Ah thanks for explaining! Yeah the inability to purchase it directly on local exchanges is a bummer, although if localmonero vendors are available in your area, you may be able to pay them using your local bank account too.

These days you definitely don’t have to download the entire blockchain to use it; you can just connect to someone else’s node. But if you want to restore an old wallet, you unfortunately do have to run through each blockchain transaction after the wallet was created, to see if any of those transactions belong to you. There’s also a mobile app nowadays called Cake Wallet.

All in all, I agree that it’s not the friendliest crypto to use, unfortunately. Its main selling point is privacy, and criminals are more incentivized than others to protect their privacy, so I’m not sure how it’ll ever shake off that image.

What about it was a hassle for you?

How does Mastodon do it differently?

My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills.

Honestly, why learn programming then?

I’m asking this as a programmer myself. I’m not trying to discourage you from learning it by any means, if that’s what you want to do. I’m just asking because it doesn’t sound as if you actually want to do it.

You’ve already tried learning it, and it’s a slog (whereas for me, I was immediately fascinated by it when I was introduced to it as a teenager, even though I was horrible at it). You don’t have any burning desires to create apps (whereas for me, there are so many ideas I want to explore, so many things I want to create that don’t exist yet, but alas I don’t have enough time or energy to work on it all). You don’t even have the desire to do it for purely career-related purposes, which is what I’d imagine drives most of the rest of people learning programming without enjoying it at all.

So why bother with learning something you neither enjoy nor have strong motivations to do?

What does the self-hosting community value, then?

I would think that, more than anything else, the issue would be more getting it through all the bureaucratic red tape. See the ESB debacle:

Weaver had been brought to Raytheon, the company the Air Force had hired to write the software for the next generation GPS satellites, because the Raytheon team was behind schedule and over budget. This issue of data transmission to the ground stations and back again was one of a few problems that was holding them back. There is an industry standard way of doing this, a simple, reliable protocol that is built into almost every operating system in the world.

But this team wasn’t using this simple protocol on its own. Instead, the team had written a piece of software to receive the message from that protocol, read the data, and then recode it into a different format, so they could feed it into a very complex piece of software called an Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB. The ESB eventually delivered the data to yet another piece of software, at which point the whole process ran in reverse order to deliver it back to the original, simple protocol. Because the data was taking such a roundabout route, it wasn’t arriving quickly enough for the ground stations to make the calculations needed. Using the simple protocol alone would have made the entire job a snap—as easy as nailing a couple of boards together. Instead, they had this massive Rube Goldberg contraption that was never going to work.

The people on this project knew quite well that using this ESB was a terrible idea. They’d have been relieved to just throw it out, plug in the simple protocol, and move on. But they couldn’t. It was a requirement in their contract. The contracting officers had required it because a policy document called the Air Force Enterprise Architecture had required it. The Air Force Enterprise Architecture required it because the Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture required it. And the DoD Enterprise Architecture required it because the Federal Enterprise Architecture, written by the Chief Information Officers Council, convened by the White House at the request of Congress, had required it.

I’m sure some of the fine folks at 18F would love to help various US agencies or state governments with migrating to Mastodon. I’m not so sure any of them would be able to convince geriatric politicians to do so.