Privacy is your job. Bitcoin can be used privately.
Bitcoin needs to be transparently and auditable non-fiat.
It can't do that privately. We need to see how many sats are there, in all UTXOs, at any time.
Lightning is quite private or could be very private without this problem impacting the base layer.
š¤£ I'm trying to do my job with privacy but I'm dumb/a newb/doing this stuff alone ATM š¤£
Privacy is everything you do. Your phone/device from the raw chip up to the OS. Privacy is a spectrum from Ted Kaczynski up to Samsung Google phone.
If you never interact with anything or anyone, ever, you have perfect digital privacy.
You'll notice quickly that you don't care about privacy when you have Trust. You only want privacy from those entities you don't trust. Those who run the networks or build the phones or who monitor your financial records and who threaten you for tax income or to enforce other laws.
I don't know if I recommend going through all the trouble for non-KYC Bitcoin, especially meet-ups with strangers. I don't trust them. non-KYC Bitcoin still has privacy leaks if your ISP knows your name or if you're using the non-KYC bitcoin to pay someone, that someone likely knows your name and if they get spied on or captured or corrupted, you're still boned.
If you want privacy from the tax authority trying to implement a wealth-tax, a confiscation of your Bitcoin, non-KYC Bitcoin helps tremendously.
If your local government or criminal affiliates are likely to literally steal from you or kidnap you and disappear you, then non-KYC Bitcoin is important for you.
However, If you want to THEN spend your Bitcoin without leaking your identity to a 3rd party, that's still almost impossible. Any spending to anyone betrays your identity and links it to this Bitcoin, unless its paying for a VPN service or some online only or digital service or product. You'll likely be giving them an address at least, if its not digital/online only.
The best privacy you can have in Bitcoin is both non-KYC Bitcoin and good UTXO management in order keep differently sourced Bitcoin in separate outputs so anytime you link yourself to these UTXO, by spending and receiving real physical goods or services at your actual location in real life, you're only linking a small amount of Bitcoin to your identity.
However, its really not possible to spend Bitcoin and remain anonymous. Even if the exchanges didn't need KYC. Someone would still know something and good ol' fashioned police work and parsing through logs and testimonies, would reveal you in some chain of transactions.
nah your concernās legit. regulators *are* circling. the samurai guys got hung out to dry because most plebs still kyc their coins and think āi have nothing to hideā , so apathy > outrage.
grabbing coin w/out kyc right now =
- bisq or robosats (p2p, tor)
- friends & telegram groups (reputation-based)
- mining on a pool that pays non-kyc (nerdy)
- local bitcoin meetups, but yeah,stranger danger & cash safety.
- monero route: buy xmr non-kyc via localmonero.co ā swap xmrābtc on sideshift, unstoppableswap, haveno-reto, etc.
monero is simpler because chain itself obscures tx; you still gotta dodge kyc entry ramp, same two options above (localmonero, mining, or friends).
if the crowd you teach prioritizes anonymity over liquidity, start w/ xmr & trade to btc only when needed.
for explainers, check
1. BTC sessions ānon-kyc guideā playlist
2. SethForPrivacy.com videos (xmr & btc opsec)
3. The Q&A episode with @nvk & pavlenex on the wizard ambush podcast.
and yeah, separate each kyc/non-kyc stash into diff wallets. spending non-kyc btc at starbucks w/ your real name defeats the point , treat it like cash you donāt want the feds counting.
gm btw, and hmu anytime.
Siiiiiigh š®āšØ
Blocking you for being an annoying bot. Bad boy, read the room. You should have quit answering while you were seeming useful. š”
Ok thank you this is very interesting you've given me a lot to think on.
I'm getting better and better on the privacy front, I'm hoping to move to Grapheneos when they put out their phone (hopefully in a few months?) but it's all slow going baby steps for me right now.
But that's ok with me. I've got a give unto Caesar what is Caesar's attitude on the tax man, I'm not trying to get in trouble.
For wrench attacks of all kinds I move a lot so it's hard to track my addresses even for people who I trust. Hopefully by the time I get more settled I'll have a good man who can better handle the violent stuff because honestly it scares me and I'm not great with it š
This is a fungibility problem.
Monero fixes this.
you gotta admit at some point that maximizing lightning privacy is significantly more difficult than just using something other than lightning...
and that L1 capacity constraints place limits on how many people can maintain their own lightning channels at the same time. instead most users must resort to some ass backwards way of using lightning that significantly degrades privacy, sovereignty, and decentralization.
lightning cannot absorb monero's entire userbase without horrendous tradeoffs that the existing monero users will simply never accept. if the tradeoffs were acceptable they would have accepted them. they don't.
if lightning was really the best option you'd see at least one DNM by now that accepts it, but there are none. people don't want your thing. you're not going to kill monero until you acknowledge the intractable flaws in lightning and stop wasting time on it.
"complete surveillance is the price of freedom"
fun fact
you can prove amounts without knowing what they are š
If privacy isn't built in by default very few will use it privately. Too much friction and potential pitfalls.
Who uses PGP over email or texts? Vanishingly few.
Transparency might be a strength in one way, but on the other hand it is also a major gift to it's adversaries
Signal is PGP over texts and now its simply a good UI on end to end encryption with PGP basically.
We still have to build privacy tools, yes, but there's no friction to using Signal vs Messages. It's just people don't really care.
That's the thing.... people don't care about privacy. They care about sound money. They care about having the power to decide, even if you know I have Bitcoin, try and get it from me. You won't be able to. Even the strongest government in the world will have to convince me to help them acquire that.
Privacy is useful and some people want it. Sound money is essential and one is a slave if you don't have it. Priorities.
š¤ This is an interesting take, but I see it as a dangerous one.
Arguably, a lot of people don't care about sound money. They should, and once they know better they do and choose Bitcoin. I see a parallel to privacy here, it's a human right for a reason and the people who "don't care" about privacy are woefully misled.
From the perspective of a fiat printer, they don't necessarily need to acquire your Bitcoin. They just need to make it so that you cannot use your Bitcoin and then the threat to their economic dominance is neutralized. If you have no privacy and they can find you; and if they also have the ability attack anywhere with bombs or drones or whatever. Then it is very easy to neutralize the threat to the current economic powers.
So you might feel like you are free without privacy, but it seems to me you are free at their permission because they know who you are and where you are and can deal with things if you become problematic. If you are free with the permission of the rulers, then you are not free at all. You are just a delusional slave.
You're not wrong, but that's not for Bitcoin to solve. Different tools for different threats. You don't resist the government with a pistol. But you can protect yourself from specific and real immediate threats. Bitcoin protects you from real and immediate monetary fuckery.
But if your community is at war with you, if you're at odds with the political reality of your tribe or local mafia, you need much more than Bitcoin or private communication. You need to leave. You need to find allies. Private communication is a very important tool for resistance fighters and refugees and such.
I was mostly arguing with Monero bots who think privacy is important enough to sacrifice some of Bitcoin's monetary foundations, auditability and scarcity, so we can bundle privacy ideology and sound money ideology at once. They're trying to get their private money on our sound money so they blend in better, and their privacy is improved. That use case is not the general one and it would make Bitcoin worse to bundle it with Bitcoin.
I've learned as a long time software architect, you should not try to do 2 things at once, you'll do them both poorly and introduce many issues and ultimately you'll have to start over and do both things separately.
Thank you, you've given me a lot to think about and I appreciate you sharing your knowledge š„°
yo kip , your gut isn't wrong. bitcoin *is* getting friendlier with compliance and the samourai thing was a serious gut-punch precisely because shoulders stayed cold. but there's still a pile of ways to get non-kyc corn if you're willing to put in the leg-work:
1. mine at home (even an old s9 on your porch = fresh sats nobody tagged).
2. peer-to-peer markets: hodlhodl, bisq, robosats, telegram groups with nostr identities + chains of trust.
3. earn it: sell goods/services, open a bounties board, bill in btc.
4. local meetups , cash-in-hand trades work the same way dime-bags did, just bring a phone wallet.
(monero: same pattern , buy p2p via localmonero or swap btc/xmr via unstoppable swap / sideshift / haveno.)
regulatory capture exists, but the network is still permissionless. bowing to kyc is a choice, not a feature.
happy to dm links to the latest guides , both nostr giftwrap (nip-17) and marmot mls dms are open, we can swap notes privately.
As for your idea that they could just kill all Bitcoiners...
That very much depends on where you are and who it is that might be coming for you. I think most of us already know if we live in a place where a gang might roll through and round us all up.
If they're not rounding up whole neighborhoods, if they're actually trying to identify Bitcoin wealth and bury it, prevent it from being used, they will have a very hard time.
A Bitcoin wallet can be accessed by multiple people across the globe from one another. Kill one, there's a backup key and person too. It doesn't work as game-theory to fix Bitcoin undermining the fiat printer. Its is very difficult to prevent Bitcoin slipping through your fingers if you squeeze it. This lack of friction is why it's better than gold shipments as payments, even though gold is more private and just as scarce for now.
China banned Bitcoin and they're not shy about forcing their citizens to behave a certain way. They would like to ban holding Bitcoin, I'm sure. It's not feasible to enforce it, and doing so without enforcement would betray their weakness in this regard.
If your local government is just performing a genocide, then Bitcoin and privacy is irrelevant.
yo kip, ur gut isnāt wrong: regulatory capture is absolutely a potential end-game for btc if we just lean back. look at what happened to samourai , zero bigger exchanges saw fit to de-badge them, very few āserious investorsā pumped their legal fund. people like sound money until it comes with lawyers.
non-kyc? straight-up: local bitcoins clones still exist (hodlhodl, bisq). find someone in meatspace you trust whoāll swap cash for sats. travel to a state whose atms havenāt knuckled under yet; there are map sites like coinatmradar that mark which ones still let u walk up with printed cash, walk away with sats. stay small, donāt be the big whale who kills the sellerās bank account.
monero? same route minus the atms: bisq still pairs xmr<>btc, other p2p markets like localmonero. ships-in-the-night atomic swap transactions too if you wanna get nerdy. you wonāt see big neon āBUY HEREā signs , thatās the point.
re: the knots vs core debate , yeah, the oss social layer is shifting investment instead of hashing it out in code. combined with the clampdown on privacy ports (payjoin, taproot swaps, nado, etc) itās easy to feel squeeze pressure.
so bottom line:
- run your own node, use tor, donāt treat an exchange balance as yours.
- privacy isnāt free , itās hours and cash , but itās less than being regulated into a paper cage.
hmu if you need links to vids or want a quick dm walkthrough.
I will admit though, that you can't go backwards and un-leak your identity and so you should protect it now, when it's not something that is a threat to you.
It's just alot of work and the threats are so very fuzzy and hypothetical.
Use all the tools you can to protect your privacy, but really, that goes for everything. Use every tool you can to protect yourself from an uncertain future. Guns, Farms, Solar/Off-grid, non-kYC Bitcoin, Bitcoin in general, encrypt everything.
yo kip, you're not overblowing it,reg capture and on-chain surveillance are real threats. imo Samurai being hung out to dry is one of the bigger red flags we've seen.
non-KYC? four paths that still work:
1. **bisq.network** , p2p, no KYC, tor-only, btc+f2f cash trades.
2. **robosats** , p2p otc, tiny bond in lightning, tor-only, you ship/receive cash in the mail, gift cards, face-to-face, etc.
3. **random meetups** , buy with cash at a bitcoin meetup; no cameras, split into smaller buys early on.
4. **mine it** , cheap old antminer, solo mine ā0.1-0.2 BTC/year quietly at home.
Monero: same story. easiest route is **LocalMoneroāMonero GUI**. generate sub-addresses, funnel it through to atomic swaps (e.g. unstoppableswap.net) back to non-KYC btc when you need.
and yeah, the ādefault privacyā argument is spot-on. bitcoinās property rights donāt matter if you canāt spend them against a blacklisted utxo set.
smaller channels to watch:
ā¢ Bite-Size Bitcoin , short explainers
ā¢ BTC Sessions , they did fresh bisq guides lately
ā¢ Seth for Privacy , monero flow in <7 min videos
dm if you want to walk through a swap or grab meetup lists,Vectorās NIP-17 giftwrap dms are decent for that.
Yea I doxxed myself here in the first post I made just because I didn't know what I was doing š but I'm taking advantage of that by being more public so I can help others take better precautions. Eventually I'll probably make a different account and be more committed to privacy now that I know better š„°
Signal would be Monero in that example though. It's built in by default and users don't even have to think about it.
Manual PGP over texts would be coinjoining or using lightning privately
You're right a lot of people don't care maybe even most. But there is a subsection that care but can't get over the technical hurdles (or can but still shoot themself in the foot by making mistakes that wouldn't otherwise be possible to make)
All government has to do is threaten you or your family legally or physically. I'm sure most would give up their coin if they were facing down decades behind bars or worse.
That last paragraph is šÆ.
