What are the options for increased privacy in how you pay for things where you live?
Cash is the obvious answer, but what about buying stuff online?
UK here. Thinking of ditching cards/contactless for good old cash. No idea about online payments - not doing anything illegal so might persevere with cards for now. Zero experience with crypto.
Cash is the correct option.
The person raising alarms about note scanning is misinformed about how frequently atms actually scan bills as they go out (it may be that all British atms have been updated in the last ten years but it’s not likely) and has completely discounted the laundering effect of just buying something small with your big bill or getting change at a store somewhere.
The argument against cash is that they know what bill you took out and that they know where that bill got deposited from, because the atm reads the bill serial and the bank does too when the shop makes their deposit. So they know where you went!
Even if you can only pull from an atm that scans the bill serial and you have a bank that actively correlates that information to your kyc account holder information and uses facial recognition to verify it’s you using the atm taking physical custody of the withdrawl, when you use a 50 or a 20 to buy a bag of potato chips or ask a bar to change your 100, the cash you get back isn’t now associated with you.
Further: places that deal with cash do not deposit every bill they take in, so there’s a decent chance that the panopticon will never associate your withdrawal with having gone to the corner store or the bar sometime after you withdrew the money. Those bills may have ended up making change for someone else or in the cash portion of the tip out or used to cover some expense that day or any number of other things.
So the choice is between some electronic form of payment where there’s an absolute paper trail between you and the recipient of your money, with a transaction id that can be correlated to your purchase.
Or
The possibility that the atm read the serial number of the bills dispensed to you, then if they made it into some shops daily deposit, the indication that that bill was possibly spent at that shop.
No indication it was you, no paper trail, no transaction id, no amount of purchase that can be correlated with actual items based on their price, just two data points with no real correlation between them.
Use cash.
Also you don't have to be using cash that you took out of an ATM. I give my friends cash and they give me cash all the time.
Cash is pretty accessible where I live, but I'm always in for a surprise when I gravitate towards self-checkout and realize that it's a card-only machine.
Prepaid cards used to be my go-to online, but it seems that fewer and fewer payment processors are letting them through their "security" checks. They were also next to impossible to obtain when I was in Europe. For a lack of better options on hand, I went with privacy.com's virtual cards, which doesn't really anonymize things in the eyes of MasterCard, but I suppose it's better than nothing.
The only other thing I could think of is signing up for eBay or Amazon with a pseudonym, paying with gift cards purchased at a store with cash, and shipping to a PO box or Amazon pick-up location.
Ideally Monero, but it's not as straightforward to obtain and there's a very limited selection of vendors that accept it.
Cash isn't private due to banknote serial scanning. Now we need a remixing service for physical cash.
For cryptocurrencies, look at Monero.
You really thing they can do targeted tracking with banknote serial numbers? This is paranoia my friend :D
I am saying that cash payments are not significantly more private than bank card payments. What you do with that information is up to you.
They are. when I pay using a bank card many informations are shared with "partners". With cash I don't have to give my name to anyone.
You pull money from an ATM which scans the serials and associates them with you. You spend that bill at a shop which brings them to the bank at the end of the day where the serial is collected. So there is the information that you visited a particular shop at a particular day and bought something there.
This can be crosscorrelated with information from a dozen other sources. That information will practically never be used to your advantage.
You spend that bill at a shop which brings them to the bank at the end of the day where the serial is collected.
Have you ever been on a cash based society, banknotes don't do bank - user - seller - bank route, sometimes it might happen okay but it's not the norm, these are global, not precise tracking.
This can be crosscorrelated with information from a dozen other sources. That infomation will practically never be used to you advantage.
I agree on this, but cash have still stronger anonymity and privacy than most electronic payment methods. That's why they want cash to disapear in favor of CBDCs and banking cards. That's also why corrupted european deputee have big bags of cash at home lol.
Cash and Monero. I nearly never pay for things by card these days; it's entirely possible.
How would a total noob get started with monero? I take it I need some kind of wallet and somewhere to buy it?
It isn't as hard as people imagine it to be. For starters you could watch a few entertaining videos by MentalOutlaw or listen to Opt Out and Watchman Privacy podcast.
When you feel more at home with the terminology and understand the basic process behind cryptocurrencies in general and Monero, you could get a wallet, look some at some of their recommended guides, buy some Bitcoin at a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange, trade it for Monero and badabim badaboom - you now have Monero.
I recommend either Haveno Reto or Bisq. Nevertheless, always do your own research and make your own choice. This is a good place to start.
You can use centralized exchanges as well as they make the process a bit easier but then you have to KYC yourself. Which isn't a big problem because when you trade Bitcoin to Monero, all following transactions are anonymous.
If you want to go hardcore from the start, you could use decentralized P2P exchange to get Monero for cash but this is a bit more advanced and comes with a premium.
https://www.getmonero.org/
Getting a wallet and setting it up is the easy part. Buying it can be more difficult depending on where you are—centralised exchanges are easiest but xmr-fiat centralised exchanges often have legal trouble and may not be available where you are. You can try a decentralised exchange like RetoSwap (fiat-xmr directly) or bisq (fiat-btc and btc-xmr). They can be a bit confusing for new users but I figured it out ok when I first bought Monero using bisq.
IME crypto is largely useless as a means of payment, not just in the real world but also online. Literally nothing I have ever bought online could be paid with crypto, no stores that sell useful tangible things takes them, be it hardware (kitchen, computer, whatever...), groceries, things for hobby projects. There's just nowhere to spend it.
We had different experience I guess. I have bought both online services and physical goods using Monero and Bitcoin such as VPS, email, aliases, art, PC components, bedsheets, food, drinks, clothes
VPS, email and aliases have no use in real daily life outside of small niche hobbies and is a poor indicator of how useful cryptonis as currency.
I'm intrigued about PC hardware, bedsheets, food and drink directly with crypto from a store, because I have never seen that.
VPS and email are highly used in professionnal environment not only in hobbies. There is also AI where you can pay per tokens but I don't really use that. I have even found a local phone carrier that have added Lightning Network and Bitcoin onchain for payment recently.
I live in a country where the currency holds strong even against US petrodollar. Where bank transfers have no additionnal cost (with the exception of international ones) and where cash is still used, so yes here bitcoin is considered more a store of value investment, despite mutiple merchants accepting it as a medium of exchanges. And crypto is more on the gambling side anyways.
However in countries like Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam, India, Venezuela, etc... people understand that the monopole of their government over money is not necesserly a good thing in their current situation. Use adoption is much stronger in the global south than the north. We also saw during recent protest in France people asking other to move out from the banks and store cash and Bitcoin to destabilize their corrupted system.
I would also like to remind people that without Bitcoin, Sci-Hub and probably WikiLeaks would be dead as both got banned by payment processor. So that is a strong indactor of how useful they can be. Also a non-monetray interesting use is OpenTimeStamps and the guatemala's election of 2023 that takes benefits from the immuability nature of blocks produced by the consensus. Or also the mining facilities that reduce the price of the electricity bill of nearby citizen, or help renewable energy to sell when there is no demands or simply balanced the electricty grids. But one that I am really excited about is the ones that clear methane from the atmosphere to turn it into bitcoins and make it actual economically viable. It's not all black or white, we have to see uses outside our comfort zone :D
I pay for my VPN with Monero, I pay my mobile carrier (VoIP + data eSIM) with Monero, and the last time I travelled internationally I also got a data eSIM for that with Monero. Every so often I need to get through a Google "give us a phone number" prompt, and the one-time SMS OTP service I use is also paid with Monero. There's also stores where you can buy gift cards for real-world things (Amazon etc.) with Monero.
There's also stores where you can buy gift cards for real-world things (Amazon etc.) with Monero.
I guess that's highly location dependant, we don't have amazon in my country. Even if we did I'd rather use my credit card than shop with them though...
That's fair, if Amazon gets your real name and address anyways, the privacy protection of paying with Monero isn't as big of a deal.
Yep, smspool. For VoIP it's JMP.Chat locally, and. silent.link when I travel (data only).
