migadu.com still works greta for my private domain. $20/yr plus whatever the domain costs ($1.90 in my case)

You can absolutely use monero without converting it to other currency. You just haven’t looked in right places. Of course you can’t buy a loaf of bread with it, but you cannot use gold either, neither can you rent a server with something like mongolian togrog, yet, they’re all still valid forms of currency.

It’s not. I carry one(mix 3s) as a pocket laptop for when Im going out but might need to do some work urgently and also as a lightweight backup in case something happens to my main laptop. For the former, it’s been great and saved me many times, but for the latter… this did once happen when I bonked the entire screen out. To say it was a painful week while waiting for the replacement would be an understatement. My back was killing me the entire time, and the thing is so underpowered it was easier to remote into that screenless pc rather than trying to launch stuff locally. And even with that, the thing whirred like crazy. It’s fine for a few minutes at a time but hearing it sll fay got annoying quick. And dont even get me started on the keyboard…

You must be severely misunderstanding the idea. The idea is not to encrypt it in a way that it’s only unlockable by a secret and hidden key, like DRM or cable TV does, but to do the the reverse - to encrypt it with a key that is unlockable by publicly available and widely shared key, where successful decryption acts as a proof of content authenticity. If you don’t care about authenticity, nothing is stopping you from spreading the decrypted version, so It shouldn’t affect consumers one bit. And I wouldn’t describe “Get a bunch of cameras, rip the sensors out, carefully and repeatedly strip the top layers off and scan using electron microscope until you get to the encryption circuit, repeat enough times to collect enough scans undamaged by the stripping process to then manually piece them together and trace out the entire circuit, then spend a few weeks debugging it in a simulator to work out the encryption key” as “trivial”

I’ve been saying for a long time now that camera manufacturers should just put encryption circuits right inside the sensors. Of course that wouldn’t protect against pointing the camera at a screen showing a deepfake or someone painstakingly dissolving top layers and tracing out the private key manually, but that’d be enough of the deterrent from forgery. And also media production companies should actually put out all their stuff digitally signed. Like, come on, it’s 2024 and we still don’t have a way to find out if something was filmed or rendered, cut or edited, original or freebooted.