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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

The reason the author is having such a hard time is because they want to stay anonymous and there is no reliable way of self hosting something (outside the US) at a reasonable cost while staying anonymous. So, they keep hopping from one domain to another and get hit with DMCA everywhere. There is no winning move here.

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Maybe the new Russian service will work for them. Although how hard is it really to host files in the <1MB range?

How will you host any files anonymously, no matter the size ? I don't mean bittorrent, ipfs, tor and the likes. Plain old website needs you to pay a hosting provider and a registry for a domain, both of which require your name and some form of payment. If you have the resources, you can create an LLC or find some other workarounds, but it's a hassle and not cheap.

IME for most TLDs and hosting providers there's no KYC to speak of. You can just fill in anything, and keep doing so. Unless I'm completely misremembering things, but I signed up to a hosting provider quite recently.

That works, to varying degrees, until the provider gets a letter from law enforcement. And unless you find some provider willing to take crypto, you are doxxing yourself when you pay.

yes it's better to keep a digital paper trail in a public permanent log.

Several domain registrars / hosting providers (including Njalla) accept Monero, which is as untraceable as you can be. Or Monero can be used to indirectly pay a bitcoin invoice very easily (even Namecheap accepts bitcoin)

can you buy monero with cash?

It doesn't matter. You can buy Bitcoin with cash, convert the Bitcoin to Monero and then as soon as you send that Monero to your own wallet, you're done. You have digital cash to spend anonymously.

Ideally, cash with no INSERT IDENTIFICATION so there's no flow of value to audit. ATMs are out!

which limits it to very small amounts or the proceeds of crime.

The way Monero works, you can simply have two monero addresses/IDs. The one you get the initial coins (cash, bank transfer, doesn’t matter), then transfer to the second one. Then you can buy whatever you want anonymously from the second one. That’s the whole point of monero, that it is not possible to trace transfers, to the contrary of bitcoins where every transfer is in the ledger.

Or am I missing something?

> Or am I missing something?

blinding hatred of crypto? Otherwise, nothing as far as I know.

Who hates crypto on this thread? I rather saw hatred of ATMs =)

the opposite of blind faith is suspicion/disbelief, not blinding hatred.

That's fair, I take back my comment. I don't think it was very fair to you and the dialog in the thread. Goes for the other replier as well.

isn't this the point that the people in power start to look into your finances and asking questions? especially if copyright is involved, there is effectively infinite resources to be spent on chasing you. you need to remain careful not to slip up every single time - they just have to be lucky once.

Yes, this is the crucial point. It's probably not even that hard to get a pile of semi-clean Monero. Cashing it out, paying or avoiding taxes on it, and avoiding lifestyle signs. Best I've come up with is that I'd spend it all donating crypto to OSS projects that I want to see succeed.

neocities?

There are services like https://njal.la/ which can be used anonymously, though they cost more.

There are a variety of services like Tor2Web that make accessing .onion sites on the plain internet trivial. For MOST .onion sites you may well not want to do this, but when all you want to do is hide the identity of the publisher, rather than worry about the privacy of the visitor, it's not really an impediment.

There is the matter of bandwidth -- this is where being pulled into other repositories and copied would be helpful. The code is small, but tor is notoriously slow.

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