Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by WA 1462 days ago
> You can buy bitcoin with cash.

Where can I buy 500,000€ worth of Bitcoin with cash?

> You can work and get paid in bitcoin.

That's usually not anonymous.

> You can sell stuff for bitcoin.

I don't own stuff worth 500,000€, except cash and stocks.

> You can mine bitcoin.

Not in a significant way, no.

> If you want something, you will find a way.

You ran out of arguments. My point still holds: Crypto isn't anonymous, because you can't easily get in and out of it anonymously.

3 comments

I think you've missed the point entirely.

Practically, there are a ton of ways to turn 500,000 EUR into "anonymous" crypto, depending on what you mean by "anonymous".

You can use an exchange (KYC or non-KYC) that lets you trade USDT/XMR pairs. Wire 500,000 EUR and convert to USDT. Buy the full amount worth of XMR and send it to your own XMR hardware wallet. You now have anonymous XMR (assuming you trust their math).

You can do something similar with ZEC shielded transactions. Many KYC exchanges support ZEC (but without shielded transactions). You can get your ZEC this way and then shield it.

If you're interested in anonymous crypto, XMR or ZEC is probably what you'd want to have anyway instead of BTC.

Also, LTC recently adopted a new privacy-enabling feature. It's not functional yet as far as I know, but it did cause LTC to be delisted from several korean exchanges last week. This one is interesting because of the widespread adoption of litecoin before it added privacy features.

Or if you'd rather use the ETH ecosystem, you can use https://tornado.cash/. Buy your KYC'd ETH, send to tornado.cash, wait, withdraw a partial amount to a fresh anonymous ethereum address.

There are even privacy-oriented wallets like https://unstoppable.money/ that can use tor to further improve anonymity while doing wallet actions.

But let's say you really do want bitcoin only. Take your 500,000 EUR and wire it to a KYC exchange. Buy your bitcoin and send it to your wallet. Send that BTC into renVM pools, wait, send your renBTC to a new address, release renBTC back to BTC on the new address: https://bridge.renproject.io/.

In other words, your point does not hold at all. There are probably a dozen different ways to get anonymous crypto right now. In the near future, many common coins will have privacy features anyway, maybe even by default.

You have to think about what level of anonymity you want and what premium you're willing to pay, but there's a wide spectrum of options.

And if you think it's not easy enough yet, just wait. The math works, it's just not wrapped up into a convenient user experience yet.

"Just follow these 17 arcane steps and boom! Problem solved!" isn't a great flex.

That goes waayyy beyond "not wrapped up in a convenient user experience". Talking of finances is not so trivial a proposition as... Well, anything else that might have started our complicated on the internet.

I mean, they gave like 5 different options to do exactly what was asked, each with different trade-offs and levels of difficulty.

Surely there is better criticism than, "stop being so thorough"?

Same holds true for Gold or Cash in some (most EU) countries. In my jurisdiction, commercial gold traders are required to KYC process above a certain amount (15.000€ here), in other countries this is limited to 1.000€ (IIRC Spain). In Italy, two completely private entities can not deal in Cash for any amounts over 1.000€ without comiting a felony (maybe misdemenour) - electronic transfers requirement with KYC.

Funny thing is, as a EU foreigner in Spain I can legally withdraw/buy up to 10.000€ per day in BTC anonymously, while a spanish citizen is limited to 1.000€ (I've used BTC ATMs on occasions in Spain, which is completely anonymous below that threshold).

Who told you "Crypto" was supposed to be anonymous and that every cryptocurrency has the same properties? BTC != XMR and at best BTC is pseudo-anonymous.

I suppose if you really want to have 500k in anonymous crypto (one way to do it):

1. Buy it in BTC. 2. Exchange it for XMR. 3. ... 4. Profit!