Hear me out. It's impossible to build anonymous systems at scale today. Anonymous systems require fees or rate limiting.
You have two options: either give up your privacy and pay for a service via credit card – or give up your privacy and create an account to rate limit you.
Two words: personal servers.
mix ip addresses thru share or.....
why "fees OR rate limiting"? I think you need both and the former is the solution for the latter (in anonymous user context).
With "fee" interpreted in the most general way possible. Any scarcity is possible. Hence things like RIDDLE/aut-ct, and indeed hence things like privacypass/cashu/any chaumian cash,lightning payments (weaker privacy but other adv.), etc. Although, in some contexts, some of those things need a kind of "bootstrap" (i.e. they might be private, but if you have to pay for them with a non-private payment the problem isn't fully solved).
I should have said "fees FOR rate limiting", that would've been clearer 😉 – what I wanted to say is that there are many free services out there which require you to make an account or have some form of identity. Either to ban you if you're being nasty, or to monetize on the data they gather through it.
It's a really bad situation we got ourselves into. I'm starting to believe that the (historical) lack of online private payments is responsible for most of it.
