Sonalder

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.

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

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.

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

You really thing they can do targeted tracking with banknote serial numbers? This is paranoia my friend :D

Yeah, reinterpretation of some lines with context removed.

Yes, I tried it when it was in beta but it is now officially launched (so shouldn’t be experimental anymore). The main difference with traditionnal VPNs is that it rely on the nym mixnet which is a decentralized network that is routing packets and noise packets of the exact same size and mixing them through relay nodes. Basically it’s a new gen Tor network (without hidden services).

The app let you access the full mixnet in Anonymity mode which is 5 hops and thus extremely slow but suitable for messaging, e-mail, etc… But it has heavy battery use on mobile, at least when I tried it. That’s because it has to constently send fake packets for noise. It also let you use Fast mode which reduce the hops to two and thus is less private than Anonymity. However NYM, the company is not running any nodes, these are community runned unlike most VPN companies. Which is making Fast mode actually more private than a single hop VPN such as NordVPN.

Another interesting thing they did for registration is generating a Zero-Knowledge proof of payment that is untied to your payment informations. And thus does not require an account to register similar to IVPN and MullvadVPN.

These are the payment methods supported:

• Credit Card
• Crypto (including Monero)
• Apple Pay
• Google Pay
• Cash
• Nym token

They are building a decentralized infrastructure with a tokenomics incentive for good behavior from nodes. They have their own blockchain on COSMOS and it is untied to the mixnet part. I’m not really into tokenomics and if you look at the price you can clearly see that the NYM token got dumped on the market by initial investors (like most crypto projects), will see how it plays in the future but I think they are right that the main issue with Tor is that nodes don’t have economical incentive and thus is compromised by feds allowing targeting deanonymization attacks on specific users.