But first, a rant: please excuse me if I go a bit off the rails here.
I had what seemed like a very simple ask. I would like to use Monero to pay for a specific service. However, I do not have any Monero. Therefore, I would like to go about acquiring Monero.
How do I do this?
OK, maybe not really a simple ask. Online privacy these days is getting less and less simple.
First: fuck all these exchanges where you have to provide your SSN, blood type, DL #, hair color, eye color, penis length, and urine sample just to buy some crypto. Besides, most of these exchanges don’t even deal in XMR - I wonder why that could be.
I also know very little about cryptocurrency - it’s something I’ve meant to dive into for a while now - but I’m a complete noob, and kinda embarrassed about some of the searches I was making. I hadn’t ever taken the time to get a solid conceptual understanding of how the underlying technology worked. I had heard about it back in the day before BTC really exploded, but I had mostly forgotten the basics. Not to mention my memory became polluted with general crypto marketing-speak and my association with miners skyrocketing GPU prices. Little better than a layman’s understanding, ultimately. It just never seemed like something I wanted to get into, nor had the means to get into.
Monero is a different story. I don’t want to get into it for the money - I simply like the idea of a decentralized, deregulated, anonymous currency. The constant battle of having to sign up for another fucking account drives me nuts. Can I just not? And yet I still find myself doing just that. I don’t think that’s going to change, ever. But I can mitigate, I can push back, I can just not sign up or download your stupid fucking app. I’ll live.
Anyway, after some digging, it seemed like the only way to get my hands on any XMR was 1) purchase BTC with fiat, 2) exchange that BTC for XMR.
I’m surprised it took so damn long to dawn on me - you know, or I could mine it. Skip the fiat and BTC middle-man entirely. Now I wasn’t entirely sure how long that would take, but I figured I might as well. And it’s a good way to add to the network, as well as a much more interesting and teachable way to go about it (as I have discovered in the past couple weeks).
I researched off and on for about a week, trying to get some basic understanding of crypto concepts, how one goes about acquiring/spending/receiving crypto (a wallet), exchanges, specific-to-Monero concepts, etc…my process has been very nonlinear and more of a discovery phase, so it’s hard to document at least the early stages.
What I landed on to start was the following:
- Use the Monero Wallet GUI software
- Create a local node and mine with p2pool
- ???
- Not profit
So I proceeded to fumble around for a few hours configuring remote desktop and following the steps in this guide. It then took nearly a day to download the full XMR blockchain (which has grown considerably from the time of the tutorial). After that, it was a matter of configuring a couple options before starting the daemon and clicking the button to start mining!
I’m finishing up this post shortly after going through full CLI mining setup with XMRig, and I must say, I really appreciate the efforts that the Monero team made to make p2pool mining accessible through their default GUI app. I probably would have stumbled through everything eventually knowing me, but this saved me a lot of headache and gave me the motivation to get it set up - I knew it could be done, and I knew I had a fallback should all else fail. Keep in mind, I know next to nothing about crypto, my familiarity with the CLI can only get me so far.
EOF