- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
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Yeah but without anonymous payments (xmr) there’s no good way to easily pay for diy estrogen or hosting for piracy services, or to anonymously pay my mullvad account.
Granted if society wherent setup as a giant fucking fascist capitalistic panopticon we wouldn’t really need any of that.
Any who, I mostly agree with the sentiment though. “Career” investors and venture capitalists belong against a fucking wall IMO.
I don’t know what a mullvad is, but now I want one. I HAVE CASH
Good news! Put that cash in an envelope and post it to them and they’ll give you VPN time: https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
It’s a privacy-first VPN.
You do know that you can pay for mullvad in cash?
You can send cash in an envelope to them with your mullvad ID and they will credit your account.
Let’s be realistic, that isn’t an equivalent alternative
Sending mail is pseudo-anonymous at best. It’s exceptionally slow. Most importantly, it’s insecure to the point where most postal services explicitly recommend against mailing cash
also no delivery drugs. people would have to go out to get their drugs
How do you anonymously pay for things when the ledger is public?
Not all crypto is the same. ZCASH uses an encrypted ledger. Monero combines transactions and redistributes to obfuscate.
That’s literally what caused bitcoin mixer services to exist where you throw some amount of BTC in an account with them, tell them how much you want paid to whom, and then it takes all the transactions for a certain (usually random) time period and plays a shell game with them, passing funds from account to account in various amounts and resulting ultimately in the right amount going from you to the target via multiple intermediaries. Slow because it involves a lot of transactions, but the idea was to make it hard to trace exactly who was paying who, beyond being able to know that one or more of the user accounts were paying some amount to one or more of the destination accounts.
Over the last 5 years or so, law enforcement has been shutting down several such organizations for money laundering, being illegal money transmitting businesses or things along those lines as appropriate to the jurisdiction.
Even without them, with good opsec it can be hard to tie a BTC wallet address to a human person, which is the point of anonymous payment.
XMR uses some really cool cryptography actually. Zero-knowledge proofs and shit.
With monero the ledger is encrypted and has a bunch of obfuscated/fake data in it
Okay, politely, fuck off. Its 2026 and I absolutely refuse to believe anyone educated on crypto enough to know what a blockchain is and how it works, even if just a basic understanding, doesn’t know about encrypted blockchains or XMR.
You get to post this comment like once in your life, and after that we both know its in bad faith. I really doubt its the first time.
There’s actually a surprising new discovery coming out of East Asia this year. After years of research, they’ve discovered that you can educate someone online without being a total dick.
I too thought it was impossible. But I can’t argue with science.
Normally I’d agree but this gets posted anytime anyone says something about anonymous crypto payments like some magic gatchya, and Its getting really hard to believe its not in bad faith at this point.
Insert 10000 xkcd. If you see it so often, just have a text ready to copy+paste anytime anyone says something about it
xmr is a cryptocurrency which aims to make reading transactions from the chain impossible. Iirc the main mechanism of this is that they bundle a lot of transactions together and send out coins from that pool only once it is large enough, without preserving each specific coin. This repeats for a few proxies. You could trace a coin from origin to endpoint, but this would be pretty much useless as you cannot know whether the endpoint was the intended one or not.
How does the mechanism know who to send the coins to? How can I be sure the coins I put in go to where I intended them to go? And can the sender prove to the receiver it was their transaction?
As I understand it, this happens cryptographically. Send keys can be added to form a larger key, which gets used to sign the pool of transactions. Because the signature used your key as well, the recipient can verify that they have received your coins(from a pool you signed). The important part is that it is impossible to tell who signed what part of the pool, just that one of the people in the pool did. Because all money is pooled together and sent at the same time, it is not possible to read from the amounts sent which transaction belongs to who.
I think I get it (in theory). As much as people shit on crypto, it really is a cool implementation of math and economics.
Interesting! So at best you could narrow down the purchaser to one of many possible sources.
My first thought is that a large enough organization trying to demask you could do so by looking at repeat subscription purchases over time coming from the same wallet. You know, like a monthly fee for a VPN. The first month you’re one of a thousand people. The second month. Maybe you’re one of 500. Eventually they get you.
But I know nothing about XMR, they probably solved for this. I just can’t be bothered to read :-D
I believe the way they deal with this is by having the recipient create a one-time address for every sender, so it is not possible to recognize patterns between senders and recipients. Another thing is that every wallet has two associated keys. There is a “spend key”, which is a write-only key that can spend money from the wallet, and a “view key”, which can be used to view the contents of the wallet. You can publish the view key if you want that to be public information, but you don’t have to.
If you bought crypto, same way money laundering works. Otherwise you can earn crypto while remaining anonymous (but in the case of a VPN, connecting to it from your home IP after anonymously buying it kind of defeats the purpose [partially])
That’s a good point. If you earned the crypto anonymously, you could probably spend it the same way. Because they would tie it to a wallet but not a bank account or a person.
If you are buying online it will track back to you through the payment method. If you buy in a physical location, you give an important clue to where you live. If a state actor wants to deanonymize you, it’s only a matter of how many resources they are willing to spend on it.
You can buy from a physical location if the seller is not a regulated seller (just a random person), chances are they bought the bitcoin from someone else where the coin literally could come from any place in the world. The magic of bitcoin is it is digital so the “coins” can “teleport” around.
Say you buy $50 worth, which isn’t anonymous. Then you add to a pool of several thousand or more, which is then sent out to several clean anonymous wallets as smaller fractions of the whole minus some fee. It’s not rocket surgery but works effectively well so long as you have good opsec and the pool is trustworthy.
The wallet you sent $50 from is known, but which of the hundreds of wallets that got $10 from the pool belong to you vs others in the pool? They can deduce it from patterns and usage, but it makes it a lot harder. And this is just “newbie’s first introduction to anonimized finances”
But unlike cash, the chain exists forever. They can do wild sorts of analysis, which means you need good opsec with clean separation, and lots of obfuscation. But this is nothing new to people in that world.
So yes, it can be anonymous, but it’s tricky and may not always be because it has a permanent public record.
… But if you go thru all that trouble and then just connect to your new shiny dark VPN from your home PC… Uhh… It’s like ordering pizza delivery. Maybe not the best usecase for ‘untraceable currency’
If a state actor wants to deanonymize you…
Then there ain’t fucking shit you can do about it. The only thing you can do to keep big brother off your back is to be too small of a fish for them to spend their time on.
The ledger being public doesn’t necessarily mean anyone knows who “13LPtD4GG1XX7fgrze6xMR5V284rRQg9jv” is. But yeah, you can of course track the movement of funds, and make educated guesses on which addresses belong to who.
Additionally, you can use a coin tumbler (I think that’s the term) where a bunch of strangers pool their coins for various transactions into one wallet that then distributes the coins to their end destinations, adding a layer of obscurity for which starting wallets are associated with which ending wallets.
Which is pseudonymous, and not anonymous. Unless we are talking about monero of course.
Okay, that’s probably a fair distinction. Don’t know enough about anonymous vs pseudonymous to disagree.
“pseudonymous” is a portmanteau (or malamanteau, depending on your opinions) of “pseudo” or “seeming like” and “anonymous”, meaning “seems like anonymity (but isn’t)”.
In a pseudonymous system, it might be hard to confirm identity, but it’s possible. In an anonymous system, it’s impossible to confirm identity.
Had to go check this because I thought I was having a TIL but, while your point is basically correct, the word isn’t a portmanteau but rather means “baring or using a fake name (pseudonym)”
I’m not sure I’d trust whatever that link is as a source that XMR isn’t secure… I mean, what even is that link?
Zcash has opt in anonymization. So it really doesn’t work because any offramp can just not accept any zcash that has been obfuscated. With monero, its all obfuscated by default.
If a diy hrt seller doesn’t accept obfuscated cash they are 100% a fed, but point taken
Admittedly I’m not a hardcore crytography nerd, but I know they’ve been improving things for years, and that message on that mailing list looked like it was 10 years old.
Not saying your wrong, but Id take it with a grain of salt. Anytime I see a newer encrypted block chain I see it and think whatever improvements have been done here, will eventually bleed into monero because of that. And that unlike the other encrypted blockchain, people will still actively be using xmr for real transactions.
You might be right, I have not followed xmr closely. You might also notice that this vulnerability is unlikely to deanonimise you, but the point was more that it is a mistake they shouldn’t have made. Their last audit looks fine, though it was made by a blockchain auditing company which I don’t know. I don’t think there is much harm in using xmr for this, groups who would be capable of exploiting vulnerabilities in this kind of project are unlikely to do so, unless an issue of national security becomes associated somehow
Now compare that to how much damage billionaires and banks are doing to this planet and all the people? At least btc blockchain is not controlled by the 1% of greedy fucks.
This is literally the propaganda that banks and billionaires want you to keep parroting.
What a dumb take. You don’t have to go anti-technology in order to be anti-capitalist. The technology itself is not the problem, it’s the capitalist capture that’s the problem. You don’t have to throw the baby with bathwater.
Problem is I don’t see a baby whatsoever…
People have looked at it from all sorts of directions and tried to propose use cases but none have come up with any particular use for this concept that isn’t just as well or better served by a different approach.
Without the crypto-bros, sure, no one would be especially ‘anti-blockchain’ and it wouldn’t have the negative impacts it does today, it just would be a forgotten concept that didn’t go anywhere.
none have come up with any particular use for this concept that isn’t just as well or better served by a different approach
This is literally the fault of the banks and billionaires controlling them. This is exactly what they want you to believe.
They’d go bankrupt if people started keeping their money on a blockchain and they will do anything possible to prevent that and push the propaganda in the oop post.
While it’s partially true, banks and billionaires are much more toxic to this planet and people.
This is going to be an unpopular take here, but its true
This guy’s feed is sad. It’s fine to oppose bitcoin, but if you’re an anti-capitalist IMO there are many more valid targets to spend literal years tweeting against daily. Dude cares a lot about the externalities of propping up a currency yet he hasn’t said a peep in all this time about the US military.
The most inefficient system ever invented by humankind so far
The most pathetic system? You can criticize crypto without resorting to petty insults, which just makes your position appear weaker.
Wah~ pls no bully
If only they knew that LLMs would soon take over as the new energy hog in the spotlight
And being almost as useless (except for medical and scientific uses that are not widely known).
Those aren’t LLMs, they’re completely different specialized models for those tasks
we really need to enumerate exactly what the fuck this shitscam is actually delivering - if anywhere. not flash in the pan stuff, sustained improvements to processes and quantified evaluations.
Because we’re already paying for it all on our electric, water, and electronics costs whether we like it or not. I’m fucking sick of the imposition but if it’s going to continue they need to make a damned good argument for it all.
Now.
I would guess their argument would be “you cant stop us.”
Dude was just bored and wanted to implement his idea from his University paper. He was long gone before Bitcoin became a trading commodity instead of a novel currency.
Of which Bitcoin did it to itself which is why we got hard forks like Bitcoin cash that barely reached $2k when bitcoin was at $70k.
Not to mention that plenty of superior cryptos came out to replace bitcoin like xrp, monero, etc.
These posts are often very dumb and never understand that most of these tech innovations are novel ideas from University research that happend to become the latest trend.
Even LLMs and AI have excellent use cases, yet you’ll see idiots like this crap on it 24/7 like its the antichrist.
It’s like blaming Einstein for the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
I have always been fascinated honestly by how reductive public discourse often becomes the larger its activity is. And it honestly is rather simple to explain: If an opinion becomes popular, it has no link with its veracity or validity, all it has to do with is how it appeals to common sense and how easy it is to swallow because for it to be popular, it needs to be approachable by all types of humans no matter their social, economical and personal backgrounds.
It is just like how academic or legal documents often seem classist by the language they use to approach real and proven phenomenons, but the reason their vocabulary is not accessible is because it needs to be nuanced to allow proper human abstraction the reality around us. Whereas the popular vocabulary is common since it’s very nature is to allow exchange with all people.
Ha, Einstein yeah right.
Thanks, Obama
Adam Back, who potentially might be Satoshi himself, is the CEO of the company that advised against increasing block sizes. It was more profitable for him if the main chain is inefficient.
Here’s a decent video on this conspiracy theory
So there’s some malice involved here, but not sure if the malicious person was Satoshi himself or if Satoshi and Adam are different people.
That’s still a YouTube conspiracy theory after all these years because it was always bullshit from scammers pumping “Bitcoin Cash”. Everyone downloading everyone else’s coffee purchases to store forever is wildly inefficient scaling.
The big miners were pushing for increasing the block size because it favors more centralized datacenters and discourages end users from running fully p2p nodes.
All other theories about who Satoshi was including that one seem nutty, once you read about the life of the late Len Sassaman: https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10
Bitcoin’s network draws a negligible amount of energy considering the amount of financial transactions it allows.
Do you think all the extremely complex (and corrupt) existing financial system is more energy efficient?
Also miners gravitate toward regions with cheap, renewable electricity, and market pressures continuously push the ecosystem toward greener power mixes, so the energy profile is improving over time.
Are you really gonna smear Bitcoin with financial missbehaviour? Do you know what’s the currency most used for ilegal purposes? No? It’s the dolar.
Trillions of dollars fuel narcotrafic, human trafficking and other crimes against humanity.
This post also fails to consider that Bitcoin serves a vital purpose as a savings mechanism, in the face of government that are not fiscally responsible (inflation).
Housing prices, stock market manipulation, over investments and more and more shenanigans are only incentiviced by the fact that people cannot save in any currency, when the best of it lost 90% of its value in the last 70 years.
BTW, don’t get me started on the big dumpster fire of energy and capital that is the AI bubble…
If you are going to hate something you might as well take 10 minutes to understand what you hate, otherwise you are a zombie.
Are you saying the post is wrong about the 7 transactions a second and being worse than 33 bps router?
With payment channels you can have theoretically infinite transactions per second; it’s settlements that go on the blockchain. And those settlements can eventually go into channel factories and sidechains.
I’m saying that’s like comparing apples with oranges.
Do you think all the extremely complex (and corrupt) existing financial system is more energy efficient?
it is.
If we’re comparing against the energy cost of securing Bitcoin, then wouldn’t we need to evaluate the energy cost of securing the legacy financial system - its military?
Perhaps Americans don’t see the point of crypto since USD is the world reserve currency for now, but cryptocurrency has been a great way to have economic non-cooperation with authoritarian regimes.
When the government can inflate the currency at whim to pay out their billionaire friends while leaving the common man to suffer, crypto is a nice escape hatch since it has a fixed inflation rate. You don’t have to worry about government supression of funds for journalists either.
Bitcoin’s proof-of-work blockchain is to usable crypto-currency what tulips futures are to fiat currency.
And while the literal supply of bitcoin is predictable, it’s also as a store of value extremely deflationary by intent. Which makes it far closer to a bond or stock than it does a usable “currency”.
I agree. Bitcoin has become more of a store of wealth than an actual currency. Similar to gold. If you live in an authoritarian and corrupt regime and need to use money, I’d suggest Monero (XMR).
Yeah, but now you can buy drugs online way easier.
It’s non anonymous, it’s pseudonymous… So, if you want to have your drugs transaction logged with an alias forever in the blockchain, go ahead…
that’s why you make sure you don’t leave PII that links to you in that transaction. Buy bitcoin with cash from your local shady dealer (of course you can buy drugs from them directly, but BTC is still good for drugs they don’t carry)
Bitcoin is, and even then if you send it through a tumbler it becomes difficult to track who is buying what. But most markets these days don’t even accept Bitcoin, they only accept monero (xmr), which is anonymous.
When i used the silkroad they had a coin tumbler built into it
It’s safer to use multiple independent tumblers in series, or a p2p app that does it.
I mean they never caught me so clearly the government isn’t competent enough to require peak precautions
And yet, looking at this phenomenal waste of resources, tech bros took a good hard look at it and said ‘Hold my beer’ - and made LLMs.
And the main problem LLMs seek to fix is human labor getting in the way of shareholders value.
Also used for scams. Imo if the #1 use case for a tech is scamming people that’s a good reason to ban the tech
Oh ban cryptocurrencies, just like we banned drugs?
Yeah, because that worked out great didn’t it?
Jesus if I could just have a button to eliminate everyone with ideas like that, you wouldn’t get my hand off it.
Just a little over a century ago we could get laudanum or whatever over the counter, whenever we wanted. And things were so much better.
Not ONE drug cartel, thank God we went to war, right?
The drug war actually made meth and fentanyl use inevitable, to replace heroin, cocaine, etc. If only we had stuck to the classics.
oh well. Time for my wellbutrin and duozepine and quetiapine and prazosin.
Those are the drugs I have to take daily to stop screaming, because screaming is bad now or some shit
Llms are made by genuinely smart mathematicians and computer scientists. Techbros are just the ones hyping them .
You know, that’s a good point. LLMs themselves aren’t horrible abominations - it’s capitalism that, as usual, ruined a good thing.
Edit whops replied to th3 wrong place
//
Theoronic fingers that satoshi nakamoto actually developed bitcoin as a proof of concept, not as a full payment system.
Send it to zero with my by ignoring it like I do and bellowing with gales of laughter in the faces of it’s advocates.
How long have you been laughing at them?
Yeah I’m still waiting on it to drop back to 8 dollars
I really really really doubt those claims. I would need sources to believe that and also the blockchain itself is not a bad idea. Theres also like a thousand different implementations of it. Its like saying every form of currencies are bad.
I mean, the earliest modems I’m aware of were 300 bps, and in 1990 I had a modem that did 9600bps. That right there makes me question more of the claims.
What, why would you doubt such obvious claims such as “the blockchain […] weights 60 000 tons”
I seriously would like to know WTF the poster meant by that
Tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere is a pretty standard way to measure climate impact.
I thought the context was obvious - in server hardware and infrastructure required to house it.
Verifying this number thought seems essentially impossible.
