Crypto Fund II](https://a16z.com/2020/04/30/crypto-fund-ii/), or others in his network. This team addition is a major heavy-hitter in the cryptocurrency industry, and the opportunity is time-sensitive.
* *(optional)* "Forever funding" for endogenic in the form of **$70k USD**. If funded, I won't post another proposal (aside from a hypothetical Monero-related legal defense sponsorship proposal, etc - details below). Since I'd still have to convert the XMR, pay tax on it, etc. to use it for fiat purchases, I will keep it deep cold storage in Monero until it *has* to be converted to fiat, if ever. If I never use it, it might go partially into a trust for FFS/CCS proposals, and/or be used on the marketplace over 10 years. Otherwise I'd use the sum for emergency expenses, or to pay down the remaining ~$70k USD financing on my housing situation if I run out of personal money.
* There's a chance I may have to put money towards MyMonero-related legal defenses. If that happens I'll try to disclose everything about such a usage of these funds. For what it's worth, I haven't invoiced MyMonero / The Spagnis for December 2019 yet either – we're still a ways out on the payment plan anyway and I haven't received the recent payment if I'm not mistaken. But if funding this proposal is a matter of cutting out my personal ask, I would be open to that discussion.
* About Paul: I jumped into iPhone dev in 2008 as I'd already learned Obj-C for some [Mac app projects](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF4TnajSaqs) requiring high performance interactive graphics. Quickly shipping maintainable, performant client-side software became a speciality. I've worked at a few top VC-funded startups, been flown to YC to interview to be funded for a codeless app maker startup of mine, hand-written maybe a hundred shippable iOS apps, and have been asked to consult independently or build initial shippable MVP codebases for about a dozen world-class design and ad agencies, incubators, and funded startups. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pshapiro/)
* Full explanation for this component is in Addenda
* *(optional)* 1 year of minimal-case hosting costs for the *new* marketplace and inbox system *(separate from MyMonero hosting)* - if we assume a maximum of $2k USD per month (which could cover dedicated hardware purchase, instead, allowing for more frugal hosting, as I have significant high-security datacenter contacts developing) - is **$24k USD**. An exchange cost is not included in this because we'll use a provider who chooses to accept Monero. If this component must be removed from the proposal then we'll probably only provide scanning to merchants.
#### USD Subtotal
$105k + $70k + $24k = **$199,000 USD**
### XMR Total
Assuming XMR-USD rate: $65.00 USD/XMR
**3,061.54 XMR**
### Disbursement Plan
The components of this sum will be passed directly to the individuals by Paul 'endogenic' on a monthly delivery schedule given their respective continued monthly involvement.
### Historical CCS/FFS proposal references for this ask
* "Globee's Secret Project Fundraiser / Marketing Opportunity" by fluffypony - [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/70ueta/globees_secret_project_fundraiser_marketing/) - [proposal](https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/88459/globee-s-secret-project-fundraiser) - XMR4,865.80 (at Nov 05 2017 USD-XMR price of $86.35, ~$420,161.83 USD) - I think funding contributed to [projectcoralreef.com](https://www.projectcoralreef.com), which recommended Changelly for purchasing Monero, and potentially some Globee staff and projects
* "Surae Noether: First Denver Monero Konferenco, Spring 2019" - [proposal](https://forum.getmonero.org/9/work-in-progress/90909/surae-noether-first-denver-monero-konferenco-spring-2019) - XMR599.36 ("35,450 USD to 60,100 USD") - Used to reimburse Surae's personal expenditures for the first Monero-specific technical conference
* "Lee Clagett (vtnerd): Broadcast transactions over Tor Hidden Service" - [proposal](https://forum.getmonero.org/9/work-in-progress/90923/lee-clagett-vtnerd-broadcast-transactions-over-tor-hidden-service) - XMR142.12 (~14,200.12 USD)
* "Team Monerujo: Part-time December-February" - [proposal](https://forum.getmonero.org/22/completed-tasks/91137/team-monerujo-part-time-december-february) - XMR220 - Funds for third-party Monero wallet with in-app exchange
* *(idea)* "Firmware for dedicated hw wallet" - [proposal](https://forum.getmonero.org/7/open-tasks/88180/firmware-for-dedicated-hw-wallet)
* *(idea; canceled by dev)* "A Monero-centric Merchant Web Store" - [merge request](https://repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/merge_requests/117) - Lance is the founder of xmrauctions.com mentioned previously as a dev collaborator
* *(not delivered)* "Monero and Kovri" - [proposal](https://forum.getmonero.org/22/completed-tasks/86967/anonimal-s-kovri-full-time-development-funding-thread) - XMR7245.00
* *(idea)* OpenBazaar Monero integration - [rbrunner analysis](https://rbrunner7.github.io/openbazaar) - Requires multisig whereas our system does not need to escrow
# Addenda
## MyMonero's Financial Contributions
* At Konferenco in summer 2019, fluffy told me of a cap on remaining funding for MyMonero with a timeline of having a discussion about raising funds in Dec 2019. In December 19 Ric opted to extend funding until end of Feb 2020.
* Since 2018, MyMonero did collect some income (worth ~$40k USD now – sitting in Monero and Bitcoin wallets - much of it from Edge/Airbitz) from enterprise hosting customers since mid-2017 – although some signed companies have flaked on tens of thousands of dollars of bills even though we continue to provide (apparently) free hosting to their customers.
* MyMonero over the years has significantly materially contributed to Monero's operation:
* $20-40k USD at least on hosting for critical **Monero-specific** infrastructure over the years - only some of which has even been documented – such as for CDN, websites, redirects, and so on. I'm not able to claim any of it as an expense but it accrues to company's debt even if not attributed to Monero itself.
* $20-30k USD plus a couple weeks of my time spent on quarterly MRL workshops bringing researchers (including special requests from universities and the core team) to work for a few days at a time on exclusively Monero problems of their choice – We have agendas and minutes recorded of these workshops) in between fun, local activities.
Ric chose hosting that would enable us to have some degree of confidence about the safety of the community's viewkeys from e.g. Five/Fourteen Eyes-subpoena. I heard he personally made a relationship with the DC, and after Ric set up the servers, I was generally asked not to worry about the many thousands of pounds per month expenditure.
Thanks to recent efficiency advances, I've been able to work with 'pigeons' and 'ndorf' to tone down our hosting costs by removing unnecessary servers, moving previously or partially active Monero servers (like machines that handled some Monero subdomain redirects) to Globee (thanks to those guys), and moving down to 1-gigabit, unmetered. This has reduced a ~5-6k GBP/mo hosting bill down by 1.5k GBP/mo to ~4k GBP/mo.
The ~$40k USD stored in XMR from hosting revenue could pay for MyMonero hosting for a little while, but
* the DC does not accept Monero,
* I was unable to establish a fiat bank account in time through our GC, and
* if one or two additional reliable customers don't join, MyMonero's enterprise hosting business in that form is technically "default dead" - unless hosting is reduced to a few hundred a month (which should be easy for ndorf - see our auxiliary proposal).
Monthly revenue is also a far cry from covering ndorf's $10k/mo salary (which is very modest, by the way, given his background and talent - hopefully demonstrating to the community he's also done a lot for Monero at a steep discount or for free purely out of interest and passion).
In Dec. 2019, I had a very brief discussion with Ric informing him of an investigation into raising funds from select core members because at the time I wasn't closing the bigger enterprise deals we were hoping would close. It wasn't so appealing for those community members to take on the burden of funding MyMonero in such a situation. Then the new thing occurred to me in January while I was in SF.
## Why this new project must be independent
* Ric and Paul have a single loosely phrased initial partnership agreement which also included Risto at an equal share with Ric
* In original agreement, Ric agrees to pay for Paul's ~$5k monthly expenses but specifies no hard payment schedule. It makes no mention of whether Ric's 47.5% is in consideration of that payment (or for IP) or how the capital will be treated
* About a year ago, Ric stopped paying Paul's expenses in monthly increments ("coming soon"). Paul has been operating on savings.
* The agreement Ric and Paul have was readily thrown out by third-party attorneys as mostly meaningless, with the likely interpretation that Paul owns most or all the work done, so we've been in the process of formalizing matters. Despite lengthy efforts in fall 2019 and 99.5% of the legal work to finalize the formation of (intl) corp structures with Jonathan, nothing of consequence for the foreign co got finalized, with holdups at the last moment. Paul now owns a US co called MyMonero which exists to employ Americans and sell work product to a foreign co which didn't get finished despite lengthy follow-up; Ric owns a legacy SA pty ltd called MyMonero that technically publishes the iOS app and entered some customer agreements, as well. We were forming - did form - a Malta co to own IP, assets, agreements, revenue, ..., and finalizing banking. By-laws etc were ready.
* The original 'agreement' indicates a silent partner loses their share
* Original agreement with Paul includes another founder 'Risto' as equal in holding to Ric - which Ric changed verbally among the "active partners" at some point to Ric holding Risto's share with a 2017 promise of upping Paul from 15% to 30% when he became CEO.
* A year or two after partnership agreement signing, Ric opted to view his capitalization of the company as a debt MyMonero must pay back, while holding 85% as inentionally inactive founder
* Paul was given debt tally spreadsheet in late 2019 totaling ~$1.5MM, including expenses for Ric's internal resources like our GC (and Ric's own CFO) at rates Paul wasn't told, while those resources are also salaried at a lower rate, internal to Ric's group
* MyMonero had debt for expenses from before Paul joined, but Paul is not given access to revenue information from the additional output on every transaction done through the MyMonero wallet which was incidentally removed the moment he joined due to RingCT-type range proof size of addtl output inflating miner fee, but Paul was told that the rev from that was used for business expenses – but it's unclear which expenses they were used for and none of the revenue is on the spreadsheet
* Paul was told early on MyMonero was his "baby" but in Dec 2019 Ric informed Paul on a phone call – in direct answer to Paul asking for advice on closing an enterprise sale – that Ric had asked Cake Wallet if they wanted to buy MyMonero.
* Paul was also informed on the Dec 2019 call the company proprietary code would either be fully open sourced or IP sold to Cake by end of Feb
* In Jan 2020 call Paul presented fully designed and documented marketplace, and on advice, asked for consideration of majority voting allocation - but Ric replied that changes to shareholding would only be considered after debt fully paid back.
* Paul has been informed that an apparently likely legal interpretation is he owns some or all(?) of the new IP, but assumes that an interpretation would exclude the server-side code Ric paid 'vtnerd' and 'ndorf' cash for. No assignment apparently took place and Paul is the designer of the systems, etc., so Ric's attorney actually told Paul it's not clear. (Paul now doesn't mind if MM code is open-sourced because he likely wouldn't opt to use MyMonero's server code or infrastructure for a new scanning system to improve maintainability and future-proof the system anyway.)
* Paul has recently been placed on a payment plan for back-expenses Ric owes from the last ~10 mos (2019) to be paid at "$10k/mo" til completion (~$60k still outstanding). Payment delays started in 2018/2019.
* When Paul checked in mid-May, he didn't see any $10k payment received for May 2020
* Paul has no plans to bill Ric's company for the duration worked on the marketplace in Jan and Feb 2020
* Paul has also not invoiced Ric for Dec 2019 yet, but will likely do so since Paul had significant expenses in December for authorized and significantly fruitful MyMonero business development and XMR integration for other groups. Expenses for things like MRL workshops went on Paul's credit cards.
* Marketplace info marked "Confidential" was disclosed to sister companies and the public without consulting the CEO.
* In the past, The Monero community has struggled to obtain reports on usage of CCS funds and results for past successful proposals by other Monero-adjacent, for-profit companies which were supposed to return money to CCS proposals or the community, despite no ability of the community to verify the return. An independent structure combined with this marketplace will enable transparency and accountability of reporting, plus clarity on return of value to Monero. The marketplace is of course strongly incentivized to carefully measure its economic contribution. (MRL general fund and donation recipients will also be able to publish transparency reports which can act as probes into the activity on the marketplace.)
### Conclusions
* Ric doesn't want to cede control to Paul, and has stated debt repaid as a condition;
* Apparently possible conflicts of interest and other issues impede operation of marketplace with other participants;
### The Current MyMonero Hosting Bill Payment Situation
I had planned in January/February to use my fiat money to pay for MyMonero hosting. But things changed. Here is some background.
* I agreed to shoulder the MyMonero datacenter hosting costs of many thousand pounds a month after Ric's funding MyMonero ran out at end of Feb 2020 – meaning that paying for hosting should ostensibly no longer to be on Ric's todo list, as he had decided to wind down the company until I indicated an opportunity and that I would be carrying it forward
* But when Paul was late paying the DC directly for hosting in April, money was taken without discussion from Paul's *personal* back-expenses total owed and Paul was informed after the fact by being sent a screenshot of spreadsheet change by Ric's attorney. Zaheer (Ric's CFO) autonomously paid the DC for hosting claiming I was late answering an email thread he was on, even though this is months after funding ran out, and while Paul was in the process of collaborating on the email thread with pigeons and finalizing costs for the month with the DC due to (a) a Monero-project-specific, largely unused, many hundreds of dollars' server being taken off our account with past credits applied, and pending (b) Paul's confirmation with the DC about their readiness to accept Monero, while (c) having repeatedly obtained the DC's word they wouldn't freeze the account.
* Paul was told by Ric's attorney (who was MyMonero's internal GC and Paul's friend for the years) that if subtracting money for MyMonero hosting from Paul's personal expenses total is a problem to, Paul recalls, see them in court.
* A couple weeks ago, I suggested to Ric's attorney to have Ric have Zaheer continue to use their fiat bank account to pay for hosting while I send them Monero from the MyMonero enterprise hosting customer revenue wallet. They agreed, saying they'd help for 2-3 months but suggested I find a solution quickly.
* But Ric's attorney recently told me there's hesitation to pay for hosting, because I'm a few days late sending the existent Monero rev collected by MyMonero, that they already messaged me stating a fixed XMR rate for, despite costs having been in GBP, and even though technically Ric's Pty. owns that income anyway.
* I anticipate Ric won't continue to pay for MyMonero hosting or may cut me out of shareholding or discussions if I'm too late sending reimbursements, meaning I need to use my fiat bank account (and take exchange fee hits) unless we switch DCs – which is not likely in the immediate term without more work by Nathan 'ndorf' given how inefficient the original infrastructure setups really were, despite advances in Sept. 2019 like server deployment automation by pigeons, ndorf, and endogenic - they are still geared to assume excessive resources
* As of May 20 2019, the DC sent Paul, Zaheer, et al., an email requesting an update on payment for the month, and Zaheer asked Paul in that thread to "advise" despite their already having agreed to use their account for hosting payment for at least another month or two. Past discussions with the attorney to clarify the matter got no where and have ended with claims of innocence and confusion.
* Later in the day on May 20 while Paul was still finishing this proposal, Jonathan informed Paul they would only pay for hosting when the XMR rate is fixed - something Paul had never agreed to. The conversation became quickly devolved into claims of alternative interpretations. Jonathan ended with a request to get on the phone; Paul replied with a request for agenda for call and thanked them.
#### Paul's Personal Situation / Next Steps / MyMonero hosting clarity
I'm confused about what else to conclude except Ric doesn't believe in the company while trying to retain control of it. It seems my time is simultaneously being intentionally wasted while I'm encouraged to work on it. In the past I confess I would have asked myself if Ric was trying to teach me how to manage people like that. That's one reason this has dragged on for so long. Alternatively this situation may be by design. Who knows, anymore?
I'm putting in my remaining ~$60k savings (socked away from the gig I did for Treble.fm in summer 2016) and I have come down to a burn-rate of a few thousand dollars USD per month to survive the next year and make sure this marketplace gets launched without having to give away control yet. I'm sure I'll have a few surprise purchases and other needs in 2020. E.g. currently I found the minimum medical insurance plan on healthcare.gov is $350/month. I also expect the potential need to 'invest' some personal money over the next few months to pay for occasional dev or design resources on this new marketplace project if strictly necessary.
As a sidenote, if I had known my personal expenses from the past year wouldn't be paid til an indeterminate far off time in the future, I might have had the cheek to ask for the rates to be fixed back then, too. I'm not clear why Ric's attorney thinks it made sense to fix the XMR rate when hosting costs have always been in fiat and my rates have never been paid at historical prices. But anyway.
I frankly don't care to take much more risk or hardship for "MyMonero", as I can't obtain control to ensure its future and the interests of shareholders even after proposing to run the marketplace under the brand (below).
**As a consequence of the above and what is disclosed in the following section, as mentioned, I won't continue pay for the MyMonero hosting out of my own pocket** nor spend time worrying about it – despite attorney pressure.
## Where we can go with MyMonero Hosting
The incorporated shareholding structure of MyMonero was to be as follows: fluffypony (partner from '14), endogenic (partner from '16), luigi (advisor from '16), pigeons (advisor from '16), vtnerd (advisor from '16), naveenspark (advisor from '18), ndorf (options from '18), mds (advisor from '18), with one or two possibly left out. There are some years of agendas and minutes from department meetings.
Without someone paying the hosting cost, emails from the DC warn the contents of the servers will be deleted imminently, even though the DC gave us their word many times it wouldn't happen. **I did not keep any backups of the viewkeys**, but the others who had access to the server could easily have backed them up at points, even though it took years to institute a backup scheme.
### MyMonero vs Marketplace vs Inbox/Metadata Hosting
Regarding the marketplace, specifically, I know we'll provide hosted scanning free to merchants, and eventually pro users - but I'm still currently considering providing hosted lightwallet scanning for free to all users to start, since it's so much more efficient now, and since anyone who wants to keep their viewkey private can ask for blocks via the new hybrid mode. We'd actually been thinking of just deleting old viewkeys in the MyMonero db on perhaps a monthly basis; scanning on the fly can sometimes be fast enough.
I also might just buy hardware and host some stuff in a mountainside with laser sharks. Gigabit business fiber is not hard to come by, and thanks to recent PRs and some wallet scanning scheduling innovations on our side, and a few long-standing, low-hanging ideas to make our infrastructure scale far more modern fashion, in addition to the introduction of the WebSocket API (no more unmetered uplink requirement), I expect scaling to similar volume on just a few hundred USD/mo.
The marketplace server will also definitely provide free hosting for encrypted inbox messages, but we'll also provide free hosting for encrypted metadata backups, so that the experience is seamless (for now, at least). We might eventually roll higher storage requirements into a pro tier. The encrypted metadata and inbox content is expected to be easy technically to efficiently store and access.
The MyMonero servers can of course still provide free scanning and hosting for scanned transaction history, and, as a matter of fact, I think it is a natural match to upgrade the MyMonero lightwallet server to be able to host the inbox-specific system by integrating inbox and metadata hosting directly into the LWS itself.
The new hybrid mode allows a singular coding interface for wallet creators while allowing the user to choose whether to do scanning on their side. In that way, the lightwallet server WebSocket API can constitute a superset of other Monero APIs for the wallets. Streaming blocks to the client with the new hybrid mode means wooder's new WASM wallet-scanning work will now work with a *singular* API no matter where the scanning needs to get done, and will receive the benefits of server-side scanning via the same code if any of the users want to switch modes.
### Retire the RPC APIs for the new hybrid push API?
The alternative for a realtime push API for Monero for client applications is to hit ZMQ directly, or keep polling the fractured and often unscalable legacy RPC APIs etc.. I'm assuming the Monero community isn't willing to keep the wallet2 API documented. Cake Wallet works by keeping up with all changes to wallet2's dark API, but they'd like to upgrade as well.
Keep in mind – third parties (including you) can still host these hybrid servers or get a managed system with strong privacy guarantees since MyMonero worked with Lee 'vtnerd' for about 6 months to PR an implementation for everyone to run and as OpenMonero exists as well.
'vtnerd' is continuing to keep the lightwallet server rebased and is maintaining it – it's very high quality code, even if it's not intended to scale past home/community usage right now - and even if it still needs to be extracted to another repo – and I've mentioned OpenMonero's implementation of the RESTful API is also becoming more mature and optimized.
In my personal opinion, the wallet RPC API should be retired or rather, migrated into something future-proofed, and which can expose the performance enabled by vtnerd's recent concurrent ZMQ work in the daemon.
So it seems to me the inbox and metadata storage system is a natural fit for the new light / hybrid server. This inbox and metadata storage design lets the community use Monero-native addresses while avoiding storing ephemeral data on the blockchain. A hybrid server can recognize whether a message was intended for it if it has ever scanned for an address, and if it doesn't have that account or wants not to store that message for later, it merely forwards it to the rest of the network (and yes, there are metadata leakages associated with this, which are solvable in other ways at the network layer – the store-and-forward itself likely should utilize i2p - another h/t to fluffypony). A network like that would allow for some incredible possibilities (which I don't want to mention yet but heck, let's just say, decentralized atomic-swap liquidity-discovery, for starters).
But no community adoption of our inbox/metadata system is actually required for the new marketplace to work since we can host the data. The marketplace server itself will be a singleton instance (for now?) because we manually curate the listings, and are also on the hook to keep a database associating order IDs with payment deposit subaddresses of merchants (open to suggestions – less metadata means less risk for us).
### New systems: High-security Wallet Hosts
To the end of increasing privacy with lightwallet usage, I have also begun working on a new company – with another veteran devops specialist, who happens to be another long-time Monero community member – to make a new service providing higher security hosted Monero wallet scanning in e.g. isolated execution environments and servers, etc., as well as some approaches to single-click home installs of hybrid systems and Monero nodes, including some low-hanging hardware device ideas. I'm lucky that this individual is basically running everything there himself, is serious about executing, and mostly only needs my expertise, opinions, and encouragement. He already has a few working systems and is waiting on me for legal. I've been interested in some (somewhat subversive) project ideas expanding Monero daemon, mining, and lightwallet server deployment and proliferation, and I feel good about the collaboration I've had with him so far.
## Suggestion to Open-Source MyMonero
Here is a suggestion of a plan implemented by a new proposal that Nathan 'ndorf' might open on the CCS in order to maximize the benefit of open-sourcing MyMonero.
2 + 1 + 2-3 months (5-6 x $10k = **$50-60k USD**)
* 2 months to
1. finish out the fixes for low-hanging but long-standing bugs - things like the mempool and viewkey communication issues causing the wrong data on mempool transactions;
2. crush some low-hanging big scalability and future-proofing improvements to the infrastructure, mostly modernizing old systems for the WebSocket API's full potential;
3. continue to maintain the MyMonero servers for customers while we reduce hosting costs through optimizations;
5. keeping our libraries, including [mymonero-core-cpp](https://github.com/mymonero/mymonero-core-cpp), up-to-date and working with the latest Monero version release over the time period of this, in connection with Nathan's work on a [reproducible embeddable Monero codebase derivation process](https://github.com/mymonero/monero-core-custom/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed) during his MyMonero tenure;
6. open-sourcing some of the harder parts of our C++ implementations of our internal systems like scanning prioritizations and mempool-blockchain view-unification, and possibly some of the new WebSocket server implementation as integrated – so that the community has most of the harder parts of a scalable form of this new client-facing API mostly for free. What gets released from these two months can be part of the discussion for funding, as well as a product of how much time Nathan is prepared to put into enabling the Monero code to take those PRs.
* 1 month to rebuild MyMonero infrastructure to run on one server (instead of 3) and without unmetered gigabit.
* *(optional)* 2-3 months of funding to sponsor ndorf to expand the existing PR made by vtnerd for the OSS LWS implementation – with the expansion to implement our new WebSocket API, support for subaddresses, optimizations to vtnerd's LWS itself, and the hybrid API work – basically making sure we get everything into mainline. In order to accomplish this, ndorf would have to work with vtnerd to create a two-repository situation where Monero core code can be expanded continuously without destroying its maintainability. This alone would be a major win for the Monero project.
About Nathan: Before working at MyMonero, Nathan had more than a decade of professional C++ experience, probably knows every detail of every C++ version spec, and has worked at finance companies such as Bloomberg, Bear Stearns, UBS, and Walleye.
## Closing Remarks from Paul
All the companies I was involved in as a founder before MyMonero were 'bootstrapped' by the founders alone – we worked on consulting jobs with high day-rates when the company needed money, cooked our own meals, and stayed in low-rent apartments. We took zero investment despite (in hindsight potentially) good matches because we did not feel it was ethical to pitch an unconfirmed opportunity which, despite our innovations, solutions, and patents having significant value, wasn't making money yet – and we wanted to make sure our priorities were straight. One of the biggest lessons I learned about building a product company that needed to make actual money was, "validate before you build". Basically, it's not real until e.g. money changes hands. So even though I can't disclose many of the wider vision I see, I hope my track record of integrity almost regardless of personal cost and my awareness of customer validation should, I hope, indicate I don't make the above statements about transaction volume and secret opportunities lightly, and that I would not embellish such things. I told three Monero community members: Nathan 'ndorf', Matt 'scoobybejesus', plus one very high profile community member who prefers to remain anonymous for now (who is not a core team member) about the unexpectedly exciting stuff that occurred to me during my studies of this new system. They'd be able to attest to the scope and veracity of my claims, but please don't burden them by asking questions – because they won't answer them, and such leaks will not be in the project's interest.
Having spoken with so many legit people in the Monero community who want to be involved in this, I've become cautiously, but slowly very excited to watch this new movement grow, as we bring Monero to everyday life. If this works *at all*, it's going to be nuts. I may be taking a risk in making this proposal instead of launching from a stronger position – and it's also taken me quite a long time to write and edit. But I feel like one or two of the people who have shown up to work on this new project deserve to have an environment in which they can operate confidently. So I think the risk in making this proposal could be worth it to help this new project see its full potential.
This is also an uncertain time for Monero, even though we feel good. It may be *the* most dangerous time. May I use this chance and my years working for the Monero community to be so arrogant as to suggest not to be careless with what's special about the Monero project, especially as the next couple years unfold? I'll be more specific. It can be easy for people to abandon a project after getting useful research from it. People often forget that the environment which could produce that research also had to be made and even has inherent value, and that the establishment of that environment was usually down to the continued efforts of a few invididuals. People also forget when we have projects like Monero that there was nothing else was actually viable to contribute to at the time.
So many people hear about Monero nowadays as a tool for price speculation. Noticing the dedication of much of the community, some people have tried to capitalize on the attention community members pay to subreddit debates, in order to build reputations or even find support for their own ideas and projects. But the people who understand what we're doing here, and often the people who have contributed the most actual code or effort to Monero itself, seem to exclusively be highly principled people and willing to fight in some way for a better world.
I'd say what's most important to the Monero project is its own survival - because it has inherent value regardless of what other projects claim to be able to reproduce.
The major threat I see to Monero right now is other projects marketing that they've got similar ideology or culture with greater operating scope just long enough to bleed Monero of momentum or interest. This isn't something to take lightly even if it seems trivial. The Monero project has climbed a hill since 2014. At a local maximum in any project, it's easy to become complacent and "exit" because of fatigue or a loss of feeling of the mission left to accomplish when there seem to be no major novelties left to discover, even if though that feeling is generally guaranteed to be mistaken if actually accompanied by fatigue or a lack of interest.
As an open-source project without centralized control, the loss of any one individual is *supposed* to be one of Monero's strong long-term advantages. But it doesn't always work out like that. There are situations where Monero may face talent drain, and it's not only the precedent of talent leaving that's problematic, but sometimes specific individuals deciding to work on other projects will cause a migration of talent as well.
One of the reasons for Monero's real cohesion through time is the clarity of its purpose: soundness of base-layer as a critical priority (basically the same as requiring privacy, real censorship resistance, and self-custody of a long-term fungible unit of value). What's the point otherwise? The first missions to the moon took similarly clear intention. But much of the critical aerospace know-how and practices we developed in order to get to the moon *just 50 years ago* have been lost in such a short time (Ask hyc – he knows.), Despite people saying the result can be brute-forced again by the likes of Space X with more modern technologies, I still don't have a moon-car. Monero has only similarly taken the first leap, and other projects might be able to come eat our lunch in bringing private, sovereignty-enhancing, [*sufficiently*](https://twitter.com/cryptocomicon/status/1263203505017286656) censorship-resistant digital money to the real world. There's value in our own work being retained by the Monero project as it is not so easy to make contributions in the long-run if they cannot be accumulated in one location. Other private cryptocurrencies – forks of Monero, at first – can and will begin to get issued, positioned as a way to scale Monero. There is no reason to dissuade people from working on their own thing. But there is a down-side that accompanies the upsides to fracturing projects *just because*.
The Monero core team might be the stewards of the Monero project, but the entire Monero project is now the steward of the role of being a true cryptocurrency in the world because of the culture, values, and history the project encodes. Swapping to other coins comes with its own privacy leaks. I'm mainly suggesting we question blind support of forks or new issuances because they also bring risk.
The price, marketcap, and darkweb adoption environment people observe now demonstrates its effects by a delayed function after the underlying factors have long-since changed. So while it's not as easy for other projects to hide in fake cryptocurrency marketing lingo anymore – making it clear to anyone paying attention that Monero is vastly superior at present because we focused on fundamentals first – and even if we remain technically ahead of other projects – if we ignore what those fundamentals are supposed to be used for in the real world, Monero may have its features easily reproduced in a more practically capable system and become irrelevant very, very quickly. It would suck if "Monero" became one of those vintage, defunct projects you look up on Wikipedia and while enjoying its funky, retro logo, because it would mean something got lost.
So I hate to be presumptive but projects like this new marketplace might actually now become key to Monero remaining competitive in the next few years. The UX in Monero may be superior to Bitcoin, but it's not remotely good enough, and funded teams will figure out a way to spawn a project that could replace Monero while being highly incentivized to actually solve the usability problems in their replacement. Enabling real economic activity is where it's at, even if it's true Monero is used on darkwebs for now by people driven to the extreme to need to use it.
Aside from not being the fastest to accomplish specific things which we right didn't prioritize in the past, it's not clear if Monero has sufficient "executive function" at this specific moment. I think there's a difference between the #monero-dev meetings from 2016 and 2020.
One permutation of many could leave Monero in the dust: an inability to maintain or further expand our C++ code's leading to a reimplementation in Rust leading to the question of what's special about Monero (A: its adoption and output-set), or the researchers imminently losing faith in the CCS (we have come very close), or the loss of anyone actively drawing technical talent to Monero while other similar-sounding projects draw attention, or new tech that doesn't require existing anonymity sets, or the creation of so many forks that Monero's set no longer matters.
Lots of people have voices commitment to Monero's future as a project, but there actually isn't clear and strong enough consensus on that. If there were, we would have been able to commit 1-2 years of funding to the MRL researchers without a second thought. They, and their online collaborators (there are too many people but I'm going to name-drop knaccc and koe) have important plans for Monero, but deserve more confidence that there's enough commitment from the community to support even one additional researcher. Time isn't standing still, and I know for a fact Surae and Sarang have historically downplayed the effect to which they'd be able to deploy more resources. I've spent a lot of time with them and know they could manage five additional funded direct reports each. I've heard certain people who clearly understand how cyptocurrencies work still question whether we can throw our weight fully behind Monero. That communicates a lack of commitment to contributors themselves even though the message is often packaged as a vague allusion to cypherpunk ideals of independence and not relying on points of failure.
Removing all doubt for MRL that Monero is worth investing their time in is a key to breaking the dam that presently bars a huge influx of mainstream talent from the rest of the world, too.
Every single Bitcoin enthusiast I know is actually a Monero supporter in real life. That means they know something's wrong with Bitcoin. But what if Monero as a project is still #2 to Bitcoin right now because the wider community doesn't think we're ready for the world stage, either? They might be wrong, but it's still our job to do something about that. Prioritizing privacy and soundness was the right call initially, but can the Monero community honestly answer the question of whether we want "mainstream adoption" in the affirmative right now? I bet a lot of people will actually say "no" and be pleased with themselves. But it might be time to say yes.
I think we can send the signal to the world that Monero is ready for people to throw their weight behind partially by the Monero community funding this proposal, but also by starting to make better commitments to our researchers. We'd also want to increase the prioritizy of usability issues in Monero technology itself like the output balance composition and locking impeding continuous spending, plus the development of new primitives to enable new layers by actually using Monero.
Something underground can always have its place if it's truly censorship resistant, but we're here to change the world, and the promise of Monero coming to the mainstream is something we can only do with Monero playing a visible part in people's lives, rather than it merely playing a supporting or hidden role. (People spend actual the actual fiat currency itself to buy, e.g. in-game items – an obvious observation.)
Too many projects think that the implementation doesn't matter if all the user interacts with is the abstraction. But in Monero's case, the implementation and the abstraction aren't distant.
From that point of view, Monero is also a Trojan horse for certain other changes in the world.
I say Monero and not "cryptocurrencies" because there has yet to be another one with the properties we need for this.
When you assume that confirmed transactions simply cannot be reversed or censored – certain processes change.
The question is how we start those dominoes, and that's what I figured out. But those dominoes probably don't *really* require *Monero*.
Thank you for your consideration of this proposal and your time in reviewing it, and for being a part of a genuinely special community.
As I continue working on this new project over the next two years, I expect many more sectors where the power dynamic shift can occur will come to light, and you will all be the first to find out about it and be able to take advantage of it.
Wakanda forever!
Paul
P.S. In case anyone's wondering, I've never received any "knock" or notices from any government or other entities – that is, unless I've been neuralized?