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Meanwhile I grow tired of Visa and others logging my transaction history and travel patterns to sell changes in my behavior as a service. I am seeking to minimi
by lrvick 5y ago
Meanwhile I grow tired of Visa and others logging my transaction history and travel patterns to sell changes in my behavior as a service. I am seeking to minimize this.
I still have bank accounts for clients that really want to pay via ACH. I keep enough USD in the account for a few bills and a little cash on hand for purchases IRL and recently adopting prepaid debt cards since some stores refuse cash. The rest is sold for Bitcoin and other crypto-assets to hardware wallet devices backed by cold wallets managed offline that can be recovered via a quorum of people I trust spread across several countries. No one government or individuals would have any legal or even practical means of seizing my cold wallet assets. I pay my taxes but the rest is mine and free from inflation long term.
Meanwhile I have friends that have had their accounts frozen over (eventually proven bogus) legal claims filed by individuals, stolen by randos social engineering bank tellers, and my own account frozen multiple times over them thinking my own small purchases were fraud... and deleted once because I had a PO Box on file as my street address. Nevermind the fact I was homeless for years and the homeless do not have street addresses and are thus deemed unworthy of bank account unless they get creative with street addresses.
The security, availability, and stability of bank accounts is greatly oversold. I have done subcontracting work for major banks and I can confirm at least one still uses ie6 and activex as recently as a few years ago to touch your personal data. Big banks like Chase do not even allow you to have even last gen poor security hardware 2FA unless you maintain a balance over $100k with $500k in yearly deposits. Security is a feature they sell to those too rich to care about inflation eating their lunch with large USD balances.
Online I use Bitcoin anywhere possible and a Coinbase visa as a fallback I can send Bitcoin to in order to proxy to USD on the fly.
I also am one of those crazy people that hosts their own online web services in a closet server rack. I would like to see the UX of flows like this become easy enough that anyone can do it with minimal risk of shooting themselves in the foot.
Some of us do care about personal privacy, security, and sovereignty... these days more than ever. The political future of any country is never certain.
- yunohn 5y ago> Meanwhile I grow tired of Visa and others logging my transaction history and travel patterns to sell changes in my behavior as a service. I am seeking to minimize this. Your alternative is to write all your transaction history to a public ledger?
- lrvick 5y agoUnlike the visa transaction history, the history on blockchains does not have easily identifiable recipients and I send from addresses not connected with my name each time from funds clients personally paid me in for services. A store publishing a public log of all cash transactions wont alone identify if any of them are mine. No central marketing firm has a chance of working out which transactions on chain are mine and who is involved in them. They can at best determine what major exchanges are involved.
- yunohn 5y ago> No central marketing firm has a chance of working out which transactions on chain are mine and who is involved in them. They can at best determine what major exchanges are involved. In this explanation, clearly the exchanges themselves have done KYC and have your entire history on-chain. They can sell this to any marketing agency… For example, Coinbase: Blockchain Data: We may analyze public blockchain data to ensure parties utilizing our Services are not engaged in illegal or prohibited activity under our Terms, and to analyze transaction trends for research and development purposes. https://www.coinbase.com/legal/privacy https://www.coinbase.com/legal/privacy
- lrvick 5y agoI would never expect privacy from exchanges. Some of my clients directly pay me in Bitcoin for services I render for them. Funds go directly from wallets my clients control to wallets I control as if they handed me cash. No exchanges involved. We report taxable events but the transaction histories need not be shared with central third party private companies. Also even when you buy Bitcoin on exchanges you can always trade it for Monero via a number of swap services then back to Bitcoin again. Now you broke the history and have private Bitcoin again.
- yunohn 5y agoBut, do you actually do that for every single transaction you do? And, you trust exchanges to not sell/use your data? And, you expect everyone to be their own bank and laundering/mixing pool? That's a lot of effort...