Draft: Educational content for Monero plus kycnot and iseeyourcash maintenance
I'm Pluja, author of kycnot.me and iseeyour.cash. I am a Computer Engineering graduate specialized in Cybersecurity. Apart from my main job, I love to spend my freetime developing personal projects which can help the Open Source and privacy communities. As some of you may have noticed, I love Monero and I belive it is the future for electronic payments.
Kycnot.me is a curated list of exchanges and services which do not require KYC and can be trusted. It only lists exchanges who support BTC and/or XMR.
Iseeyour.cash is a search engine where you can search for any Twitter or Reddit user and, if they have ever published any cryptocurrency address, see their funds and linked addresses. This site was made to create concern about the potential risks of transparent blockchains.
Apart from that, I also maintain an awesome privacy list on Github with over 5k stars and 200 daily visitors. On this list Monero is listed as the only private alternative to known electronic payment systems.
Why
All these projects help making privacy concerned users get to know Monero, and many users have contacted me thanking about this work.
Over the last months, and after introducing some of my dearest friends to Monero (some of them chose to get Monero instead of Bitcoin as their first cryptocurrency!), I noticed that the information about Monero is very spread over many websites, articles and books. This makes it very difficult for someone to learn everything in an easy and fast way. Also, most content is written in English and, even it exists in other languages, it is again spread and not that easy to find.
I aim to build an up-to-date knowledge base available in, at least, 3 different languages with quality translations. It will be newbie-friendly so anyone can understand what is being explained. Also there will be some more detailed articles for more experienced users.
I asked the community on Reddit about publishing this proposal and it the response was quite positive, so this is why I decided to open this CCS based on that feedback.
The milestones
For this CCS I want to fund my work on this knowledge base (studying, writing, translating, designing, etc) and also get some funds to keep maintaining my current projects as I now have a lot of monero-related domains and two VPS servers to run it all.
The milestones for this project are not very easy to set. So I will be setting three of them:
Moneroj.info related (18 XMR):
Moneroj.info will be the domain hosting this knowledge base. The knowledge base will be translated to Spanish and French (manually, without any automatic translator, so it can be a quality translation) in all versions.
I will be writing other small articles related to terms such as cryptocurrency, mining, hash, mnemonic seed, private key, public key, and anything I consider that would be good for a new user who is learning even if it is not Monero related.
Also, along with the work related with Moneroj.info I will be contributing and updating any sources that I find outdated such as monerodocs, getmonero site and also contributing to the Mastering Monero's second edition.
Milestone 01: First moneroj.info version (6 XMR)
- Moneroj.info website design.
- What are transparent blockchains and what is Monero.
- Risks of transparent blockchains and how Monero can solve them.
- How does the Monero technology work:
- User-friendly explanation for all levels.
- A more in-depth explanation for experienced users.
- History of Monero - This will cover topics such as how it was created and how it was distributed, and also the importance of not having a "CEO".
- Articles for specific terms.
Milestone 02: Second moneroj.info version (6 XMR)
- How to use Monero - From getting a wallet to transacting. Why is there a blocked balance, transaction fees, view keys, subaddresses, etc.
- How to buy Monero anonymously - Guide presenting all the available tools to get Monero in an anonymous way.
- Atomic Swaps - Introduce atomic swaps and show how an atomic swap should be carried with the current state.
- Running a node - Guide on how to run a cheap node.
- Monero mining - Guide on how to mine, why you should mine and what you need.
- PoW vs PoS
- Decentralizing Monero mining - Present p2pool and why it is important.
- Articles for specific terms.
Milestone 03: Third moneroj.info version (6 XMR)
- Monero vs other privacy coins - In-depth analysis of Monero compared to other coins such as ZCash, ARRR, Dash, etc.
- Monero vs Lightning Network - Many say lightning network is private. In this lesson I will compare both and get an in-depth idea of why this is not true.
- How does the Monero community work? - Explain how monero is sustained, developed, what are workgroups, CCS, MRL, etc.
- Monero Mechant's Guide
- Why you should accept Monero
- How to accept Monero (in person and online)
- Monero Contributor's Guide - How you can start contributing to Monero
- Guides and tools - Section presenting a series of useful guides, articles, tools and books related to Monero.
- Articles for specific terms.
- Brainstorm for other moneroj.* domains
Milestone 04: Other projects - maintenance for 6 months (4 XMR)
With this same CCS I want to include the maintenance costs for kycnot.me and iseeyour.cash and all other sites/projects related to Monero. The information on how this is calculated can be found on the Budget section.
The Budget
I am a graduated Compuer Engineer and as per the information on Salary.com an estimation of $37/hour is the low-average wage for a Computer Engineer. As this is my first CCS and this work is not directly related to Computer Engineering, I will be setting an $18/hour wage.
As per today (Dec. 1 2021), the price for 1 XMR on Coingecko = $236
I plan to work on the project on a daily basis (weekends included, as it is when I have the most free time). I estimate to work an average of 2 hours / day on the project (sometimes it may be much more, but it is just an estimate average).
The moneroj.info milestones, will be divided on 80 hours blocks for each milestone, totaling 240 hours of work. This means that for each of them I expect to work around 80 hours including studying, writing, translating to Spanish and French, drawing any illustrations, designing the page, reviewing and correcting.
80 hours * $18 = $1500 or ~6 XMR
To make it round, I will set the milestone payout to 6 XMR. I personally think I will be dedicating more hours than the estimation here, but as I enjoy it, and I wasn't planning a CCS, I won't be adding more hours to it.
On the other hand, I will keep maintaining my other projects. To this day I rent 2 VPS servers where all these services, along with Nitter and Teddit (backend for iseeyour.cash) and Cryptpad.fr (where I write and review the text) instances, are hosted.
I pay $6.5/month/vps, which is $13 per month in total. Each domain has an average cost of $15/yr totaling $110/yr for the domains (moneroj.info, kycnot.me, iseeyour.cash, moneroj.shop, moneroj.art, moneroj.xyz and monero.boats) which is ~$9/month. This sets for a total of $22/month cost for domain and server expenses.
I also need to spend time maintaining each of the projects; I receive a certain amount of requests for kycnot.me listings which need to be reviewed and tested, and I plan to add new features to iseeyour.cash. I aim to spend around 2h/week on these projects, so:
(2h/week * 4 weeks / month * $18/hour) + $22 = $166 or ~0.7 XMR
0.7 XMR * 6 months = 4 XMR
The total budget for the CCS is 22 XMR which, with the price of 1 XMR today, totals for $5194
The Timeline
For the moneroj.info site, as I'm not working full time on this, I expect to complete one milestone per month and a half. This would be a total of 4.5 months starting from December 1st 2021. I will add an extra month and a half for anything that could happen, so 6 months for the work on moneroj.info. This means moneroj.info should be ready and completed by June 2022 at most. The expected timeline is:
- Milestone 01: February 15th, 2022
- Milestone 02: April 15th, 2022
- Milestone 03: June 15th, 2022
An extra month and a half is added, so there is some margin for each of the deadlines if anything unexpected happens.
On the other hand, the maintenance work can be released all at once in 6 months from this proposal, or at the very beginning. I would propose for it to be paid at the end of the 6-month period, this being on May 31, 2022.
The deadline for this CCS is June 31st, 2022.
Merge request reports
Activity
added 1 commit
- f151294f - Fix error on budget calculation and wording issues
Any feedback is welcome. For now, I have been listening to the feedback from the Reddit community through these two posts:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/r5wdbs/asking_the_community_for_feedback/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/r6lj9h/ccs_proposal_educational_content_for_monero_plus/
Also, I am actively reading the Monero UX Matrix room, where I also received some feedback which has been added to the Milestones.
Please, add anything you think can be useful, any criticism to this proposal, even if you think this does not need to be in the CCS. I'm all ears!
I noticed that the information about Monero is very spread over many websites, articles and books. This makes it very difficult for someone to learn everything in an easy and fast way. Also, most content is written in English and, even it exists in other languages, it is again spread and not that easy to find.
I admire your past work and I think this initiative is needed, but I worry that a whole new site might make important Monero info more spread out and harder to find. There is also the risk of needlessly duplicating effort. For example, there is already getmonero.org which has a well integrated translation workflow (https://translate.getmonero.org/) and is badly in need of updates to the wiki & user/dev guides. You can get an idea of the changes needed at https://github.com/monero-project/monero-site/issues . There is also a parallel need to keep https://monerodocs.org/ up to date.
Having multiple sources of info is good for redundancy and decentralization, but there is a balance to found with keeping current sources (which already have good SEO) up to date and useful.
I'm not saying "don't make your own website", but I would urge you to consider including maintenance/use of getmonero.org and monerodocs.org as an aspect of this proposal at least to avoid duplicating effort.
but I worry that a whole new site might make important Monero info more spread out and harder to find
I have also thought about this and I understand this point. The main objective of this project is to have a unified knowledge base adding new knowledge but also guiding the users to all the sources and pages where they can learn and explore. The website name, moneroj.info, is pretty simple and easy to remember, so I think that this would be a good resource to exist rather than “making important Monero info more spread out and harder to find”.
There is also the risk of needlessly duplicating effort
I will be checking every resource available on my hands and contacting any author, so I can be sure that I don't do any double efforts. I have already noted that I will be collaborating with Mastering Monero's second edition in parallel, and every piece of what I write on my site will be available for any kind of use (free as in freedom). If it is useful, it could be copy & pasted on any Monero site.
You can get an idea of the changes needed at https://github.com/monero-project/monero-site/issues . There is also a parallel need to keep https://monerodocs.org/ up to date.
Thank you for your suggestion. I will be taking a look on these site for sure, and I will contribute with anything that overlaps my scope. I will add this to the CCS description later today or tomorrow.
Nevertheless, I still will be working on this site as I think it is a good thing for the community and I want to learn more about Monero with this.
but there is a balance to found with keeping current sources (which already have good SEO) up to date and useful
You are right with this. As I said, I will try to contribute as much as I can to these sites with anything on the scope of this CCS.
I'm not saying "don't make your own website", but I would urge you to consider including maintenance/use of getmonero.org and monerodocs.org as an aspect of this proposal at least to avoid duplicating effort.
Thanks for your advice, I will add the contribution to such sources to my CCS.
added 1 commit
- 4d0fa183 - Update pluja-educational-monero-content-and-projects-maintenance.md
@pluja You may want to readjust the requested funds in the description before it gets moved to funding required stage, if it gets.
As per today (Dec. 1 2021), the price for 1 XMR on Coingecko = $236
$203.88 as I write this comment.
Out of curiosity, have you considered completing the first couple bulletpoints from Milestone #1 (closed) before it gets moved to funding required stage? I appreciate your other two websites but since this is a Monero-related resource you'll be working on, getting funded via CCS, perhaps you can show off a mockup of the design of moneroj.info and one or two posts. It would help you get more trust from potential donors, in my opinion. Very basic, quick teaser, as token of PoW for upcoming deliverables to be completed for broad XMR communities. Not a dealbreaker if it doesn't make much sense to you.
Note: small typo. You typed Moeroj.info and it is moneroj.info; can find the instance quickly via Ctrl. + F on your browser.
Edited by rottenwheel
