notsoanonynous

Maybe I already did this and maybe I didn’t. Maybe it’s all armchair theorizing. Then again…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wUJccK4lV74

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SYZqC7EGMfM

To not share how you secure anonymity is to rely on security by obscurity. Now I think it’s better to lay out the playbook using Kerchkoff’s principle so k will become far larger than 150. Remember… to improve anonymity, at some point you have to publish your private keys. And where better than Hacker News?

The playbook is yours. Improve it!

Step 1: try to break it. Post how you’d defeat the anonymization scheme. The threat model is that you’re all state level actors combined. I’d love to see what you come up with.

So what if they find that you used a phone?

They still had to somehow link your online identity to your phone. And how would they do that? The phone is simply a computer that you use, through VPNs, to send and reveive mail and post messages to groups etc. They’d have to approach ProtonMail, then your VPNs in order, and then get security footage from the place where you were accessing the VPN at that time. And then cross-reference your gait etc. to a database. Maybe in 10 years they would have such coordination, and we will need better tactics.

What’s far more interesting is what to do if VPNs are banned in a country. You can’t be using one there. You’d have to have set up anonymous hosting and port forward stuff yourself.

Again, it’s possible that all anonymous hosting, VPN etc. is shut down and requires KYC by say 2050. That is why you must bootstrap from what are valid but essentially “compromised* accounts now while you still can, and hope they are grandfathered into the new totalitarian surveillance system. Buying phones on craigslist is one example.

Another example is those eyes Anderton installs in Minority Report, but security in that movie is like a bad joke, IRL he’d be outed instantly by his gait, heart patterns via wifi and so on. In fact they didnt even change the access keys after he ran LMAO

And what would they find?

The hardest investigation to defend against is the rubber hose investigation. Gotta give them what they want, without them even suspecting you could be that mysterious founder. The only way people suspect you’re someone is if your k is small, eg how many people could be Satoshi?

If you’re efficient, you can retire the mysterious founder identity and simply have multiple “early adopter” addresses that generated rewards early, among actual adopters. Make an exit from your projects as early as you can after they gain momentum with the wider crowd.

There is no way to stop people from starting open source projects, accruing the early rewards and then selling those rewards to others in a decentralized exchange or async OTC deal. If every country worldwide ever closes down all such anonymous mechanisms (maybe by 2050) and makes register in order to sell your rewards, you simply sell your private keys to the wallet in an async OTC deal. The buyer will have to trust that you won’t move the money after they register the address and before they move it.

I thought it was obvious, but I guess not.

No, you don’t do work for money. You start an open source project and get many people to run your software. You meanwhile generate as many early rewards as you can (you can even do it under multiple accounts) and when the ecosystem is up and running, you’ll be the mysterious founder, generating millions (or billions) in passive income.

Sounds familiar? It should…

Simply never move money using your first few accounts, and whoever early people you pay, have them stake your currency for a long time, and borrow against it on decentralized lending marketplaces, to avoid spooking people that the mysterious founder has moved their money.

I am open to ideas for how to mitigate this remaining vulnerability even further

Buy on Craigslist. Go to a store. Or, as mentioned previously, pay a homeless guy to go into the store and buy it.

It’s a modular system. The key is Kerchkoff’s principle — I can describe it to you all day long, but as long as I don’t reveal each identity from the other, you all won’t know what projects I am doing, even if they earned $97 million already.

Tor is amateur hour. The Feds can easily deanomymize things where a server is up 24/7 servicing requests.

The author of this article is also very wrong: Anonymity is not on a spectrum. It’s all or nothing. Like a Mario game where any mistaken encounter makes you start over (and that’s if you don’t get in trouble for what you did).

First step is to understand that any system could be bugged. Every IRL confidant could sell you out. Every keyboard could have a keylogger, etc. Every store could have a security camera. Phones are giving out their MAC numbers to every cell tower and wifi radio. They now have chips you can’t turn off, and so forth.

You should also assume there is no such thing as an “anonymous” account and that every service COULD sell out whatever information you gave it. (Yes, even Telegram or ProtonMail, however unlikely that may be.)

The below is a playbook for how to become truly anonymous. Continue to live your everyday life but the below is only for your “anonymous” identities, which you can gradually bootstrap as a hobby:

The first thing you do, therefore, is bootstrap your identity by taking advantage of unlinkability that is available to you. Buy a bunch of Android phones on Craigslist for cash, for example. (Or pay a homeless guy to buy a phone in a store for you.) Do not use SIM cards at all, only WiFi. Never take photos, etc. Keep your phone off or in a faraday cage until you use it. For extra points, always use it through a VPN on WiFi at home, which you purchased using the accounts below:

Then make an anonymous google account on the Android phone. Make some ProtonMail accoung usinf such an anonymous Google account. Now you can bootstrap from email addresses.

Buy some Google Play gift cards and download some apps to get a second number. Now you can bootstrap from a phone number. Sign up to Telegram, Signal and other accounts using this. Now you have end to end encrypted messaging.

Frankly, though, realtime messaging is a bit of a luxury to continue to stay in normie world. To stay truly anonymous, you should continue to:

1. Schedule posts and mail send/receive at random times. Do not ever use realtime audio or video because it might be recorded. You might make an exception for early days of your projects when people would have no reason to go out of their way to record you — just to give them confidence you’re a real person. But afterwarss, stop doing that. Let the people build your movement for you.

2. Never mention your anonymous identity or projects from your real one, and vice versa. This means your anonymous identity MUST NEVER have confidants or colleagues IRL. Build up a network of colleagues who are “fronts” for what you do. Eventually you can step back and let the movement do things for you.

3. Pay and get paid in cryptocurrency. Have smart contracts send you the money (think Richard Heart’s Hex origin address, but actually anonymous).

4. You will only ever be able to spend the crypto on paying people for services and DeFi protocols. You can never cash out to fiat, because the IRL purchases catch up with you when they follow the money. There is a surprising amount of online services you can spend $97 million dollars on, while staying anonymous ;-) If you really do need to spend money IRL (because you went broke somehow in your everyday life) then you can cashout using cross-chain bridges and Monero to pay for goods. But still, never get ostentatious wealth IRL!

5. The weakest link then becomes your writing or coding style. Never publish any code or writing, let others do it for you. Make your communication to others from your anonymous identity sufficiently different than anything saved later would not identify you (this is the weakest link, but you can consider “playing a character” when speaking to others).

6. Any private keys that you used to sign your messages can be periodically published in some conspicuous place, effectively giving you plausible deniability about all your previous and future posts. It’s hard to prove a negative (that no one else has access to your private keys before your public disclosure.)

Alright, Hacker News. I have given away the non-amateur anonymity playbook using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle

Go ahead and try to deanonymize this in the comments below. Assume you are a state actor with all tools at your disposal.