You are never anonymous when you connect to the Internet, even over Tor, even through 7 proxies. There is always a connection right back to you.
We need to move beyond the obsession with anonymity and refocus the goal as being privacy. Then, recognize that privacy has several levels. That way, the expectation is more clear.
This is disingenuous. Bitcoin is very anti-anonymous. Tor is rather anonymous. Saying that perfect anonymity does not exist because there's always some bits leaking to an omniscient entity is not helpful.
ProtonMail should support Monero. For now, I pay using a group of Monero wallets I churn every few hours and xmr.to. I suppose Bitcoin is the least common denominator in that sense.
That's correct. It is very anti-anonymous by its design; its security rests everyone verifying the transactions. The distinction you make is the same one I attempt to make by arguing against anonymity as a goal. Both Bitcoin and Tor are, in the mind of the public, construed as ways to be anonymous on the Internet. That is dangerous.
> There is strong demand for anonymity all over the world.
Is there? From whom? Facebook is still growing rapidly and now claims more than 2B users. It seems that not even privacy is in high demand, much less anonymity.
If you're very concerned, you could use a high speed/volume BitCoin Mixer[1]. For example, if it currently has sufficient volume, something on the Darknet like BitBlender[2][3]. There are a number of different mixers out there. You could also, of course, wash the BitCoins by hand yourself.
No this is the incorrect answer. Mixers congest the network and cause many unneeded fees and they are NOT future proof and do NOT deliver suddenly-fungible bitcoins at the other end.
Use Monero, not ZCash, not DASH with a special type of transaction, use MONERO with genuine ring confidential transactions.
We will hopefully support ZCash in the future. But, unfortunately, we don't right now. I am a member of the ZCash forum, though. I have been keeping a close watch on the project/coin and am very impressed with it. I don't know anything about Monero. I either hadn't heard of it before or just didn't give it any attention after seeing it because of the flood of coins lately. Thanks for the pointer and endorsement of it - I will take a look at it when I have a chance.
ZCash is not Monero, is not fungible, and does not have complete privacy. I was very clear about this distinction in the previous post because ZCash is not the right answer, and every time something is said about Monero the next comment agrees about everything that makes Monero valuable, and then goes on to talk about ZCash as if the two are interchangeable. This is a false equivalence that can confuse readers who don't care to research better.
It's close to being anonymous though. If I give you a random bitcoin address, what are the odds you can identify the owner of it? It's very close to zero.
I said "likely", not "certainly." Satoshi Nakamoto is the exception that proves the rule; part of his infamy is precisely due to the fact that he has not yet identified, which is extraordinary.
If you want to mask your identity wouldn't you be better off buying Visa gift cards with cash at a major store and then using them to purchase services online?
Even better to have someone else buy the gift cards and then hand them off to you in a dark alley. Bonus points if you're both wearing trench coats and fedoras.
It is harder than that though. Monero has an issue in that everyone is only doing ringsize=3 transactions, providing little anonymity. If you buy from an exchange then turn around and sell it back, even with different amounts, you will be on a shortlist of suspects.
To do Monero properly you need to wait a while (at least hours, better days) while churning to other addresses, being sure to keep your ringsize and fees looking like everyone else's. Hopefully they will raise the ringsize minimum to 10 in the upcoming hardfork - that will go some way towards fixing the problem.
For now, I bet there will be cases of people happily bouncing to Monero via Shapeshift and getting busted.
I could argue the merits of the ringsize but it would be moot because it's being bumped to 10 in September. So I will just leave this here as a note that the argument that a ringsize of 3 is not very anonymous will be moot in September for future readers.
Even with ringsize 10, it does not help if someone does BTC->XMR->BTC with the same exchange (or an exchange that shares records) without adding some XMR->XMR churn steps inbetween.
My future freedom depends on me getting this right, so I am a bit sensitive on this topic. It took me a while to cut through the fluff and figure out how to churn enough to make it safe. Fortunately I also used multiple Bitcoin mixers on both sides and didn't originally get our Bitcoin investment in a way that's directly linked to any of our identities.
It is somewhat irresponsible of Monero's marketing to make such grandiose privacy claims at the moment. I say this as someone that loves Monero and thinks their team is fantastic, and I'd bet Monero will be the privacy currency winner if it isn't already.
Or using a coin designed to be anonymous and private, like.. Monero. You would still probably be on camera buying a Visa gift card in a retail store. With timestamp.
You don't have to trade for dollars. You can use one or more intermediaries such as gift cards and high resale value goods, just like using proxies to distance yourself. The more hops, the harder it is to connect.
And how do you know that that the Bitcoin mixer you decided to use is not actually operated by the FBI and that they are actually keeping a private log tying bitcoins in with bitcoins out?
It does if you've connected it to a bank account, but if you didn't do that, or you used funds that originated from a bank account to get access to a wallet which wasn't connected to you directly, you could make it a rather difficult trail to follow with certainty
We need to move beyond the obsession with anonymity and refocus the goal as being privacy. Then, recognize that privacy has several levels. That way, the expectation is more clear.