Public sentiment? It’s in line with what many people on r/CryptoCurrency seem to believe these days. They want a heuristic for what’s safe to buy during a bear market, and a popular one is ‘BTC and ETH are the two blue chips, everything else will fade away.’

In principle it doesn’t matter what coin it was; their MSB rules are the same in any case, and they’ve done it with Bitcoin before.

How else could I rent an SMS service to talk to someone who’s being prosecuted, without being targeted just for daring to talk to him? Without having to rely on a company not to secretly give my information out behind my back, even if they weren’t actually legally required to?

If people want any sort of alternative to credit card payments and bank transfers, it has to have the privacy features of Monero. Open-ledger coins are even worse. People have recently been kidnapped and murdered for having too much Bitcoin, which anyone was able to see.

These are minimal SMS exchanges, and the feds are probably reading them in real time. I asked if he was able to use email + PGP, and he said no. I haven’t said who I was, I’m just anon asking for the Internet.

I would also like a comprehensive list of prior enforcement actions.

FinCEN has this, https://www.fincen.gov/news-room/enforcement-actions

If that’s really all they’ve done, it’s been quite rare.

https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-penalizes-peer-peer-virtual-currency-exchanger-violations-anti-money

In Eric Powers’ case (2019), they seized all his data, fined him $35k, and forced him to sign an agreement that he wouldn’t act as an MSB again. Sounds like they thought a jury would be sympathetic, and so they couldn’t go for much in a plea bargain. They list only two other MSB enforcement actions since then.

Now that people seem to be pulling their cash-by-mail ads on localmonero, I was thinking that something I’d like to have would be a site that has the same sort of escrow and dispute resolution infrastructure, but with private ads. If you already have contacts, you want to keep buying during “p2p winter”, and you know someone who wants to keep selling, you can tag each other, make accounts, and one party puts up a private ad which is only visible to specified other parties.

It turns out that localmonero sort of supports that already. If you go to make a new ad, there is an option to make it for trusted users only. So you can mark each other trusted and make a private ad with arbitration protection that way.

I’d like to see a finer-grained version of this where you just specify users that can view a specific ad, and don’t have to worry about what ‘Trusted’ does today. Obviously your trust level is not 100%, which is why you’d like the escrow service to keep both of you punctual.

If you’re going to salt your current localmonero account because you’ve traded with someone who’s getting prosecuted and you want to keep your past trades with them from being slurped, remember to exchange PGP keys with everyone you’ve already traded with before you hit the big red button, so you can verify your identity with each other afterwards.

I would also like to see a feature on private ads, that once the trade is finalized, with the agreement of both parties, the trade chat and all other information about the trade can be expunged immediately. No waiting six months, and no record of the trade whatsoever. Just escrow while you need it and then it’s gone.

Records said he has been released. I gave him a link to this site, suggested he make an account, and asked if there was anything he wanted me to tell people.

Thanks. I’m safe and unavailable for trades, and working with the pretrial services office of the US District Court for the Central District of California to get trades on Agoradesk/LocalMonero. I’m barred from “social media apps” but not under a gag order. Thanks for letting people know.

People have been relying on the notion that “Selling peer-to-peer isn’t illegal.” The problem with that is, that as soon as you are trading regularly, or making a profit, they are going to say that you are in the business of it instead, and therefore have to be a licensed money-service business, keep records, and perform full KYC on your customers.