The only long term solution is to request anonymous users to commit a tiny amount of cryptocurrency.
If you don't want to deal with cryptocurrency then this could be simply a provable burn - purely an IT thing with no accounting team involved.
If you don't want to deal with cryptocurrency then this could be simply a provable burn - purely an IT thing with no accounting team involved.
Monero and ZCash supposedly offer real anonymity, but IIRC all implementations so far have been found vulnerable to (at least partial) deanonymization.
Crypto currencies may have good uses, but so far, anonymity is not one of them - most definitely not for the masses (and hard-to-impossible for the very disciplined and knowledgeable pros)
VPN or proxy users are not really anonymous anyway and would certainly welcome an option to pay $0.1 in cryptocurrency instead of fighting infuriating CAPTCHA-s all the time.
Unless you actively try to hide your tracks, every single transaction you make is related. You may pay your friend at work $5 back for coffee using Bitcoin -- and at that second -- since he knows your wallet id -- he can check the blockchain for every transaction your wallet has ever participated in - every website you paid for (as a captcha, as a registration fee for that totally-legal-but-morally-questionable site, the money you contributed to support/oppose a political cause, etc.)
This is NOT paranoia. People who aren't the NSA are constantly analyzing and making public identities related to wallets and transactions they made. Psudonimity is not anonymity - it's one step away from being an identity; and the fact that the blockchain is public makes all history public for an identity once that step was taken.
Take cash from ATM. Put in wallet. Use cash in wallet to pay for drugs. Use cash from same ATM from same wallet to donate to church. Only NSA/FBI has the means to track this, and they have to work for it.
Put money in bitcoin wallet. Use wallet to pay for drugs. Use same wallet to donate to church. Now church knows you paid for drugs, and your dealer knows which church you contribute to.
Brandan Eich was forced to resign because of his political beliefs, as evidenced by his monetary contribution to some political cause[0]. If pseudonymous blockchain payments become mainstream, such events are going to become an everyday occurrence. For some things, that's a net positive for society (you want to know who the hypocrite politicians are). For some things, it's a net negative (losing privacy for individua).
[0] I'm tryting to word this as neutrally as possible.
If I would have to pay 10c to visit a website I would like it to "burn up". Most websites I visit I don't support in any sense.
Law enforcement is increasingly targeting these mixers, there was a recent case were one operator was criminally charged[0] for not having a "money service license". I am willing to bet that, as part of a plea deal, all past logs they keep (which is likely all of them to day one) will be provided to FinCEN, which may or may not make it public at some point.
FinCEN is a few notches below the NSA. It's not your cousin Jerry, true, but it's a lot less than "only the NSA". And the history is immutable - it's possible, even likely, that 20 years from now, many mixer logs will have become public enough. Anything on the blockchain stays there for posterity.
[0] https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/first-bitcoin-mixe...