Makes sense. One of their concerns with removing phone number requirements, was it being too easy to create spam accounts. Having a phone number creates a hurdle and real cost. So they’d need something to duplicate that cost.
As long as I can pay it with Monero, sure.
Looks like currently they only accept BTC, ETH and USDC.
Stay anonymous! (must reveal personal information to do so)
Yeah, and all three of those are surveillance coins.
they’re really not helping beat honeypot allegations with that
How do you figure that? You realize the Silk Road ran on BTC?
Yes, and the person they accused of running it went to prison for 11 years because it was easy to trace what was going on.
It is not impossible to use Bitcoin anonymously. It is just extremely difficult to use it anonymously, and it is extremely, extremely easy to fuck up and de-anonymize yourself on accident. With a foot gun,
Uhhhh no authorities investigated it for years and he got cocky and fucked up, and even then they had to ambush him in a public library before he could re-lock his laptop. It had literally nothing to do with BTC.
If you have not yet done so, go read a book called Tracers in the Dark.
It does a very good job explaining how surveillance coins are tracked.
tldr?
I hope we don’t need to explain the insecurities in GPS and payment processors here
If I can do it with cash then hell yeah.
I’d expect a crypto option. After all one of the few decent use cases for it is paying for things you don’t want your name attached to. E.g. VPN for downloading Linux ISOs.
It’s worth recognizing that almost no cryptocurrencies are anonymous.
For sure not anonymous in the sense that transactions are easy to trace. However they can be much more difficult to link to a name and address than standard payment transactions. Even if you bought BTC in the most convenient way possible - from some exchange using a credit card, subsequent BTC payment transactions do not carry your name and address but a randomly generated ID. The ID is attached to the VPN payment without your name and address. If someone wants to see who paid for that VPN, they have to compel the exchange company to give them your info for that ID. But then if you want to go invisible, you’d get BTC for cash from a local ATM without showing your face. From that point on, the BTC ID attached to your payments leads to nothing.
On the off chance that you have a background in computers: what’s the difference between an address and a pointer to some address?
For the purposes of reaching the address, there isn’t one.
The blockchain is an immutable distributed ledger of all transactions conducted on it. A ledger is a record including the recipient and source.
People can just look on the blockchain and see that the numerical id goes to the wallet you filled using a credit card.
If at any point a transaction gets tied to your identity now every transaction conducted with that wallet or any ids associated with it is tied to your identity.
There are myriad ways to tie a transaction to a persons identity.
Consider instead cash. There is no immutable ledger. A person investigating cash transactions would have to do significantly more legwork to find out when and where you were at some place, what was purchased and gather evidence and wrangle witnesses in a way that would preclude them from simply not cooperating with the investigation.
It is much more difficult to investigate cash transactions than those conducted with crypto.
It is much easier to conduct cash transactions in a way that protects your identity than it is with crypto.
Thankfully, Monero is truly anonymous crypto
Is it? I know they claim it is but it didn’t pass the smell test like 6 or 7 years ago when I looked at it. Don’t recall the details.
It is. The blockchain shows that a transaction was sent, but you don’t know who it was sent by, how much it was worth, or who it was sent to.
Everything you said is consistent with what I said.
In computers the difference between an address and a pointer to it is the cost of the lookup. The difference between the address and the pointer to the address in this context is legal difficulty (cost). The legal entity (call it exchange) that has the CC information tied to the walled is (tends to be) different than the legal entity that holds the transaction that ties the wallet to the product purchased (call it the vendor). When the vendor gets hacked, what leaks is the wallet and what it purchased. In order to tie that to name and address, the exchange has to be hacked as well. If it’s a legal issue, the crime usually happens at the vendor end - you downloaded the wrong Linux ISO and the copyright owner wants to sue you. They have to be able to compel both the vendor and the exchange to get to you. This tends to be more difficult than compelling the vendor alone. At the very least it costs more. If the vendor and exchange are in different jurisdictions it gets even more difficult. Notice how I talk about difficulty, not impossibility as I never disagreed with your point that crypto is not anonymous. There are cases where that difficulty is enough to provide anonymity and cases where it is not. For example downloading ISOs via crypto-purchased VPN as far as I know is safe. Getting equipment for efficient mass removal of Flock cameras might not be.
Cash-obtained crypto severs the link between the blockchain transactions and your identity, provided you don’t link your identity with those transactions elsewhere (e.g. add real shipping address).
Of course cash alone is better in that regard, with the downside that it can’t be used in many places where digital transactions are the only option.
I should have been way more clear: the cost of dereferencing a pointer is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of traversing the filesystem and searching for files that contain a string.
Using bitcoin is making them dereference a pointer.
Using cash is forcing them to search the whole filesystem looking for a string in a file.
If even one of your bitcoin transactions is tied to you then every other transaction linked to that wallet is also tied to you. Now you could use separate wallets but literally no one does that.
You should really not rely on bitcoin. Laundered gift cards are more private.
You should really not rely on bitcoin. Laundered gift cards are more private.
Or CC purchased with cash but those got really rare over the last 5 years. I used to pick them up at the grocery store.
Why would one use a VPN to download linux distros?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Linux_ISO See definition 2
Thank you. I had not heard that euphemism before.
You should use a VPN for everything
What’s aboutsignal.com?
Not much, what’s aboutsignal.com with you?
Here is about aboutsignsl.
