Hey fellow Bitcoiners, is there a guide, on how to achieve more privacy on the internet? How to setup a second identity or use a pseudonym correctly?
I try to be as private as possible on the internet, but I think I can still improve some things.
I would appreciate some ideas and experiences.
A resource that I found useful would be Privacy tools and if you have the technical skills self hosting apps is powerful. A good thing to get started with is obviously a bitcoin node :-) a good second would be something like a private Nextcloud on a VPS so you don't have to rely on Google/Apple cloud.
My experience so far has been that there is not a singular thing you can turn on for privacy. It's more of an awareness of how we are exploited and mass surveilled by big tech/government in a digital society. There are always things to improve for anyone that cares about privacy, and many things come down to trade offs.
For anyone interested in learning more about self-hosting privately, this YouTube channel has some great tutorials: https://youtube.com/c/402PaymentRequired
402PaymentRequired is fucking awesome! 100% recommended!
Great post thank you.
I will add that data is the biggest business on earth so there are not many interests aligned with "privacy", it is a trigger word. By definition you are demonetizing the S&P 500. Better to use victim language in the current climate. The best language is used by the radical left "this is not safe for me because i am in [protected group]". Or play up the victim card even more "i have a stalker" "I am involved in a lot of social justice charity work" etc. And if you don't think that works, look at all the legit criminals still getting away with wearing masks in public, LOL.
There is so much money and effort spent on activism I think we just need to direct a little bit of the messaging toward our own goals.
good advice but a bitcoin node will do nothing for you. It is no real improvement over SPV
not leaking your addresses and balances to a strangers node is something
Unless you are very careful to run your node over tor, you are going to leak your address whenever you emit a transaction.
most bitcoin node packages are currently tor by default, masking your IP and you also use a VPN to mask TOR use to your ISP
you will leak your transaction's address(es) when transacting, but not all your addresses to obtain your overall wallet balance. using samourai wallet's toolkit can help for transacting privately.
mutinywallet.com looks promising for private lightning network transactions
godspeed
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Not a big expert, but normally you don't pretend to be "someone else", you would rather present yourself as member of a company/organization/foundation and get every piece of privy information from it (address, phone lines, accounts and credit cards...). You can play this card once, or you can play it multiple times, "hopping" through organizations that control other organizations, preferably across different jurisdictions.
There was a very good article from Jameson Lopp, you can find it here: https://blog.lopp.net/modest-privacy-protection-proposal/ There's also an interview with Peter McCormack (done almost four years ago) here: https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/personal-privacy-and-safety-in-the-surveillance-age-with-jameson-lopp
this may be of use:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity https://anonymousplanet.org/
Regarding self hosting I have some personal do's and don'ts.
Do use a nym and lightning when buying domain names. Do use a nym and lightning with your vps provider. Do host services from home using Tor hidden addresses, or through a vps intermediary like tunnelsats.com Don't host services from home using clearnet. Don't assign a registered domain name to your home IP
Do use VPN 100% of the time for your phone and personal computer, recommend mullvad or lnvpn.net Do burn cookies and site data off your browsers regularly except for trusted sites like SN Do use a browser that blocks fingerprinting or returns fake data, DDG does it and brave does, I think. On desktop there are browser extensions for it.
One other thing, this generation of decentralized social media, aka fediverse, has some issues with privacy and encryption is often an afterthought. Hosting a decentralized social media server like mastodon may be less private than having an account on someone else's decentralized social media server. Same goes for self hosted email. Nostr is like next gen decentralized and it fixes at least the social media part.
You might want to setup a smartphone that is not tracking you 24/7.
I wrote a guide to do just that here
here is also a good YT channel about privacy https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3KeV6Ui_4CayDGHw64OFXEPHgXLkrtJO
Oh that looks interesting. Thanks!
You already started: you use LN and a nym that are different than your real life name/identity. Well done. Keep going like that.
Remember just one basic rule: what is private, you are doing in your private life. What is online, is already ALL public. Just by knowing how to separate these 2 things and you are already on the good path.
If you have a GitHub account with an ssh key and you create another anonymous GitHub account, use a different ssh key otherwise you just de-anonymized yourself to Microsoft Bill Gates, MD
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We provide Prepaid Cards and Gift cards as well at https://AllArk.io
And we have zero KYC and zero interest in ever implementing it.