I feel like this is a hack that is rarely talked about. And it’s the most reliable method I’ve found for getting an email account that I can use for signing up to other websites.

Imagine you want to create a completely anonymous account on some website. Most websites require an email account to sign up. if you’re lucky you can use one of those a temporary email services, but many websites block those nowadays. They only accept trusted email providers like Gmail, Protonmail, etc. And trying to make an anonymous account on those providers is difficult. Even Protonmail, surprisingly. If you try to sign up for Protonmail using a VPN or Tor, they will ask for a phone number or a second email account. So now you have to get a phone number anonymously (very difficult), or get another email account anonymously, back to square one.

Darknet markets solve this problem. Pay a bit of Monero, and you get an account. Completely anonymous. Now I won’t pretend it’s easy. Even just signing up for a darknet market often requires learning how to PGP encrypt/decrypt messages. But it only takes an 30 min or so to figure it out and sign up, and it opens up a new world of tools to use for privacy. There are many other types of accounts that you can buy aside from Protonmail, and many other products in general that you can buy.

I don’t get why Protonmail doesn’t just accept anonymous crypto as an option during signup, but until they do this is honestly the most reliable option I’ve found. I really wish more websites just accepted crypto for account creation. It’s understandable that in order to prevent spam accounts, account creation has to cost something, and crypto allows it to cost something without costing your privacy.

Anyways, here’s a quick guide to get started. I’ll avoid direct links since I don’t know if those are allowed.

  1. install Tor Browser Bundle, and use it for the following steps
  2. search for websites like Daunt, Dread forums, and Tor Taxi. Darknet markets change all the time so use those websites to figure out which ones are currently active. Cross-check links across multiple websites to make sure they are trustworthy, since often scam websites will try to pose as legitimate ones
  3. look for markets that let you search for the product you’re interested in before signing up, to save you time
  4. some markets require you to load funds into the market and then pay using those funds. Avoid loading more than you need, since some markets have “rugpulled” before (aka taken everybody’s funds and disappeared. This is the risk of an anonymous market).

Edit: also if for some reason a seller doesn’t accept Monero, you can use a crypto swap. Basically you send the swap service some Monero, tell them what crypto to convert it to (like Bitcoin or Ethereum), and where to send it to. Many can be used anonymously, without signup

  • whatiswrongwithyou@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 hours ago

    I agree about the devil you know vs the infinite possible future ones you don’t.

    I think you’re making way too many assumptions about physical surveillance (“they know you care about privacy” as opposed to the actual thing they know, which is simply that you mailed a letter, being able to narrow your suspect list down based on the fact that they care about privacy, etc) but even if I were to take every single one of them at face value then the authorities have less information than is public on a bitcoin transaction (I know you’re a fan of monero, I’m using the amount of information in a bitcoin transaction here to make my point clear in the language of crypto). And they had to be looking when you did it.

    I’m of the opposite opinion: digital surveillance is game over. The opponent still has orders of magnitude more resources than you, but they also have access to your entire communications chain via well documented backdoors, can apply millions of exploits on each piece of software or hardware involved in that chain, can literally directly translate those resources to faster and higher quality exploits and with hndl they don’t even have to be there when it happens. I think the best thing you can do is avoid the digital as much as possible.

    I always used to laugh at my professors, friends and coworkers who were “revolver next to the fax machine in case it gets any funny ideas” types but a few decades around computer security done made me into a stereotype.