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Unknown Fund: Investing and donating to support anonymity
- kitten_smuggler 7y agoVery cool! I'm shocked at how much harder it is to be anonymous online today than it was only a few years ago. This is much needed.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- otoburb 7y agoIf Unknown Fund is not a recognized non-profit in at least one (or more?) countries, would any project that receives funding see their owners having to pay tax on the grants? Given the nature, purpose and stated distribution mechanism of the fund on the website, it's highly unlikely Unknown Fund would register as a formal private foundation. I'm not sure how that works.
- snitko 7y agoHow this works? They send btc and people use them. You're thinking in the old frame of reference: you don't need banks, legal entities or identities even to produce code. Who cares if it's recognized or not.
- mNovak 7y agoIf they're donating to businesses that pay taxes, those businesses probably care.
- snitko 7y agoI hope they donate to projects with anonymous developers, not businesses.
- cortesoft 7y agoLocal tax authorities will care, and will have the resources to track you down.
- snitko 7y agoWhat? If I'm an open source developer online, I doubt local tax authorities have the means to track me down. I can be anywhere in any country.
- dwoozle 7y agoLooks like some of the Bitcoin whales are trying to get more bitcoin out into the world.
- ukd1 7y agoIs there any proof they hold $75mm in BTC? I didn't see any on the site. Why; I could have put this page up.
- Forbo 7y agoThat's an excellent point. This could be an elaborate long-con watering hole attack.
- Deimorz 7y agoWhat would the attack be? Someone applies and they... now have their email address and business info, which is probably public or easily discovered anyway?
- sillysaurusx 7y agoI was going to agree with you that it seemed an unlikely attack vector. But... Craig Wright shows the lengths that people will go to for seemingly no reason other than status. Did Craig ever get anything? (Other than a whole lot of trouble.) I don't remember if people figured out what his original motive was. Ah, think of it like this: you behave much differently when you talk to someone you think has loads of money and might be interested in investing in your ideas. That means they're in a position to start making some very interesting connections that they otherwise wouldn't have access to. The VC model works via reputation. When you take away reputation, you're left with questions like "Should we spend time trying to convince this person to give us money? Will they want unreasonable terms? How long will the process take? What if they string us along but never actually sign a check (which is what happens most of the time anyway)?" All that said, this is wild speculation. But your comment was a neat prompt for speculation.
- michaelt 7y ago1. Say you’ve got an investment fund with $$$$ in assets 2. Suckers see that as social proof, and assume other investors have done their due diligence 3. They invest 4. The money disappears in suspicious circumstances.
- pyc0d333 7y agothis is good. You can fight for the people by putting money into the right hands
- dandelo1953 7y agoI think this "solution" is the exact inverse of what is actually needed: Strong identity and attribution. identity need not be just an "individual". It can be a group of individuals that agree to mutually sign data before dissemination. Individuals, corporations and your toaster can create as many identities as necessary. Right now we are all living seemingly schizoid lifestyle because we are forced to partition multiple selves into molds that are being provided to us. The partitioning is necessary for organizing information. But the way it is partitioned should be flexible enough for the end user to have the ultimate say in what and how that information is curated. Currently, all we have are blackbox "algorithms." People are asking for transparency, thinking this will solve the problem. I think it will only lead to obfuscating the problem even more so. Until the individual has unfettered control, we will always be playing this game. I really wish conversations would wind back to towards discussing ideas tangential to the web of trust... I think that problem was hard to solve for a reason. Being impossible not being one of them... but an easy position to sell if you feared the consequences ultimately lead to a loss of control.
- api 7y agoYou're getting downvoted, but you are at least mostly right. With video and audio deep fakes we are rapidly approaching a world where anything can be trivially faked by anyone. As a result, anonymous information is becoming worthless. Unless the provenance and chain of custody of a piece of evidence is precisely known, it has a high and growing likelihood of being bullshit. I do think there are roles for anonymity, but getting "the truth" out is not one of them. What is far more important is selective privacy and the ability for individuals to define their own envelope of visibility and trust.
- dandelo1953 7y agoIn case it wasn't clear, I am not suggesting ALL data must be signed/attributed. Entertainment, for example, can be safely consumed and have little impact on your day to day regardless of the source. Provided it's clearly meant for entertainment purposes. However once you introduce some dependency of trust into your process (monetary transactions, health related data exchange, etc), I believe most people in this crowd would agree that they want crypto identity and attribution applied to the data at every stage of transformation. And then there's everything in the middle... which again, I think should be left to the individual. Norms would eventually develop that would guide best practices. Pipe dream stuff I know, but I don't see another way out. Open to other suggestions. And especially open to criticism about this approach. I don't want to be the one with the answer. I just want an answer.
- noads 7y ago"who met on 4chan" nooooope. Not touching any company involved with this with a ten foot pole.
- Forbo 7y agoI find the use of a ProtonMail address to be interesting. Don't they require the use of an existing email address, phone number, or credit card/PayPal donation to create an account? I just tried creating an account via Tor for test purposes, and it was immediately disabled "for abuse or fraud". Couldn't this mean that some entity could submit a legal request to ProtonMail for said information in the event of an investigation? Edit: The site is also hosted on Squarespace. Why not something more anonymous, like an onion service, IPFS, ZeroNet, etc?
- tyingq 7y agoJust created a free account, it didn't ask for anything other than a desired email and password. The recovery email was optional. It does ask for an existing email to verify the account. It accepted my Gmail address.
- Forbo 7y agoSo you can anonymously create a Gmail account? Or is that just the next hop in the subpoena/investigation process? Edit: Just tried creating a Gmail, it required a phone number.
- hyperdimension 7y agoDoes it require a phone number, or just prompt for it? From what I've heard, it always has a field for a phone number, but it sometim es lets you submit without one (based on some sort of not-a-bot trust score, ReCAPTCHA v3 maybe?)
- user764743 7y agoI salute this initiative but the focus on corporate surveillance is a bit strange. Snowden demonstrated that corporations either don't have a choice or are complicit in surveillance, why not target the source of the problem which seems to be the regulators who have been hijacked from within? I mean the problem is not technological, it's political.
- xwdv 7y agoThat is the eventual goal.
- vermilingua 7y agoIs it not a little ironic that this payout is in bitcoin, that has been repeatedly shown to be the furthest thing from anonymous? Would they not be better off exchanging it for a coin with baked in anonymity?
- jascii 7y agoWhy would funding for products providing a level of anonymity need to be anonymous? I can see a level of accountability being useful for both parties.
- whoo 7y agoYou can achieve reasonably anonymous payments through use of good opsec, and by utilizing CoinJoins: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin Wasabi Wallet has built in trustless coinjoins, routed through tor by default: https://wasabiwallet.io/ https://wasabiwallet.io/ Samourai Wallet has similar features, requiring a much smaller amount of coins: https://samouraiwallet.com/ https://samouraiwallet.com/ I assume anyone competent enough to hang on to this amount of bitcoin is already doing this.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- houseboat 7y agoI hate to be that guy, but I'm curious what they do with the $5k/year it was a few years ago. I don't recall hearing that much about the money, as it was given to them by the government.
- Forbo 7y agoWho are you referencing here?
- motohagiography 7y agoThe use cases for anonymity will drive the tech. I'd argue there isn't a middle class use case for strong anonymity. There are tons of use cases for identity and privacy, but anonymity presumes you are being preyed upon somehow. You need antagonists, and most of those are government/institution related, but by defining yourself in opposition to them, you in-effect leave the middle class. E.g. cease to identify as someone those institutions ostensibly serve, and identify instead as one of those they target. To value strong anonymity, you need to be part of either an underclass group, or have enough wealth that it needs protection internationally, with a big gap for use cases in between. There are tons of criminal use cases for anonymity that facilitate the needs and desperation of people afflicted by poverty, but those are illegal precisely because the line between relieving and exploiting poverty is so grey. Lotteries are a great example, as are cash jobs, narco logistics, vice and sex trade, short term loans, gambling, escrow payments for irregular immigration. These are all things people do for either survival or relief where to facilitate them is exploitative. Arguable, but that's the mainstream view. On the upper end, moving collateral around to protect the "beneficial owner," of an asset like art or property just reduces to variations on tax and regulatory avoidance, or sometimes evasion. It's almost uniquely both high risk and boring. I don't see this fund producing anything interesting.
- dolomite 7y ago<<I don't see this fund producing anything interesting.>> It produced this announcement, which is interesting by evidence of people, including yourself, engaging with it.
- hghhbvv 7y agowell, they produced this announcement which you obviously found interesting enough to write a lengthy take down.
- neetdeth 7y ago"You need antagonists, and most of those are government/institution related, but by defining yourself in opposition to them, you in-effect leave the middle class. E.g. cease to identify as someone those institutions ostensibly serve, and identify instead as one of those they target." This describes quite well the process of becoming a political dissident. The value of anonymity is that it allows you to exist in both states at once, both of the middle class and apart from it. By "doxing" dissidents, some hope to eject those people from the middle class, or otherwise make their political activities so costly as to dissuade them entirely. Anonymity has had a role in Western politics, of saying things which cannot be said, that dates back to at least the 18th century if not earlier. No doubt there are many on this website who will argue that speech without fear of personal reprisal is categorically a bad thing - but uninteresting? I don't think so. I agree that this fund produce wont produce anything, but only because I believe it's entirely fake.
- rhizome 7y agoSweet, another sink for techdollars that isn't public policy. The money should go to lobbyists for anonymity-protecting legislation, not a bitcoinz4startup pipe dream. This has to be someone's tax shelter.
- iratei 7y agoInteresting, but of dubious merit when presented with the Guy Fawkes' mask, especially in today's online battlegrounds.
- theboywho 7y agoHow is this going to be legal if you receive the funds ? because: 1) you create an anonymous Bitcoin fund 2) you apply and say you received funds from them Money laundered.
- badrabbit 7y agoPrivacy I am all for but universal anonymity not very much. You just need accountability a lot of times. That said, I can support anonymous systems with transparent de-anonymization. For example, if dragnet deanonymization happens all affected will know and act against the attacker. If Cops deanonymize a suspect, the suspect can enquire about an associated search warrant
- awarning123 7y agoWARNING: I emailed these a$$h0l3$ and 12 hours later Experian sent me a note that someone is trying to apply for credit in my name. WATCH OUT.