Issue 1/Monerica

Two Maps of the Monero Circular Economy

The fastest way to leave a system is to stop needing and using its money. That means earning outside it, which is harder than spending outside it, and it is where most people trying to exit get stuck.

monero.jobs puts the case on its own front page. XMR secures wealth and financial privacy, "however, the best way to increase your freedom is to get paid directly in XMR." It is a freelance marketplace where every payment is in XMR. No KYC, no ID, no platform cut, and proposals go in anonymously. It is community-built and community-funded.

Who is on it: a plumber and electrician in New England, a translator in Buenos Aires taking ancient Greek into Spanish, a Rust backend developer in Myanmar, an OSINT and forensics analyst in Nairobi, a forum moderator in Germany. Open jobs against them today include a Latin and runic typography commission, an administrative assistant, and a promotion job for a Thai peer-to-peer payment tool.

Earn and spend, with neither end passing a bank. An hour billed in XMR is demand for the coin that no exchange created.

The Monero community has known this from the beginning, and it is the problem Monerica is trying to solve. Monerica is a directory of everywhere Monero already works, run anonymously with no JavaScript or cookies, mirrored on Tor. It calls itself "a directory for a Monero circular economy", and its categories are a list of what such an economy has to contain, from work and shops to payment rails, cards, exchanges, hosting and schools.

The Jobs category is the first map, the earning half: bounties anyone can open and anyone can fund, a Telegram room matching work for XMR since 2018, public crowdfunding for Monero proposals, grants, and two job boards, one of them monero.jobs. The second map is the spending half, the rest of the directory, from the point-of-sale software a shop needs to take XMR at the counter to the gift cards and virtual card numbers that turn it back into ordinary money.

Dead and dishonest listings stay on the page struck through and marked.

The earning end is the test. Every skill listed for XMR is work the coin can buy, and every invoice paid in it is income nobody had to convert. The parallel economy is exactly as large as the number of people getting paid in it.