cross-posted from: https://monero.town/post/229349

Hüseyin Dogru is a journalist. He has been sanctioned by the EU for a couple of months already.

The sanctions prohibit any EU business and people from offering him any resources. His bank accounts are frozen, he has no money, he cannot pay rent, he cannot pay for food, he cannot feed his 2 newborn children.

Is Hüseyin some kind of vicious terrorist ready to jump on you? Not really, he was sanctioned because of wrong-think, literally.

He was propagating ideas that were not in line with what the EU thinks is right.

Unfortunately he was a bit too successful at it, so BAM! Sanctions! No more food for Hüseyin. He is now reduced to begging friends, family, and complete strangers for food.

Regardless of what you think of what Hüseyin did, the truth is that he had not violated any laws and has not been accused of any crime, otherwise, there would have been a court case and a judge would have decided if he was guilty and what punishment he would receive.

That's not how it works with these sanctions, you go straight to the no-more-food-for-you case, and it's all decided by some bureaucrat in a high tower.

It's pretty terrifying lack of any due process, if you ask me.

No need to be working for Al-Qaeda or ISIS, more importantly, no need to prove any of that, they just need to write something as justification in the form, and that's it, you are done for!

Oh, I almost forgot, it does not matter if you are an EU citizen or not, and you don't have any money, so you cannot even pay lawyers to defend your case or try to appeal the decision.

As you see things can go wrong pretty fast in this new world we are living in. And don't think that living in the USA would protect you. Some day you or your favorite TV personality could wake up and find out that you are sanctioned because of another stupid wrong-think offense.

For example, I see you are already participating in the new "organized gang" called Monero Reddit, some abomination trying to challenge the economic foundation of our modern and very democratic societies! And I have proof because you have joined this subreddit!

That's really all that's needed for us all to go to the begging case. And Monero does not even have to be designated a terrorist organization, it's enough for the bureaucrats to say Monero very bad, something, something protecting the children/fighting against terrorism.

Anyway, hypothetically speaking, how would you manage if you were sanctioned like Hüseyin?

I want to write an article about it, for myself, not for distribution to other people (sanctioned or not). This way, I can rest assured that I have a plan for this low probability/high impact scenario. Here are some of my first thoughts:

Short term (survival mode)

• get a way for people to know your situation and your xmr address

  • put it in your Twitter/X handle
  • make a kuno on https://kuno.anne.media/
  • ask/demand reporters writing about you to always mention it in their article

• beg friends, family and strangers for food and essentials

Mid-term (making money)

• save some money to move out of the sanctions area if you are still inside and live somewhere you can earn some money

Long term (new life)

• Move to a country that does not enforce sanctions that were not voted by the UN Security Council

Please share any idea or link that could help!

P.S: It goes without saying, obviously this is not a recommendation for sanction evasion, just a thought exercise among 100% law-abiding people, and you should always dutifully respect and follow your local laws and regulations.

Joke: You could also voluntarily genuflect and bow from time to time towards the building of your local overlords in order to show appreciation that you are not yet sanctioned even though you are a potential wrong-thinker.

UPDATES: I have originally posted this in January, since then, things have not improved at all...

• In July 2025 he filed annulment action, the court has still not ruled
• His lawyer (Alexander Górski) says the "evidence" the EU handed over on request consists exclusively of Doğru's own public social media posts — no financial transactions, no emails, no Russia links. FAZ concedes no evidence has been presented as of June 2026.
• In March 2026 the German sanctions-enforcement office (ZfS) froze his wife Lizzie Phelan's bank accounts — the trigger: she took out insurance for the family car after his policy was cancelled.
• In May 2026 the bank also froze his pensioner mother's accounts
• He now has a total of 3 children to support (2 newborns and 1 newerborn)
• He lives off an exempt €506/month allowance; anyone giving him money, food, or "even a bottle of water" risks prosecution — up to 5 years under the EU directive / up to 10 years under German law.
• Reporter ohne Grenzen says individual sanctions for disinformation are "risky"; but the German Journalists' Union (DJU/ver.di) declined to call it a press-freedom violation, framing him as "a businessman running a destabilization business-model with Russian support." (no proof at all was provided to support that)
• There is a tiny plus side, with a petition at free-dogru.com that passed 8,000+ signatures and the topic is getting a bit more attention in German society.

Meanwhile, the precedent is established and sanctioning EU residents for "wrong-think" with no court case is now being applied to at least two more people (French ex-MEP Aymeric Baud, Swiss-Cameroonian scholar Nathalie Yamb).

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/36077652

I succeeded in using Haveno (Called RetoSwap when used on the mainnet). It was quite confusing so I will document the TLDR here and give a guide about the use on Linux.

First confusion

• Haveno is the software used, it comes with a testnet for trying it and the software releases are basically useless apart from trying it out.
• RetoSwap is the haveno app but connecting to the monero mainnet, allowing to actually buy monero. But the RetoSwap app is called Haveno when installed!

Installation

I installed the .flatpak application from the latest Github release. You need to setup flatpak and flathub before.

There are many ways to install it, for ease of sandboxing and graphical configuration I recommend the .flatpak file.

TODO: Verify the download! There is a .sig file but I didnt find their key yet

You can install the .flatpak file from a graphical app store by opening it with that, or via flatpak install appname.flatpak from the terminal.

Once installed, it will appear in your app menu.

Wallet

Opening the app, it creates a trading wallet for you. This will receive the monero you buy and you can pay from it directly, or transfer to a personal wallet first. But the wallet is not protected with a password yet!

Backup

It is important to back up the wallet first, then encrypt that backup, for example using an AES encrypted .zip archive, or the tomb utility, or gpg/sequoia or many other ways.

That backup is apparently important, though I was able to load the wallet in feather wallet just using its seee and creation time.

Password

Now create a wallet password. You will need to enter it every time you open the app, and to unlock the wallet when using it in another sofware like Feather or Monerujo.

Credentials

Store the following in a password manager like KeepassXC:

• seed
• creation time in ISO format, like 2026-01-30
• password

These are essential, especially the creation date which can be easily forgotten. Otherwise you will not be able to retrieve your trading wallet and lose any amount stored on there.

Payment

Now you can configure any payment method you like, if it is supported. As far as I understood, these are all methods where you actively pay a person, like Bank transfer, Paypal, Wise etc. I do not know if you need to configure one if you just want to pay, as the XMR seller should mark a payment as sold, while the exchange has no insight.

Buying XMR

Important: to buy XMR, you need XMR! So if you start with zero, try to get XMR from a friend, or use another exchange like Bisq (not sure if possible) or the many centralized ones.

Haveno requires to spend monero intermittently, the most amount is used as deposit, while a small amount is the transaction fee.

Depending on the lowest available offer, you need more or less XMR to start. You can pay the XMR from your trading wallet or an external one, and then use the bought XMR to fund bigger payments.

Buying XMR is pretty straightforward, while I haven't understood the signing and trust system yet. You may preferrably buy from long existing sellers with a checkmark next to the account.

Initiating a payment, you can select the amount of XMR. You can use this to buy just as much as your existing deposit allows. Be sure to check the price per XMR, some people might try and rip you off!

After having started a payment, expect to wait over an hour for the payment to be confirmed on many monero nodes (afaik). This improves safety by storing that info further in the blockchain. From this point on (afaik) you cannot cancel a payment, or otherwise weird things may happen.

You may open the trader chat to contact the seller and discuss if you need to enter a specific payment reference for example.

Once the seller receives your payment, your XMR will quickly arrive in your trading wallet.

Using the XMR

I dont know the issues with using that wallet to pay directly. Sending the XMR to your personal wallet involves a small transaction fee though.

You can directly import the wallet in Feather, Monerujo or other wallet apps, where you can use it to send and receive XMR. Make sure to store the credentials and store the password manager backup file in multiple places!

Greetings everyone,

I’m part of Dawnswap (Dawn-Collective) and we used to post on monero.town which is not available anymore for the XMR community. So we would like to continue posting our updates here among other places. For those who don’t know us yet feel free to check our official https://dawnswap.com/ website or Tor onion site. We’re a Haveno instance and launched last summer. Right now we’re aiming to grow and reach out to the traders among us and clients to connect them. Here are some of the characteristics of our instance:

Crypto currencies: XMR, USDT, USDC, ETH, BTC, LTC, BCH, DAI

Other assets supported: XAU (Gold), XAG (Silver), XGB (Goldback)

Wide range of fiat currencies and payment methods to choose from

Minimum trade and deposit amount reduced to 0.02 XMR (default: 0.1 XMR)

Minimum deposit percentage reduced to 5% (default: 15%)

Maker fee is 0 % and taker fee 0.4 % to cover systems cost and maintain a self-sustaining network

Custom installation paths for side-by-side use with other Haveno based networks

Arbitrators 24/7 available for timely dispute resolution reduced from 6 days to 3 days

Non-Custodial: Users maintain control over their funds

Privacy-Focused: Utilizes Monero and Tor for secure transactions

Reliable decentralized infrastructure for maximum availability

Feel free to visit our open source github page for the latest code and releases. If familiar with pgp please also save our pgp key and use it to verify official communications and related.

Thank you,

Dawnswap

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46374091

Hi

I documented myself about Monero and it seem really great !

I would like to start my own node but obviously before I have some questions and I would like to exchange about it.

Like lemmy is still "marginal" but growing, the community's are still low, so I went on the official website of Monero but I see that they only propose linear chat services that require that you identify yourself ! or belong to GAFAM and that goes quite to the opposite of what Monero fight for to preserve your right to anonymity.

Do you know a crowded lemmy community where I could exchange with other Monero enthusiasts or anything else that is a like a built-in board forum where when you have a question you can open a dedicated thread and exchange on that thread ?

Thanks.

Hey Monero people, I hope it's ok if I ask a few questions (and ok that I'm gonna crosspost this to monero.town even though you're phasing it out because the subbed number is higher), I trust you more than the LLM and ad filled search results.

What's the safest way to get monero from fiat anon in Current Year?

• Buy, say, ETH kyc, and transfer?
• Hodl Hodl or localmonero or something? (recs welcome)
• other? Please share preferred

I'd rather burn a few bucks to not get ripped off, if it's reasonable, but I'm open to (I've heard you can somewhere) buy a gift card and do a transfer with escrow.

With Cake Wallet, I rolled a random name for my xmr wallet, would I lose anon if I named it a pre-used screen name(+xmr, btc, etc) and used subkeys? Who all can see the wallet name?

If I do end up with some kyc monero, what exactly does that mean to me? I still use it anon but have to pay taxes or something, or is it like, "now we know who is associated with this acct and you paid your weedman in XMR so now we send you to prison?" Should I have one wallet, kyc that one, and then send it to a second I keep clean, is that reasonable? Can I only accept non-kyc monero to my acct if I intend to stay anon? I'm so very new to this.

I'm really not planning on dodging taxes or buying/selling weed, actually mostly planning on using it as an inconvenient but private cashapp-type replacement (prob have like, btc, xmr, and eth wallets for variety just in case and store the funds as btc and xmr), but I'm privacy minded which is what attracts me to XMR to begin with, I'd like to plan for buying a gun that shoots fentanyl bullets on the darkweb and then in reality I'm paying my friend for watching my cat, or being paid for watching their dogs.

Lastly, is there anything else you think I'm too inexperienced to know to ask, but should be told? I mean consider me dumb, I don't know shit, I'm new to crypto entirely not just xmr or cake.