https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-t4lmHcXqw Stallman Taler v Monero
It's for people like me who have been living under a rock. Casts Stallman as a little irritating here and there; he may have been a little tired for the video. Stallman has a lot of facts to back his opinions up. The starting TEDx video at https://fsf.org/TEDx quickly explains the four principles of software freedom needed to prevent computerised population control, and how that is different from open source. I am guilty of being scared to say "free", saying "open" instead, and hope to remember this ted talk a little. Stallman supports GNU Jami, previously called Ring, SFLPhone. https://jami.net/ . It appears to be a decentralised audio/visual/text communications platform using TLS 1.3 . It supports multi-device linking, unlike many other decentralised communication networks. GNU Taler, https://taler.net/, is a cryptographic financial network that protects full anonymity of the buyer, while also providing for taxability if needed while preserving this anonymity. Contrariwise, as I understood Stallman, large merchants must operate completely transparently on GNU Taler This moves power away from entities that gain dominance a little. Taler does not use a universally stored permanent ledger nor a proof lottery. (I think Stallman missed the point that cryptocurrencies provide to end network and storage censorship in a way dangerously otherwise missing in the technological ecosystem, but Taler seems a good thing.) After this it got more political around Monero, which Stallman hasn't spent much time studying. He repeats his point that everybody is free to make whatever decisions they want; that that is part of software freedom. I took the time to write up the above information as it seemed valuable to repeat, and didn't catch as much of the political parts of the video. I do recall him saying that a report showed that over 10% of the world's wealth was held secretly by something like rich people avoiding tax regulations. It sounds like I have some similar politics to him.