Buying a subscription to gay.com from Syria. Your on the clock..
> Buying a subscription to gay.com from Syria.
That is not a credible example. Here are some reasons:
1) Paying for porn? Paying for porn when the implication is that it's illegal and could get you in trouble? Who would do that?
2) Cryptocurrency isn't anonymous, and is usually highly traceable.
3) And even if it was anonymous, what good will it do when your DNS lookups will divulge you're looking at gay porn?
4) Oh, so now someone's supposed to be using some elaborate TOR/VPN setup in a repressive country, just so they can pay for porn?
5) What, exactly is the process for converting Syrian Pounds into cryptocurrency again?
6) etc.
> Your on the clock..
Why were you so confident in your non-credible example?
Crytocurrency is difficult and costly to trace and exchange identifying not available to Syria.
VPNs would be used
Same process for other currencies on Binance and other exchanges.
That's objectively worse.
1. Deposit your money in a bank. Wire it to Binance. Buy Bitcoin.
2. Go to a McDonald's.
3. Hire a gig worker through an app, pay them in cryptocurrency to buy a Big Mac with fiat and give it to you.
4. Eat your $55 Big Mac, and wonder at the amazing real-world utility of cryptocurrency.
>> Why were you so confident in your non-credible example?
> The other poster is probably very confident because gay.com redirects to https://lalgbtcenter.org, which is an LGBT advocacy group in Los Angeles.
I doubt they knew that. It's inconsistent with their thought of "buying a subscription to gay.com," and it raises the question of why someone in Syria would even be interested in a LA-focused advocacy group. Plus in their reply indicated they thought of it as a porn site. What kind of advocacy group has a paywall that someone would want to see behind?
I have. However you illustrate an important point about cryptocurrency: it's an exercise in political ideology without practicality.
> The debt ceiling grows every day.
If you're that worried about inflation, shiny gold seems like a better option.
Try that trick with some digital currency :-)
By using crypto the person now has written a public record of that payment. An attacker now can use correlation attacks to try to identify the user.
It's worse in almost every way for that user.
Public record that Syria cannot easily track with bitcoin or no trail with Monero.
I'll give you a bitcoin wallet address can you tell me who owns it?
It depends on the address. But assuming the person is using the same address for multiple transactions then the attacker only has to be able to correlate one address with a person (or a person's device if they have access to it).
This could be a completely innocuous transaction, including something as seemingly innocent as signing into a Dapp.
Compare that to a non-blockchain transaction, where if the attacker hacked an random ecommerce site (say a supermarket) that doesn't automatically allow them to tie all records to transactions on the site that is a problem.
> Worse than a credit card? How?
If I buy something at my supermarket with my credit card, even with home delivery AND even if the supermarket kept the credit card number there is nothing tying that transaction to gay.com.