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How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself? What is your backup plan to pay

by lrvick 2mo ago

How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself? What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)? Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless.

lxgr 2mo ago
> How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself? "Anonymously paying for VPN" seems a bit ironic given that almost all VPN users then immediately proceed to completely deanonymize themselves towards the VPN by accessing it from their (not anonymous) home Internet connection and/or to access sites that deanonymize them. Add to that the fact that most blockchains are very much public, and I couldn't think of a better way than crypto to deanonymize my entire payment and Internet usage profile in one go if I tried. I do agree that payer (not necessarily payee) anonymity is really important and most existing payment methods fall short of what's arguably the absolute minimum in a non-surveillance state. Still, this seems like a problem largely orthogonal to crypto. It's possible to build a payer-anonymous payment system based on regular centralized databases just fine, see e.g. GNU Taler. > What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)? Mine is to live in a jurisdiction where banks aren't allowed to get away with stuff like that (and where "identity theft" is not really a thing because knowing a 9-digit number and maybe having a photo of somebody's driver's license is not considered a valid KYC method), but I realize that this is not an option for nearly everybody in the world, and I do see some value of crypto as a forcing function in those.
- t0bia_s 2mo ago
  What about inflation that eats your savings? Can your bank solve this?
  - lxgr 2mo ago
    No, but I'm not sure how that would be their responsibility. Banks don't set interest rates, nor monetary policy.
    - t0bia_s 2mo ago
      Who does?
jnovek 2mo ago
> Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless. I didn’t say it was useless, it seems to have a niche value to speculators and investors. All of the examples you gave either don’t matter to 99% of everyone (“hey mom, how do you donate to whistleblowers”) or isn’t the most practical way to do a thing. E.g. bank account-related fraud is vanishingly small (the vast majority is credit card-related); in the US it affects ~10k people per year. Is the average person more likely to lose their savings to fraud or lose a crypto wallet due to human error?
- lrvick 2mo ago
  I did not say it was ready for the average person yet. It took over a hundred years to build our fiat systems and it may take as long to fully replace them. But for technical people that need privacy, the types of people that use tor, it is an invaluable tool, today, for which no viable alternatives exist. The actual cypherpunk crowd using it as intended for privacy and sovereignty absolutely exists. The noise of the traders and grifters just drowns it out. Also I have legitimately purchased things in person all over the world with bitcoin, including at major department stores. A great way to meet the rare actual cypherpunks though are places that are crypto first, like the pubkey bar in NYC. I do not trade, and have no interest in trading. Decentralized payments will be as easy as paypal soon with Silent Payments allowing you to pay someone by email -> dns -> private one time use address, all automatically.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 1mo ago
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by lrvick 2mo ago

lxgr 2mo ago

> How would you anonymously pay for a VPN or donate to whistleblowers or get cash from an ATM without having to identify yourself? "Anonymously paying for VPN" seems a bit ironic given that almost all VPN users then immediately proceed to completely deanonymize themselves towards the VPN by accessing it from their (not anonymous) home Internet connection and/or to access sites that deanonymize them. Add to that the fact that most blockchains are very much public, and I couldn't think of a better way than crypto to deanonymize my entire payment and Internet usage profile in one go if I tried. I do agree that payer (not necessarily payee) anonymity is really important and most existing payment methods fall short of what's arguably the absolute minimum in a non-surveillance state. Still, this seems like a problem largely orthogonal to crypto. It's possible to build a payer-anonymous payment system based on regular centralized databases just fine, see e.g. GNU Taler. > What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)? Mine is to live in a jurisdiction where banks aren't allowed to get away with stuff like that (and where "identity theft" is not really a thing because knowing a 9-digit number and maybe having a photo of somebody's driver's license is not considered a valid KYC method), but I realize that this is not an option for nearly everybody in the world, and I do see some value of crypto as a forcing function in those.

t0bia_s 2mo ago
What about inflation that eats your savings? Can your bank solve this?
- lxgr 2mo ago
  No, but I'm not sure how that would be their responsibility. Banks don't set interest rates, nor monetary policy.
  - t0bia_s 2mo ago
    Who does?

jnovek 2mo ago

> Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless. I didn’t say it was useless, it seems to have a niche value to speculators and investors. All of the examples you gave either don’t matter to 99% of everyone (“hey mom, how do you donate to whistleblowers”) or isn’t the most practical way to do a thing. E.g. bank account-related fraud is vanishingly small (the vast majority is credit card-related); in the US it affects ~10k people per year. Is the average person more likely to lose their savings to fraud or lose a crypto wallet due to human error?

lrvick 2mo ago
I did not say it was ready for the average person yet. It took over a hundred years to build our fiat systems and it may take as long to fully replace them. But for technical people that need privacy, the types of people that use tor, it is an invaluable tool, today, for which no viable alternatives exist. The actual cypherpunk crowd using it as intended for privacy and sovereignty absolutely exists. The noise of the traders and grifters just drowns it out. Also I have legitimately purchased things in person all over the world with bitcoin, including at major department stores. A great way to meet the rare actual cypherpunks though are places that are crypto first, like the pubkey bar in NYC. I do not trade, and have no interest in trading. Decentralized payments will be as easy as paypal soon with Silent Payments allowing you to pay someone by email -> dns -> private one time use address, all automatically.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai 1mo ago

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