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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

Hell, the whole company could be located on that satellite if it transacts in crypto-currency.

Despite the hype, crypto is traceable. It is harder than other currencies and one transaction is probably untraceable. However if you are running a business you are going to get repeated payments from customers and repeatedly pay your employees and suppliers, which in turn creates enough data that they can track you down.

Mullvad accepts Monero (XMR), the most private and untraceable coin available today. Your point is correct for all others though.

Mullvad will accept envelopes of cash. They go far and above any other company when it comes to helping their customers maintain anonymity.

In the US, transactions over $10,000 need to be reported regardless. I don't know laws in Europe, but I would expect they have something similar. Which is to say, you can accept envelopes of cash only for relatively small amounts of money before you are going to get in trouble yourself. The government doesn't like tax fraud, and without the ability to trace things, they can prove tax fraud just because if there was no tax fraud, you wouldn't have a certain amount of money.

You don't have to report all transactions over $10,000 in cash. Your bank, where you will probably want to keep the money, will report all transaction over $10,000.

courts will see right through any attempt of someone like offering cash for crypto deals claiming they're not a bank. They maybe haven't yet but they will when it becomes important to them.

It's using cash to pay for a service. It's not related to crypto or banking service at all.

i bet that payment option is used very rarely... its brilliant marketing that costs them almost nothing

people really like to mention the cash envelope, whoever came up with it is a genius

For most people, it is far easier to pay with cash than with Monero.

And yes, whoever invented cash was a genius. It's an amazing technology that, in some ways, is far ahead of almost all digital payment systems.

OTOH, I did the cash envelope thing only once, out of curiosity. It was fun but now, for convenience, I just buy regular vouchers online.

You mailing cash to Mullvad is a bog standard business transaction. They pay their taxes on it and call it good. There is no tax fraud here.

Fully legal for any company to do this btw. They just don't want to. Even in the EU, taking XMR payments is legal, or buying things with XMR, or holding XMR - it's only illegal to list on exchanges.

Where do the people live…

This wouldn't work for companies that require humans for now.

Not possible. If all jurisdictions relinquish their claim over the satellite then it's open to being shot down.

The proliferation of space access goes both ways. LEO isn't exactly difficult to reach (many college teams can do it). GEO might work but then you need relays and any relay satellite are essentially tacitly complicit.

Satellite (and most aerospace related technologies) are glass cannons. They aren't defensible like a bunker or a tank.

What if you had lots and lots and lots of them? Maybe even enough to cause debris problems if they were attacked. With relays into countries that don't overreach their privacy laws.

if you can identify some country that is safe to relay to, why not just put it there?

> Maybe even enough to cause debris problems

Too late

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

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