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Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

exactly. it just shifts the trust from your ISP to the VPN (who ironically even has your credit card info in many cases ...).

even Verizon now peddles VPN services to take their slice of the privacy snake-oil market https://www.verizonwireless.com/biz/security/wireless-privat...

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The argument I use when someone asks me about paying and trusting non-US based VPN providers is this: I trust the VPN providers much more than any ISP I have available to me. That is all.

I still don't trust the VPNs for super sensitive stuff. For that I'll setup my own somewhere.

many accept bitcoin.

as you say though it all comes to trust.

Bitcoin is not private. It is, in fact, a PUBLIC LEDGER, and at some point, most folks want to either convert to or from bitcoin to a government backed currency. Sure, you could argue that the transaction could be laundered, but no more than any other transaction could be laundered, so then you need to compare whether it is more or less private than other transactions internally.

I’m not a bitcoin person, but I still don’t understand why people think of bitcoin as more private than other transactional systems when the whole premise of bitcoin is a publicly shared ledger.

Still less transparent and offers _some_ plausible deniability, unless you're tumbling the coins.

Monero or some other privacy focused coin would be better. Disclaimer: Not an expert.

its just a number. its not necissary tied to you and no attached name unless you advertise. there are ways of tracking it and asserting identity but their are counter measures as well. you could of course buy prepaid credit cards to a simmilar effect and that transaction could of course be tracked but as long as it was cash(though there may be video footage of the teller and time) though this goes more into posible crime than just privacy minded if they investigate that far.

yeah taking it out is a major obstacle unless you're prepared to wear a crash helmet or some other type of face concealment. When serious crime is involved you'd have to worry about CCTV on your way to the dispenser too. But set-up and transactions an be fully concealed with hardware compartmentalization, anonymous sims etc

"I’m not a bitcoin person, but I still don’t understand why people think of bitcoin as more private than other transactional systems when the whole premise of bitcoin is a publicly shared ledger."

You don't have to provide personally identifiable data to transact.

As far as I can tell, this is not achievable digitally with any traditional currencies.

Yes it requires connectivity that might yield personally identifiable data, just like every other method of connectivity via the internet.

> As far as I can tell, this is not achievable digitally with any traditional currencies.

Paysafecard [0] does exactly that with traditional currencies.

I can buy those with cash, even at gas stations, and use them to pay online without ever sharing my personal details with anybody.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paysafecard

That's not longer the case in Germany (don't know whether this is the case in other EU countries though) where it requires a verified account with Paysafe (PostIdent no less).

That must be a rather recent change (1. January?) because the last Paysafecard I used didn't require me to do anything like that, that was maybe 3-4 months ago to pay for an online-hoster.

It's a public ledger but it's anonymous in that you don't have a name attached to any of your addresses. You can obtain Bitcoin offline with something like LocalBitcoins and they'll have no identity attached to them. You can then spend them through Tor for full anonymity.

They're not perfect but they're an improvement on say credit cards, which used to be the only option.

And if you want, some providers offer more privacy-sensitive cryptocurrencies like ZCash or Monero.

A few accept cash in the post.

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