ALL CEX listings are under fire.  look at SEC vs Coinbase and binance.
Monero has the largest peer to peer marketplace liquidity

How'd you get Monero.com nostr verify? 

 First the exchanges (thats not a bad thing, DEX's are better anyway). But next comes a ban on ACCPETING monero for services like VPNs.  Thats when Monero is banished to live ONLY on the darknet.  I don't see any way around that. 

 Having no centralized exchanges isn't an issue. The main problem for monero is that spending it on goods and services could be made illegal.  In which case, even if spending monero is completely private, selling goods and receiving monero for them it is not, (except on darknet markets).  This is a big problem for Monero. I can conceive that soon it will be made illegal to accept monero as payment for goods and services. Once that happens it's value is tied ONLY to dark markets.  That's not great. 

 Yeah agreed.  So what'd your solution?  Because mine is to add value with an XMR business 

 Honestly, I don't know what the solution is. It seems inevitable now that Monero will be banned as a form of payment, bitcoin is becoming harder and harder to use privately and without declaring for tax purposes.  It may be used on the darkmarkets but lawful use is not going to be an option soon.  Even bitcoin is difficult to spend without documenting every transaction and necessarily handing all your financial details to govnts for capital gains purposes. XMR business will likely not be able to comply with laws soon. 

 Permissionless Principle

"Bitcoin is designed to operate without permission from any authority. Its value proposition is entirely based on this property.

A market can be divided into permissioned and permissionless from the perspective of the state. For ease of reference the former is often referred to as "white market" and the latter "black market". White market trade, by definition, requires permission, and black market does not.

As a simple matter of definition, Bitcoin operations cannot be both white market and permissionless. Any person operating in the white market requires permission to do so. Bitcoin is therefore inherently a black market money. Its security architecture necessarily assumes it is operating without state permission.

The security of Bitcoin does not extend to white market systems. Any system dependent upon the value proposition of Bitcoin must also be black market." 

 I think that now it is just missing manpower, i.e. more developers, or businesses, people interested to invest time, energy and money into Monero based startups, I may be biased but as a dev myself I think of development opportunities all the time that could make it more usable or friendly as a payment method for goods and services, both online and offline, like a btcpayserver alternative focused on Monero, an AI platform where you buy credits with monero, social media like Nostr where donations are made in Monero (I always wanted a video platform like Odysee to achieve this since video creation is a great fit for monetization and subscriber benefits), patreon/locals/subscribestar alternatives paid in Monero, gaming platforms like itchio. But I already have my work so I can't code everything at once

In general I think we just need people using it either for fun, or for actual income, and then it is like a bandwagon effect where it would translate to real life where everyone is like "I can just use Monero" and we may see the market cap in a similar position of the "top popular coins", and where making it illegal is useless 

 the problem I foresee, even if monero becomes popular is that govnts can make it illegal to sell things ie accept payment for monero. You then have the problem of advertising your products legally.  And the whole system collapses, back to the darknet where it currently is.  This is true of all crypto.  Privacy is great, but in the end to actually buy real world goods there is no privacy thats legal. Because the seller must be visible. 

 No crypto is private unless you never want to spend it. 
 In the UK HRMC says crypto investors must declare the following: 

    The type of tokens 
    Date you disposed of them 
    Number of tokens you’ve disposed of 
    Number of tokens you have left 
    Value of the tokens in pound sterling 
    Bank statements and wallet addresses 
    Records of the pooled costs before and after you disposed of them 

That leave you with zero privacy from the govnt, unless you want to break the law. 

 Agree,  lightning is terrible on every level, not just because of poor privacy but because its more complicated to use than any other crypto.  Which means Alby dominates lightning transactions like Visa does fiat.  Theres not much point in having bitcoin if I use lightning , if there is little privacy gain for small transactions might as use visa/paypal that is much much easier/cheaper.  So I still don't get why Monero isn't more popular as both a store of value and transaction currency.  Why don't the people who  speculate on bitcoin and shitcoins speculate on the privacy that monero offers?   If it actually does offer something people want, if it can't be banned precisely because its private (unlike less private shitcoins) why not invest. Whatever way I look at it, seems to me that if you are a speculator or enthusiast or privacy advocate there is no reason not to invest in monero rather than all the other crap coins.  I don't  want speculators, i'm happy they aren't investing in it -I suspect that makes the fiat value more realistic -  it just doesn't seem to make sense that you wouldn't if you want to profiteer of it. 
 

 Or to put the question another way: what exactly are speculators afraid of?