I feel like this is a hack that is rarely talked about. And it’s the most reliable method I’ve found for getting an email account that I can use for signing up to other websites.
Imagine you want to create a completely anonymous account on some website. Most websites require an email account to sign up. if you’re lucky you can use one of those a temporary email services, but many websites block those nowadays. They only accept trusted email providers like Gmail, Protonmail, etc. And trying to make an anonymous account on those providers is difficult. Even Protonmail, surprisingly. If you try to sign up for Protonmail using a VPN or Tor, they will ask for a phone number or a second email account. So now you have to get a phone number anonymously (very difficult), or get another email account anonymously, back to square one.
Darknet markets solve this problem. Pay a bit of Monero, and you get an account. Completely anonymous. Now I won’t pretend it’s easy. Even just signing up for a darknet market often requires learning how to PGP encrypt/decrypt messages. But it only takes an 30 min or so to figure it out and sign up, and it opens up a new world of tools to use for privacy. There are many other types of accounts that you can buy aside from Protonmail, and many other products in general that you can buy.
I don’t get why Protonmail doesn’t just accept anonymous crypto as an option during signup, but until they do this is honestly the most reliable option I’ve found. I really wish more websites just accepted crypto for account creation. It’s understandable that in order to prevent spam accounts, account creation has to cost something, and crypto allows it to cost something without costing your privacy.
Anyways, here’s a quick guide to get started. I’ll avoid direct links since I don’t know if those are allowed.
- install Tor Browser Bundle, and use it for the following steps
- search for websites like Daunt, Dread forums, and Tor Taxi. Darknet markets change all the time so use those websites to figure out which ones are currently active. Cross-check links across multiple websites to make sure they are trustworthy, since often scam websites will try to pose as legitimate ones
- look for markets that let you search for the product you’re interested in before signing up, to save you time
- some markets require you to load funds into the market and then pay using those funds. Avoid loading more than you need, since some markets have “rugpulled” before (aka taken everybody’s funds and disappeared. This is the risk of an anonymous market).
Edit: also if for some reason a seller doesn’t accept Monero, you can use a crypto swap. Basically you send the swap service some Monero, tell them what crypto to convert it to (like Bitcoin or Ethereum), and where to send it to. Many can be used anonymously, without signup
I think this comment is a good example of why people don’t like physical methods. It just seems so hand-wavy, like homeopathic medicine. How do you judge how well it will work in a given situation? Physical privacy is just dependent on too many unknowns. And privacy techniques for the user have not improved in the past 100 years, meanwhile surveillance and location tracking algorithms for the authorities have progressed.
Digital privacy continues to improve every year. Andbody can use Tor and Monero, and benefit from the research and development behind them. Anybody can audit the tech, and build on top of it. Right now darknet markets are clunky to use, but they definitely feel better than they did 5 years ago, and they’ll keep getting better.
Anyways thanks for engaging in this discussing with me, it definitely helped me explore these ideas deeper.
depending on your juridiction, the statute of limitations should save you after 20 years :)
They might see that I ate a sandwich and mailed a letter vs my transactions are in a public ledger and can be tied to me at any time in the future when that ledgers cryptography gets broken or my information or the other party’s information gets corroborated.
Quantum is fake. Everybody knows it but no one talks about it.
Parallel computing is not fake though, and the technology to do it is being deployed at scale never seen before in our lives. Hash cracking software is already designed to take advantage of video cards, and the same mathematics were put into service and honed on those video cards years before during the crypto boom(s).
So now you have to contend with the future of ai: if the bubble pops then there’s piles of parallel computing hardware out there that are suddenly upside down on their leases and have to be pressed into service doing something, anything. If the bubble doesn’t pop then consistent improvements in efficiency of new stuff cause old hardware to become available to the part of the market that can afford a little more per millisecond of torch time: crypto and crackers.
This is already happening.
The space you need to be able to solve for to transact physically is limited and finite, the same space for digital is unlimited and infinite.
What do you mean the space for digital is unlimited and infinite? There’s finite resources on the planet. 2048-bit RSA is not getting brute-forced in our lifetime (without quantum). And if you are talking about password strength, all of what you mentioned should be factored in. Take the combined compute of all GPUs of the world, factor in Moore’s law with a 50 year horizon, and figure out how strong your password should be. I know some people use 128 bits of entropy but I think 100 bits is plenty. Use a word-based passphrase for easy memorization. Or just use a hardware key.
Now I’d love to know how to calculate what level of security is enough for physical methods. Anything rigorous?
Of course Im not suggesting that d-h is comparable to some mathematical expression of laundering your money during lunch and sending a letter. You can’t compare the two using mathematics because elliptic curve works in a really narrow set of domains. Now my friends in actuarial work might have something to say about that but I was trying to use types of equations as a way to help explain how the physical and digital are different. what I mean is that any new discovery or development could undo the security of digital transactions, specifically blockchains which exist as public ledgers in perpetuity. When solving the calculus of what degree of concern and care a person needs to exercise you gotta look to any possible future.
Physical transactions are done when theyre done. You either succeed or you don’t, no one can dig back into the perfect public copy of everything you did and reveal it was you (or even in the case of some blockchains what was done!). Perhaps they find out they have a surveillance video of you going to the restaurant and getting lunch then mailing a letter and try to use it as evidence that you conducted a cash transaction using a nonce. It’s meaningless.
You don’t need to worry about it in any way you wouldn’t have to worry about conducting the transaction digitally. The solution space of a physical transaction is finite, which of course could be partially or completely encompassed by the infinite solution.
That last part is to say that for both a physical or digital transaction you gotta worry that the other party (or yourself) screwed it up somehow or betrayed their counterpart but because it’s common to both methods it’s not worth discussing.
Again the point of all this math talk isn’t to suggest that we ought to be talking in proofs or something silly like that. Some people really “get” math though and using it as a metaphor can help get the point across.